Review: Signal (SIFF 2007)

Some horror and thriller movies like to give you a back story before the real story begins. You know, the story line before the plot really gets going, that somehow is supposed to give you insight into the characters' psyches, before things start going bump in the night? I have to say I'm not a big fan of them. It's not because I don't like back stories. It's just that most of these movies don't do a very good job with this prelim stuff. The Signal doesn't go down this route. The story is told from three characters' perspective, but the timeline is continuous, and the weirdness starts right from the beginning.

The plot revolves around a mysterious transmission which pervades cell phones, radios, and televisions. It causes people to turn psychotic; they start seeing things and acting upon urges that the signal is seemingly telling them to do. Chaos soon reigns, and we witness some key characters trying to make sense of things as they try to escape people who are bent on doing very bad things to them. And, the thing that keeps one of the key characters going through it all is love.

Too touchy-feely? Nah, don't worry, there's plenty of gore, cat-and-mouse, and dark corners to keep you interested.

The movie does have a few touches of dark humor, with some scenes expertly juxtaposing quaint, normal city life with the weird, chaotic things that are going horribly wrong. These are mere dabs of color, though, as in the end The Signal is a true horror movie.

Throughout the movie, I kept noticing things that looked somewhat familiar. Near the end, it was confirmed: a good portion (if not all) of the movie was filmed in Atlanta, Georgia! That gives The Signal an extra point (I'm a sucker for familiarity).

Overall rating: 8.0/10.0

Details:
Runtime: 99m
Countries: USA
Languages: English

Review: One Day Like Rain (SIFF 2007)

One Day Like Rain has a lot of great shots. Shots that contrast something strange with some common activity of daily life. Grainy, washed out images. Impressions of animals and plans in their natural environment. Time-lapse scenes of sunlight filtering through leaves on trees. Indeed, this movie is chock full of great shots.

Unfortunately, that's about the only good thing I can say about this film, which for me alternated between periods of vacuousness, pretention, boredom, and fogginess.

The film presents a very loose thread of a plot: Gina, a quirky teenage girl living in California, has somehow gotten wind of an impending doom facing the world, and she is working out how to save the world as a result. She invests time, effort, chemistry sets, crystals, and her friends in an effort to do this. She makes some sort of chemical concoction that she gives to her friend, Jennifer, who drinks it and later dies. She then goes off with her boyfriend and has a romantic night out in the woods before the world apparently ends.

You may think I'm overly summarizing a lot of plot details that go along to flesh out the above, but I'm not. This is more or less all the scaffolding you get for the overarching story. The rest is a series of ambiguous scenes and empty, needlessly opaque conversations that make up the whole of the movie.

The dialog revolves around fuzzy statements and endless repetition of lines that don't advance the story one bit. "She's got it", you hear over and over. "She's trying to save the world." But you're not really shown how, or why, or when, or what she's really doing. I suppose you're intended to guess. But after a while the guessing game gets really old.

OK, so if there's not much of a plot, there's at least characters and development, right? Wrong. With the exception of Jennifer, I found all the characters flat and uninteresting. They spring out of nowhere, say a few tired lines, sit and stare out into space, and then bam! you're onto the next scene. The movie fails to make me care about any of the characters, which leaves them to be just mindless agents trying to convey something falsely deep and meaningful to the audience.

What the movie lacks in plot, dialog, and character development, it tries to make up in symbolism. Unfortunately, the other extreme takes hold here: the symbols are in your face and practically crammed down your throat. During several scenes, I was almost expecting some subtitling to show up, pointing out, "Hey, look! Two clocks on the wall ticking away...time is running out! Oh wait, check it out, one of them stopped!".

I'm all about films that offer an "experience" of sorts, or have symbolism, or can be studied from many angles. Kubrick is a great example of this: you can watch The Shining as a horror flick, or you can break it down and study its use of symbols, or how the scenes are shot, or what the characters are saying. But it's still a feature, and it's still something you can sit down and watch and enjoy and not have to study. Not so with One Day Like Rain. Director Paul Todisco has made what is potentially a film to study in film school, but what he didn't make is something that a general audience can enjoy without deconstructing it on a white board in a lecture hall.

In the Q&A after the movie, Todisco mentioned that the film came to him in about a week or two. I have to say that it certainly shows. Todisco took his time with how the film was shot. Too bad that his efforts in the other aspects of the movie didn't pan out.

I'm disappointed in SIFF selecting this film for a premiere. I was seriously considering becoming a member this year. But if this is the sort of stuff SIFF will program throughout the year, then count me out.

Overall rating: 1.0/10.0

Details:
Runtime: 90m
Countries: USA
Languages: English

Review: Paris, Je T'aime (SIFF 2007)

I'm a big fan of potluck dinners. Everyone goes off and makes something unique and different, and then everyone gets together and samples a bunch of dishes. Some are good, some are new, occasionally one isn't that great, but in the end you've tried a variety of dishes and you've filled your stomach in the process.

So it was with Paris, Je T'aime. 18 mini-movies, each no longer than five minutes, tied loosely together by the theme of love, and by characters who are only casually intertwined (in ways we don't learn until the end of the film). It's a movie-goer's potluck of sorts: you get a wide variety of small bites, and in the end you feel satisfied that you've seen a great overall movie that explores a topic through many dimensions.

The nice thing about the overall film is that the theme wasn't expressed in a singular way. Like the chefs and their secret ingredient in Iron Chef, every director has a unique style and approach to their mini-movie. Some were humorous, while others were more dramatic. Some were fast-paced, and others were more lingering. I believe there had to be an editor of sorts overseeing the project, as the spectrum of movies were carefully balanced in the entire work, as was the overall tone (it went from light, to dark, to light again).

Not every mini-movie received high marks from me (there was one quite surreal one with a salesman and an aggressive salon worker that caught me off guard and left me wondering whether someone had edited an incorrect portion of another film into the movie), but they were almost all interesting enough to deserve a viewing.

And, the best part about this project is that if you absolutely hate one of the mini-movies then, just like the weather in some parts, all you have to do is wait and something new will come along.

Overall rating: 9.0/10.0

Details:
Runtime: 120m
Countries: Lichtenstein / Switzerland / Germany / France
Languages: English / French

Review: Severance (SIFF 2007)

We've all seen at least one instance of the horror predator-stalks-prey movie genre, right? Movies like Saw or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Hills Have Eyes? Well, what would you get if you mixed that type of movie with a whole bunch of dry British humor and wit, and stirred it all around? Severance, that's what!

The gist of this dark-humored gorefest is that employees of Palisade, a less-than-ethical weapons manufacturer, decide to take a team-building retreat at some luxury lodge up in the woods. You've got the typical cast of characters: the optimistic boss, the undying loyalist, the slacker druggy, and a few other stereotypes to boot. As the crew makes their way up to the lodge, they come upon a fallen tree on the roadway. Because their stubborn Hungarian bus driver refuses to go on (and summarily abandons them), they decide to hike it to the lodge. Eventually, they find shelter, but it's not the lodge they were anticipating. Little things seem off (like, you know, the place is kind of a dump, and looks like an abandoned house, and it gives people bad dreams), but the optimistic manager convinces everyone to make the best of the situation and to stick with it.

Soon, things get weird. One of the employees finds files of Palisade staffers in the "lodge". A cover up of sorts tied to the weapons biz, perhaps? The employees also suspect the place used to be an asylum. And, one of the employees finds a meat pie, bakes it, and someone promptly finds a human tooth in it. Not weird enough for you? Well, soon after the employees catch wind that something is seriously wrong with the place, the cat-and-mouse game begins: some well-shadowed forces stalk, hunt, capture, and kill the employees one by one, hell-bent on not letting them escape.

I liked that this movie kept presenting scenes of horror and drama, with music blaring and tenses running high, before switching to a bit of comedy to lighten the mood and remind people that this is a horror flick with a funny bone that's not to be taken seriously. And when the funny bone has a British sense of with to it, that makes it all the more hilarious.

Overall rating: 7.0/10.0

Details:
Runtime: 90m
Countries: Germany / United Kingdom
Languages: English / Hungarian / Russian

Review: Them (SIFF 2007)

Them (Ils in French) is one of a new crop of horror and thriller movies coming out of France. And, like many of its predecessors, it doesn't fail to please those looking to get a rise in their blood pressure and finger marks on their neighbor's arm.

Them is light on character development, offering just enough to structure a premise for the plot. We encounter a young woman who's a French teacher in a school in Romania. We see her partner is a writer. They live in a big, old house in the middle of nowhere. She comes home, they have dinner, and they turn in for the night. Darkness descends over the forest surrounding their home. A perfect setup to a horror flick, right?

Soon, strange things begin to occur. A prank phone call gets them out of bed. Strange sounds raise their concerns. And, pretty soon, they fear that something is inside their house. They soon find out that they are right.

The real success of Them is that it doesn't try to shock you by portraying a lot of blood and gore. Instead, it puts you in the scene, right next to the main characters who are part of this cat-and-mouse affair, with very little knowledge of who "they" are and what "they" want. Are they people? Is it a paranormal force? Aliens? At the onset, you're not quite sure.

As the movie progresses, the true nature of the predator becomes known. But by then, a different fear takes hold, and the movie leaves you with a lasting suspense: you see that what the characters just went through is not out of this world, and is something that could indeed happen in real life.

Overall rating: 8.5 /10.0

Details:
Runtime: 77m
Country: French
Language: French, Romanian

SIFF 2007

Ah yes, the first holiday weekend of the warm weather months is here: Memorial Day. And what do Seattleites do? Do they barbeque? Do they spend time in the park? How about a nice walk on the beach? No! They rush inside and watch movies, away from the scary rays of the sun!

That's right, it's time again for the Seattle International Film Festival. This year we're watching about 9 movies (I know, a bit more conservative than years past). And, as usual, I'll post my reviews. The fun begins tomorrow night!

The Most Rotten Movies Of This Decade

I like the movie review site Rotten Tomatoes. It aggregates reviews from lots of sources and gives you a sense of whether most reviewers did, or didn't, like a movie. Anything above 60% positive is considered "fresh", and anything below is considered "rotten".

Today, I became curious: what are some recent movies (say, since 2000) that rendered no positive reviews? Zero. Zilch. In other words, a 0 % rating on Rotten Tomatoes, or the most rotten rating a movie could earn.

Thanks to the advanced search features on the site, it appears there are seven movies that fit this dubious distinction.

• Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever
• Pinocchio
• Zoom
• Crossover
• King's Ransom
• Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2
• National Lampoon's Gold Diggers

Apart from the National Lampoon's movie, I haven't heard of any of these. Has anyone had the unfortunate experience of seeing one of these?

Review: Evil Aliens (SIFF 2006)

Evil Aliens is gross. Not in a vomity sort of way. Rather, lots of fake-ish splattery gore that many "bad" horror movies include in their offering. If you're into the genre, though, the film won't disappoint.

Evil Aliens is a camp-horror-comedy where some Welsh farmers, a UFO geek, and a camera crew face of with a bunch of scary-looking and aggressive aliens. The aliens are set out to conquer and abuse, and the humans are out to defend themselves (sometimes with bats, sometimes with tractors). Honestly, that's really all you need to know to decide whether you want to see this movie or not. Like a Junior High dance, I think you've now divided yourselves against two sides of the room: either hell-bent to see it, or very sure to avoid it.

The best part of Evil Aliens is its references to other horror/thriller and action movies, such as Aliens, Predator, and Evil Dead. Movie junkies will probably get the most fun out of trying to catch all of these reference while watching the gore fly.

Overall rating: 7.0 /10.0

Details:
Runtime: 93m
Country: United Kingdom
Language: English

Review: Blood Rain (SIFF 2006)

Blood Rain is a period detective/crime/mystery movie set on a remote island in early 19th-century Korea. The film begins by showing a fire on one of the ships at the island destined to carry a paper tithe to the King. An investigator is sent to the island to figure out the cause of this fire. While there, the investigator is asked to help solve a series of mysterious deaths.

We quickly learn of a dark past on the island: a man was wrongly executed a long time ago, and now, the locals believe the spirit of this man is killing the informants who wrongly accused him. The investigator witnesses informant after informant dying a gruesome and unexplainable death, and is ever-pressed to figure out who or what is murdering these people.

Blood Rain takes a little while to start up, as you adjust to the period of the film and learn about the setting and the main characters (there are several, with similar-sounding Korean names to my Western ears). But once it does, it keeps your interest like any good murder-mystery does.

Along with the puzzle element of the movie, I enjoyed a glimpse into the societal pressures alternately guiding and forcing the investigator in his quest to solve the mystery, such as one's honor and "place" in society. I can't vouch for how accurate a depiction of 19th-century Korea Blood Rain really is, but the depiction of the characters and their role on this island was nevertheless a nice addition to the mystery element.

Overall rating: 7.5 /10.0

Details:
Runtime: 119m
Country: South Korea
Language: Korean

Review: Black Gold (SIFF 2006)

Look down at your cup of coffee. Where was the coffee grown? How many hands touched the beans between field and barista? How much did the farmer get for those beans? What about the other food you eat; how does it measure up?

These are the questions Black Gold posits. While focused on the fair trade movement and its effects in a burgeoning Ethiopean coffee growers co-op, the theme resonates beyond coffee and forces you to question how and where the products we eat and buy come from, and how much the growers versus the middle men are earning for these products.

Black Gold reviews the efforts of Tadesse Meskela, the General Manager of the Oromo Coffee Farmers Co-operative Union. Tadesse's main focus is to remove the middle men between the coffee farmer and coffee roaster, and return more money to the farmer's pocket.

So, what's the problem with conventional coffee? In a sentence, the global price is set in commodities markets in New York and London, and no consideration is given to the local cost of living for a given farmer and his family. Currently, Ethiopian farmers get about $0.24 a kilo. A living wage for them would be about $2.00. That's still a very small price to pay to the grower given the cost of a pound of beans or an espresso drink here in the States, yet prices are kept low and farmers have to make do with a tenth of what they need. Furthermore, World Trade Organization talks in the past few years have failed to negotiate a fair price for coffee and other commodities for the Third World.

The result is that coffee, one of Ethiopia's most abundant natural resources, is sold for very little money. Farmers as a result don't have clean water, enough food, or good schools to send their children. Ironically, the film shows the amount of aid we give to countries like Ethiopia, and contrasts it with the little money we purchase their resources with. It also shows how a very small boost in the GDP of these countries would overshadow the amount of aid that we currently give them.

As a film, Black Gold is very well made. Excellent camerawork, editing, and a comfortable pace, combined with moving images of farmers and their families struggling to survive, make for a great documentary. Add to that the overall message and the information the documentary provides, and Black Gold becomes a movie most any Western consumer should watch.

Overall rating: 9.0 /10.0

Details:
Runtime: 82m
Country: United Kingdom
Language: English, Ethiopian, Italian

Review: Huldufolk 102 (SIFF 2006)

Huldufolk 102 is a captivating documentary about the superstitions that permeate Icelandic culture. The movie involves interviews with several people from various ages and walks of life, and offers slices of opinions, personal histories, and stories of the "hidden people" that abound in Iceland.

Who are the hidden people? Think fairies, elves, trolls, leprechauns, and other little people who are typically unseen but often talked about. They can be good and they can be mischievous. They live in rocks, but you can't see their homes in the rocks unless you're young or you have a gift of "seeing".

Seemingly everyone has an opinion about hidden people. The documentary does a good job drawing from various walks of life in interviewing locals about the Huldufolk. Both Christian and Pagan religious leaders are represented, as are farmers, teachers, scientists, political representatives, and villagers. They each have their own stories to tell and opinions to share.

Do people in modern Iceland believe in these people? Here's the interesting bit: while most people don't say they believe in them outright, at the same time they don't deny their existence. The reason? Many people have stories of unexplained phenomena, which drives the belief forward. For example, there are stories of people being cured of illness after asking for help, road equipment breaking down while trying to move large rocks to make way for asphalt, things disappearing only to reappear days later, and people seen running across a road only later to be seen in dreams.

One of the most gripping facets of the documentary is its depiction of the natural environment of rural Iceland. Rocks abound in valleys, jutting out here and there like miniature mountains. Mist is common in the mornings, adding a translucent light to the air. In one scene, an apparently real-time rolling of fog over a meadow is captured (which was shot in the glow of a midnight sun, we later found out from the directory).

The documentary doesn't set out to answer any of the questions posited regarding the existence of these little people, but does an excellent job immersing the viewer in the folklore and natural beauty of Iceland.

Overall rating: 8.5 /10.0

Details:
Runtime: 80m
Country: Iceland, USA
Language: English, Icelandic

Review: The District! (SIFF 2006)

The District (Nyócker in Hungarian) takes a classic Shakespearean love story, adds some interesting animation, and covers it with a load of obscenities and vulgarity. The result is a visually appealing, if somewhat silly, animated feature that includes lots of tongue-in-cheek commentary on modern politics.

We begin with an overview of life in a district of Budapest, complete with corrupt policemen, rivals between whites and gypsies, and kids who emulate their elders and want to be gangsters. Music ensues, and the kids begin some rapid-fire rapping and describe their situation in musical form.

Soon, a plot emerges: one of the kids wants to get money to win his true love, so he and his science friend build a time machine, and a bunch of the kids go back in time. There, they put a bunch of dead mammoths in a crater, and (flash-forward) you now have oil! Now, you can sell the oil in the world market and make money. Right?

If you have oil under you, people take notice. Enter folks like George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and Vladimir Putin and you have a political smorgasbord in animated form all wheeling and dealing to get a handle on that precious natural resource. If my review sounds scattershot, that's because the movie is as well.

Frankly, I think the most interesting part of this movie was the animation. The bodies of the characters were 3-dimensional and moved in a smooth fashion, while the heads where rapidly-changing still images, which changed to represent the characters speaking, staring, or smirking. The effect was quite captivating, and it waffled between the construction-paper effect of animation like South Park versus the fluid movements of 3D rendered animation.

The movie's fairly explicit, and definitely not designed for children. That said, if you're into animation, this one's unique (and funny) enough to warrant a viewing.

Overall rating: 6.0 /10.0

Details:
Runtime: 87m
Country: Hungary
Language: Hungarian

Review: The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu (SIFF 2006)

Lazarescu is a movie that begins and ends in the middle of things, and focuses on the last day of a man's life as both his health and his familiar surroundings slowly decline. We open to see an ill-feeling Dante Lazarescu who, after feeding his cats, decides to call an ambulance to aid with his headache and stomach pain. We learn from the phone conversation that Lazarescu has had an ulcer surgery 14 years ago, that he drinks copiously (much to the dismay of the people on the other end of the line), and that he clearly needs some form of help (judging by the etched lines of pain in Lazarescu's face, and his fits of vomiting).

With the help of his neighbors, a paramedic arrives. At first, she is fairly indifferent, and attributes Lazarescu's problems to his drinking. She starts suspecting a more serious issue is at hand with his health, however, after witnessing his condition, and decides to take him to the hospital.

Thus begins a night of medical red tape and doctor-patient conflicts for Lazarescu and the paramedic. They get shuttled from hospital to hospital, in part because of a serious bus accident eating away at all available hospital resources, and in part because no one wants to deal with an apparent drunkard who just needs to sleep things off. As Lazarescu moves from doctor to doctor, we slowly learn that his condition is quite serious, and we watch him deteriorate to the point of needing emergency surgery. At which, the movie, rather abruptly, ends.

Death is certainly a main theme of the movie. The entire movie takes place at night, with on-again off-again rain smattering the windshield of the ambulance that Lazarescu and the paramedic use to drive from hospital to hospital. We witness the horrible aftermath of the bus accident as patients are shuttled through the hospital hallways. We learn that Lazarescu's wife has died several years earlier of cancer. And, we witness Lazarescu's own decline into apparent death.

However, another theme is the sarcasm of the modern medical profession, and the attitudes and behaviors between doctor and patient, and doctor and non-MD medical staff. We witness the paramedic initially being indifferent to Lazarescu and assuming he's just a drunkard having a bad night. But as she suspects something more serious is at hand, she becomes the voice of Lazarescu to the various doctors she encounters. The doctors are constant skeptics, and they purvey a caste system of "doctor knows right", despite the fact that the paramedic has been with Lazarescu all night and has a history with him (and with prior doctors). The doctors are portrayed very negatively in this movie, with their attention spent mostly on moving people through the medical machinery, making personal phone calls, and fetching food. I could hear the audience utter frustrated sighs as we witnessed doctor after doctor trying to hand off Lazarescu to someone else rather than really focus on him, his condition, and his history like you would expect a doctor to do.

Visually, the style of this movie is similar to a documentary, with most of the camera work appearing to be hand-held. However, the lines are clearly scripted, with actors rarely interrupting each other or being at a loss for words as a "real" documentary would portray. Still, the movie does an effective job of capturing the moment without intruding into it, and without trying to be overly poetic or romantic about the situation (music is almost completely devoid from the movie, save for opening and closing credits and an ambient television here or there). Lazarescu isn't a feel-good movie and doesn't have a clear beginning-middle-end that a traditional story-arced film would, but it's nevertheless worth a viewing, if only to contrast those forms of filmmaking with an interesting alternative.

Overall rating: 6.5 /10.0

Details:
Runtime: 153m
Country: Romania
Language: Romanian

Start Your (SIFF) Engines

It's SIFF time! And, it's rainy, so I don't feel TOO bad spending some time seeing movies during Memorial Day weekend. Let's go!

This blog will take on a bit of a movie-review tone during the next few weeks, as we watch and then talk about some of the movies in the festival. Fear not, after the movie craze is over we'll return to regularly-scheduled programming.

SIFF 2006

Yes, the Seattle International Film Festival is coming. Yes, just when the weather is warming up, Seattleites rush indoors to watch movies. Anyway, we're heading down today to purchase our tickets.

We're being a bit more reserved this year, scooping up on the order of 10 films (rather than our usual 16-18).

As with last year, I'll write up some reviews of the movies we watched, after the fact.

Review: Junebug (SIFF 2005)

Junebug is a film about opposites coming together. Urban and rural. Northern and southern. Cosmopolitan and folk. Uptight and relaxed. Happy and sad.

The story is straightforward; two newlyweds travel from Chicago to North Carolina in search of a folk artist and his work. The wife is the urban art gallerist in search of the next big thing, while the husband is returning to his hometown in rural NC. As part of this trip, the husband's family has a chance to meet his new wife. In short order, we see how both of the newlyweds are outsiders; the wife because of her education and upbringing, and the husband because of his departure from his hometown.

The real joy from this movie is not in the story or even in its message, but in its delivery. Hailing from the South, I could relate to most scenes in the movie. A question about local customs, an uncomfortable moment while sharing one's past, a potluck dinner that includes a gospel song, and sibling rivalry all come through with honesty and clarity. The acting is very casual, and the actors' candid work makes you feel like you're just another person in the room, watching the confused looks and the awkward moments pass by. I came away from the film feeling I had been reintroduced to several people I have known, in situations I have seen them be part of.

Overall rating: 9.0 /10.0

Details:
Runtime: 107m
Country: USA
Language: English

Review: Vital (SIFF 2005)

I have to admit, when we bought tickets to see Vital, we were expecting a horror movie. We were wrong, but in a good way.

Director Shinya Tsukamoto weaves a fairly intricate, slow-to-reveal tale about a Japanese medical student and his attempt to uncover his past. Recently, this student was involved in a car accident that left him an amnesiac, and killed his girlfriend. The accident caused the student to become a recluse, until an anatomy textbook brings his fervor for his studies back to life. As he and his fellow students work on dissecting human bodies, the student discovers he is operating on his dead girlfriend. As he dissects more of the body, the lines blur between dreams and reality, as the student tries to reveal his opaque memories of himself and his girlfriend.

What's most interesting about Tsukamoto's treatment of the film is its almost casual pace in building the emotions in the main character. There's no direct impact, no horror shots, no ghosts around the corner to surprise you, and no gruesome scenes to drive the points home. Instead, this tale focuses on the student's evolving emotions to create the sense of loss and discovery that the film ultimately conveys.

Overall rating: 7.0 /10.0

Details:
Runtime: 86m
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese

Review: Frozen (SIFF 2005)

Frozen focuses on the story of Kath, a woman living in Lancaster, and the mysterious disappearance of her older sister, Annie, two years ago. Kath lives a relatively normal working woman's life in a relatively small city, but seems to be haunted by Annie's disappearance, so much so that she's seeking help from a therapist.

Kath's last living memory of Annie is some Closed-Circuit Television footage of Annie walking down an alley, away from the camera. In reviewing the footage one day, Kath notices an odd image on the tapes. She travels to the alley, and there she begins to have visions of an alternate reality in which clues of Annie's existence appear.

The movie oscillates between Kath's daily life, her therapy sessions, and her increasing exploration of the alternate universe she's discovered. As is expected, not many people believe Kath's experiences to be true, including her therapist, but this doesn't stop her explorations. Eventually, we find the answers to Kath's visions as the movie builds to its climax, and we see Kath's alternate universe collide with her reality.

Shirley Henderson does an excellent job playing Kath in the film. Her passive, shy, yet obsessive characteristics come through exceedingly well, yet she doesn't overdramatize or overplay the character's emotional state. The result is a very honest, believable performance.

The camera work in the film is equally superb. Some excellent shots during the alternative reality sequences clearly indicate a "dream-like" world, but a sinister one at that with a very defined blue and white color palette and striking contrasts in the exposure.

Overall rating: 9.0 /10.0

Details:
Runtime: 90m
Countries: United Kingdom
Languages: English

Review: Dreamship Surprise (SIFF 2005)

On the heels of the German comedy Night of the Living Dorks, we saw another great German comedy, Dreamship Surprise. Dreamship (its proper German title being Traumschiff Surprise - Periode 1), spoofs popular American sci-fi franchises, most notably Star Wars and Star Trek, including plenty of takeoff jokes and silly situations.

The premise is probably familiar to any sci-fi film aficionado. The year is 2304, and humans have colonized Mars. Now, the people on Mars have turned a bit sour, and their leader, Regulator Rogul (think Emperor), along with his first mate, Jens Maul (think Darth Vader), want to attack Earth. Their armies are on the way, and the leaders of Earth, led my Queen Metaphor (think...oh, you get it) have no alternative but to call on the crew of the Dreamship Surprise for help.

Surprise is manned by three very ebullient men: Captain Kork, Mr. Spuck, and chief engineer Schrotty. Simply put, they're very gay and are focused on training for the Miss Waikiki song-and-dance contest. Instead, they're summoned to Earth (via a taxi driver, Rock, and his spaceship taxi) and commissioned by the Queen to travel back in time to 2004, where a UFO brought knowledge of space travel to humans, which led to the Mars colonization.

Mishaps abound, leading the Queen, our three Surprise crew members, and the taxi driver to jump to different points in time, courtesy of a couch-turned-time-machine. All the while, Jens Maul is pursuing our heroes in time with a flying-scooter-turned-time-machine. The result is some predictable but very amusing scenes as our heroes interact with people from times long past.

Dreamship Surprise plays off of other sci fi movies well to make its jokes, but doesn't linger too long on any of them. The result is a well-made, fanciful, relatively high-budget sci-fi spoof. One more point of evidence that German cinema can be (and is) funny.

Overall rating: 8.5 /10.0

Details:
Runtime: 87m
Country: Germany
Language: German

Review: Waiting for the Clouds (SIFF 2005)

Waiting for the Clouds is a combination history lesson and personal story. The movie depicts an elderly woman who lives with her ailing sister in a small Turkish village. The woman, with an almost perpetual forlorn look on her face, is somewhat recluse and perceived as a bit off by her fellow villagers. A stranger visits the town one day, and jogs her memory. From this encounter, the woman sets off on a trip to connect with her familial roots. We leave the woman at the end of the film only as she's opened the door to her past.

While slow to get off the ground, the movie captures village life in Northern Turkey alongside a woman's conflicted past with her present. The events the movie base on were real, yet little known or understood about this time period overseas. The acting in the movie is excellent, and the scenery is shot superbly; the eponymous "clouds" scenes in the mountains were truly haunting.

Overall rating: 8.0 /10.0

Details:
Runtime: 90m
Countries: France / Germany / Greece / Turkey
Languages: Turkish / Greek

Review: Night of the Living Dorks (SIFF 2005)

Before watching Night of the Living Dorks, I admit I hadn't been exposed to much German comedy before. I think I chose the right entrance in the genre. This is an excellent, light-hearted comedy that plays off of themes in zombie and teenage-high-school movies at the same time.

The basic premise revolves around three dorky high school students who don't get any respect. After a night in a graveyard with some Goth kids and a spell gone bad, the trio ends up in a morgue, zombified. They're not your George Romero zombies, mind you; their personalities are intact, and in fact they've gained a few skills:
- They don't feel pain, and are pretty strong
- They like raw meat
- Their body parts are more easily detachable

The movie is much more bent on teen comedy; it's the zombie premise that puts the twist in the expected scenes (with a girl, against a bully, attending a party, in a class, etc.). The jokes are frequent and consistently funny; there are quite a few laugh-out-loud lines and images in the movie. All in all, a movie worth your time if you're in the mood for a film that doesn't take itself too seriously.

Overall rating: 7.5/10.0

Details:
Runtime: 90m
Country: Germany
Language: German

Review: Hostage (SIFF 2005)

SIFF 2005's only (mostly) Greek film was another fine offering from Constantine Giannaris (director of One Day in August, a SIFF offering from a couple of years ago). Hostage is a fictional story based on a true event of an Albanian who holds a Greek bus hostage in northern Greece in 1999.

The film almost immediately plunges into the conflict: very soon after the opening credits, we see a young man climbing into a bus, and a few minutes later he is holding it hostage. Soon after, he lets most of the passengers go, but holds seven of them hostage. His demands: 500,000 Euros and passage to Albania. His threats: an automatic gun and a live hand grenade.

Greek authorities tail the bus, and approach the hostages and the Albanian when he stops. The scenes are markedly conversational: the hostages talk to the police, asking them to fulfill the Albanian's demands. The police do indeed bargain. The hostages also ask for cigarettes and pizza, as if they're holed up somewhere, cramming to finish a project. These scenes between hostages, hostage-taker, and police are much less tense than one would expect see in a American action movie.

But these scenes serve the film's core theme: the hostage-taker is seeking freedom from prior failings (and framings) in a foreign land. He first and foremost wants to clear his name; he's not interested in the news cameras that follow the bus, nor does he get overly aggressive with any of the hostages (considering the circumstances, of course). Rather, the hostages begin to become somewhat compassionate with the hostage-taker (I'll leave it up to you to decide whether they were suffering from Stockholm Syndrome).

Giannaris does a good job keeping the momentum and tension up in the movie, and he delves below the surface with more than one character on the bus; only a handful remain relatively flat (predictably for sake of time, though everyone gets at least a few lines for us to paint a sketch of their personality from).

Once the bus crosses the Albanian border (much to the disagreement of the Greek police chief), the movie takes a dark turn. Giannaris casts Albania as a Wild West compared to northern Greece, and it is here where, sooner or later, we expect the bus to come to a halt.

Giannaris was at the screening I attended, and answered a few questions after the movie. He mentioned that the film didn't do well in Greece, noting that Greeks didn't like the way it portrayed themselves. Granted, Albanian/Greek relations haven't been the best of late, but as a Greek living outside of Greece, I think it was a fairly accurate portrayal. It's these kinds of movies that bring forth an artistic version of the truth that will help two countries and cultures come together over their differences, so I applaud Giannaris in his efforts in making what he must have known would be an unpopular movie in his native land.

Overall rating: 8.5/10.0

Details:
Runtime: 90m
Countries: Greece / Turkey
Languages: Greek / Albanian

Review: Warsaw (SIFF 2005)

On the heels of Hawaii, Oslo comes another movie involving characters of separate trajectories bound together by relationships and events. Warsaw shares the theme of love as a unifying (and destructive) force with Hawaii, Oslo, but I believe the similarities fall away from there.

Warsaw depicts a day in the life of different characters with different goals. A woman stops in Warsaw on the way to Andalusia with the hopes of finding love. A man leaves an orphanage he has lived in for most of his life to find a job. A fruit farmer arrives in the capital with the hopes of finding his long-lost daughter. A confused, aged war veteran can't find his way home.

Director Dariusz Gajewski places these characters together only at the very end. The audience sees the interconnections between the characters slowly uncover themselves, but the characters are not as quick to catch on; they pass each other on the street, unknowingly.

The character development and storyline was reasonably good in this film, albeit with a somewhat weak tying-together of the storylines at the end. But, the most striking part of this film for me was the portrayal of Warsaw as a new, modern Eastern European city, versus the Warsaw at the conclusion of World War II that we've all seen in film footage. The film depicts modern Europeans going about their lives in a modern (and snowy) capital city, with scenes that could play out just as well in Berlin or Edinburgh. For those of us who haven't traveled to Poland (myself included), the film becomes a peek into modern life in the city and challenges viewers to remake Warsaw in their (potentially stereotyped) minds.

Overall rating: 6.5/10.0

Details:
Runtime: 104m
Country: Poland
Language: Polish

Review: Hawaii, Oslo (SIFF 2005)

There's plenty of movies that involve a range of unrelated characters that are tied together with a singular place or event (like Amores Perros, or Kilometer Zero). They're tricky to make in such a way that they don't seem forced. Hawaii, Oslo falls into this camp of movie, and it fortunately does a great job of not only avoiding this trap, but being inventive on top of it.

Hawaii, Oslo is primarily a movie about love; brotherly love, romantic love, friendship love, parental love, and love (or maybe it's compassion) between strangers are all presented as part of the storyline's intertwining of characters and plots.

These are the threads, or character sets, in Hawaii, Oslo:

• A couple who is having their first baby, and who then discovers that it has a debilitating disease that only an expensive American clinic can cure
• A suicidal pop star who is saved by a papergirl on her morning route
• A couple of orphaned boys, angry at the loss of their father and risking separation into separate foster homes
• An institutionalized kleptomaniac and his long lost love, who both agreed to meet at the age of 25 if they were both single, and an institution nurse who watches over them.
• The kleptomaniac's brother, who receives an escort from prison only to rob a bank and try to flee the city.

Reading the above list, one would think this movie is about the most depressing of the genre. Quite the contrary; Erik Poppe manages to squeeze quite a bit of situational humor and humanism out of the characters and their interactions. He also slowly uncovers the mysteries of each character for you, without explicit lines or cues shown all at once. The result is an engaging movie that leaves you feeling love for the characters, adding to the movie's core theme.

Overall rating: 9.0/10.0

Details:
Runtime: 125m
Countries: Denmark / Sweden / Norway
Language: Norwegian

Review: Izo (SIFF 2005)

Having spent 2 hours with this movie, I'm not going to spend more time than is necessary with this review. Izo is quite simply a movie about a crucified samurai who transcends time and space to return to the world of the living and wreak havoc. Like most of Takashi Miike's films, this movie has plenty of gore and blood. However, unlike some of his other films, this one is also chock full of pointless philosophical drivel, badly-choreographed fight scenes, an irritating folk guitar soundtrack, and bad CGI. It's a disappointing product from an otherwise unique and talented director.

If you're really curious, rent it. If you're not, simply avoid it.

Overall rating: 1.0/10.0

Details
Runtime: 128m
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese

Review: The Art and Crimes of Ron English (SIFF 2005)

Pedro Carvajal's documentary about Ron English, the artist known for his illegal billboard art, was a great foray into this talent's career. The documentary depicts two segments of Ron's art: the first, focused more on political and anti-corporate messages formed as art, and plastered onto billboards, and the second, where this art is moved into the medium of canvas and oil paint and gains accreditation through gallery showings.

The first portion was certainly the more amusing; anyone who's been irritated at a large, blaring billboard shouting an unagreeable message will take to Ron's "liberation" of this medium. The billboards he creates are certainly of a liberal bent (anti-Bush, anti-war, anti-tobacco), but are more than just scrawled words on a sheet of paper; this is real art that Ron spent time creating and displaying. Ron's reasoning was that he wanted his art to be public; sure, the politics behind it are motivating too, but he claimed having his work locked up in a gallery or in someone's home is not what he wanted.

Interesting, then, to note the latter half of the film, which is Ron's foray into oil paint. His paintings are photographic and realistic, but depict unusual circumstances (kids smoking with KISS-style face paint, Homer Simpson urinating on a campfire while others look on). But his style is unique, and his skill is great, evidenced by the popularity of the gallery showings that are displayed in the film.

Has Ron given up billboards? The film leaves you with a sense that the answer is "no". Sure, Ron's art has matured beyond the public and illegal to more traditional forms, but one can see from the documentary that Ron seems happiest when he's creating, or installing, his billboard art for the masses.

Overall rating: 7.0/10.0

Details
Runtime: 78m
Country: USA
Language: English

Review: North Korea: A Day in the Life / Seoul Train (SIFF 2005)

Our first documentary of SIFF 2005 was actually a pair: two documentaries about life in North Korea and life for those who try to escape it.

North Korea: A Day in the Life is a snapshot of events for one family on a typical day in North Korea. The family awakens and has breakfast. The mother takes her daughter to kindergarten, and then goes to work in a textile mill. A son goes to attend an English class. They return home, and over dinner the grandfather recounts stories from the war. The power of the film comes from what's presented. Director Pieter Fleury received permission from the Ministry of Culture of the Democratic Republic of North Korea to film inside the country. This means they reviewed the film's contents. This also means that not a trace of poverty, disease, prisons, or anything else related to the current regime of North Korea was shown.

What was shown is the Orwellian presence and control that the North Korean regime currently imposes on its people. Pictures and statues of Kim Jong Il are everywhere. Kids are taught how he was benevolent and a man of the people, even when he was a young boy. Patriotic music is piped into production factory floors. Anti-American sentiments run rampant, with the West blamed for most evils, past and present, including the frequent power outages. Workers perform organized work-outs at specified times of the day.

A sense of confinement and enclosure are felt while you're watching this movie. Not only is everything artificially clean, happy, and orderly, but there's no way out of, and no way into, this system. To many in the movie going about their daily lives, North Korea is practically the entire world.

Coming off of this documentary, the perfectly-paired Seoul Train shows a more realistic view of North Korea, and also follows refugees who are trying to escape the country. An underground railroad exists to shuttle refugees from North Korea to safer areas, like South Korea and Mongolia. China, however, is not a safe area: China considers nearly all North Korean refugees as illegal immigrants, and returns them to North Korea. Furthermore, escaping North Korea is punishable by imprisonment, forced labor, and death.

The film shows three things: true life of rural border towns in North Korea with a hidden camera, interviews with government officials and humanitarians, and the stories of a set of refugees and their attempt to arrive in a country that will accept them for what they are.

The images of North Korean rural life are in sharp contrast to the first film; here, you see clear evidence of the famine that is plaguing North Korea (the movie explains that international aid is routed to party loyalists, and denies from others). The interviews with officials and humanitarians shows both great intents and bound hands, as everyone complains that no one can do anything. Finally, the underground railroad depicts people taking life and law into their own hands, with heroic people risking their freedom in an attempt to provide it for other people.

Overall rating: 8.0/10.0 , 8.5/10.0

Details
Runtime: 48m / 54m
Countries: Netherlands / USA
Languages: Korean / English, Korean, Mandarin, Polish

Review: Three...Extremes (SIFF 2005)

This was our first movie for the 2005 film festival, and a midnight movie at the Egyptian theater at that.

This movie is a collection of three shorter films by three directors:
- Dumplings, by Fruit Chan (Hong Kong)
- Cut, by Park Chan-Wook (South Korea)
- Box, by Takeshi Miike (Japan)

The three movies differ quite a bit from each other, both in theme and in style, so it's worth discussing each one separately.

Dumplings is an exploration of the idea of unattainable, perpetual youth. A former actress is aging, and is seeking some modern Fountain of Youth. She visits a woman in her home, who prepares some special dumplings for her. After about 3 minutes into the movie, you understand the ingredients of these dumplings are not normal. After about 5 more minutes, you realize that this dumpling chef is a purveyor of cannibalism.

The actress returns to the woman for ever-increasing dosages of dumplings. When the actress asks for the most potent dumpling the cook has, things get out of hand.

The interesting thing about Dumplings is that it creates shock and surprise out of relatively normal themes: the fear of aging and the length people run to subvert it. If you remove the tension created by the music, the camera work, and the actors, the topic at hand is not completely out of this world. Sure, you don't find many people eating their own kind in urban areas across the world, but they do some pretty wacky things to make themselves look younger, not all of which are any less strange than this.

Cut is pure, rising tension, on the lines of an movie with an overreaching premise that the main characters need to do or avoid. Cut involves a director of a horror film who, after returning to his home from shooting a scene involving a vampire, is knocked unconscious by an intruder. When he awakes, he finds he's in a movie set with his wife, a child, and a distraught film extra who's been in several of the director's films. The director is harnessed with an elastic band that limits how far he can move. His wife is tied up with piano wire stretching from an unseen ceiling, and her fingers are glued to a piano. The child is bound and gagged to a sofa. The film extra wishes to punish the director as a way of punishing his projected failures in life. He challenges the director to commit an act of evil to save his wife.

Most of the movie therefore hinges on the director's internal plight, his wife's physical plight, and the child's innocent involvement in this constructed game of the disturbed extra. Things end less predictably than you might think (with only a bit of foreshadowing), but the visual imagery of the torture, both physical and psychological, is fairly intense and carry throughout the film.

After these two somewhat gory films, I was expecting a similarly bloody offering from Miike, director of the very violent Audition. Not so; Box is an exploration into a personal, painful past. A recluse of a woman, who is an author, has perpetual nightmares about her death involving plastic, a man, snow, and a box. Between this line, you see unfold a personal history of this woman and her sister as carnival performers. The two performed a dance/acrobatic show involving contorting themselves into two boxes. They were mentored by a man who appeared to take preference in the sister over the main character. Then, an accident occurs.

Box is the most visually interesting and slow-to-reveal movies of the three. It's much more cerebral than the other two. Rather than trying to scare you, it tries to put you into the mind and body of the main author character. And it succeeds; at the end of the movie, you're not frightened. Rather, as the last scene fades to black and the closing credits appear, you realize you feel quite sad.

Overall rating: 7.5/10.0

Details
Runtime: 118m
Countries: Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea
Languages: Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin

SIFF 2005

The Seattle International Film Festival is almost here. In less than a week, thousands of Seattle-ites will respond to the longer, warmer, sunnier days by rushing into darkened theaters and watching movies all day. Admittedly, it's better to wait in line to get in the theater when it's nice and sunny versus when it's raining, but it's still a bit odd that we choose to have this festival just as the weather is starting to improve.

This year's festival features 182 films, 55 documentaries, and 111 shorts from around the world. We had to contain ourselves to just over a dozen films over the course of the three or so weeks. Trust me, we could have easily done twice as many.

I'll try to post some movie reviews of what we see after the fact, as well as general takes on how the festival's going, how the crowd's reacting, and any director/actor/movie mogul sightings.