The Seattle International Film Festival is in its final week, so this will be my 2011 highlights wrap-up post. Navigating a film festival is no easy task, even for a dedicated buff. SIFF presented 441 films over 25 days. That’s great for independently wealthy types, but for those of us who work for a living (*cough*), it’s tough to find the time and energy that it would take to catch 17.6 films a day (yes-I did the math). I do take consolation from my observation that the ratio of less-than-stellar (too many) to quality offerings (too few) at a film festival differs little from any Friday night crapshoot at the multiplex. The trick lies in developing a sixth sense for films most likely to be up your alley (in my case, embracing my OCD and channeling it like a cinematic divining rod.) Hopefully, some of these will be coming soon to a theater near you. So-let’s go SIFFting!
with Coneheads
, it’s a wildly uneven and self-consciously campy affair that’s just endearing enough to make it tough to dislike. Writer-director Madeleine Olnek’s setup is clever-scientists on a distant planet theorize that the holes in their ozone are exacerbated by the disruptive vibes of lonely singles with too many “big feelings” (i.e. unrequited love). Their solution? Send the culprits to Earth, each with a directive to hook up with a human, who will of course break their heart and put them off of this silly love thing. The story follows the travails of three of these exiles, one of whom ends up with a socially awkward NYC store clerk (Lisa Haas). There are some genuine laughs, particularly whenever Olnek hits on some universal truths about relationships, but I wish there had been more of that and much less of a subplot involving two “men in black” who engage in scene after scene of painfully unfunny banter (quite amateurishly acted, as well) that drags the film down. The good news is that Olnek does display enough of an assured hand to hint that better things could be on the way in future.
, this is the next best thing to actually “being there”. Where is “there”? Waaay out “there”, man. We’re talking the original Magical Mystery Tour that kicked off that disunited state of mind glibly referred to by those who were not “there” as “the 60s”. In 1964, author Ken Kesey, who had been involved with the infamous CIA-sponsored 1959 psychoactive drug research program at Stanford, assembled a group of friends (including hipster saint speed freak Neal Cassady) for a cross-country bus trip/consciousness-raising experiment that would come to be known as the maiden voyage for the “Merry Pranksters”. Kesey was prescient enough to document the trip with hours of film and audio recordings, but never got around to organizing it all as a coherent narrative. Gibney proves himself up to the task; as well as connecting all the (micro) dots between the Beats, the Pranksters, Leary, the Dead and beyond (the beyond).
One more note: I know it can be frustrating reading rave reviews of films that may or may not ever make it to your neck of the woods, so in the meantime here’s a list of my top 10 SIFF favorites from previous festivals I’ve covered (2007-2010). The good news is that most of these (save two, as noted below) are now available on DVD. Click on the title to read my original review. So here ‘tis…presented (per usual) in alphabetical order:
About a Son
Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
Mid-August Lunch
Mommy is at the Hairdresser’s (Not on DVD)
Monkey Warfare
Nowhere Boy
OSS 117: Lost in Rio
Sita Sings the Blues
The Wrecking Crew (Not on DVD)
The Yes Men Fix the World
From digby: Can we give Hartley a little round of applause for seeing 14 films in two weeks? He has a full time radio job and he says he doesn’t need much sleep, but seriously …