Saturday Night at the Movies
SIFF-ting through cinema: Week 3
By Dennis Hartley
The Seattle International Film Festival has entered its final week, so I’m continuing to share film reviews. SIFF is showing 410 films over 25 days. Navigating such an event is no easy task, even for a dedicated buff (ow, my ass). Yet, I trudge on (cue the world’s tiniest violin). Hopefully, some of these films will be coming soon to a theater near you…
The Realm (Spain/France) – In this conspiracy thriller, a low-level Spanish politician becomes an unwitting fall guy for the systemized corruption in his district. He decides to blow the whistle on his backstabbing colleagues before he is forced to resign his post. It’s a good premise and has a promising start, but the narrative becomes more and more preposterous, to the point of self-parody. I sensed the film makers were aiming for Three Days of the Condor…but unfortunately what they ended up with was this 2-hour turkey.
Rating: *½ (Plays June 2, 7, & 8)
Kifaru (Kenya/USA) – I haven’t cried like this over an animal movie since I saw Old Yeller as a kid. But there’s a palpable sadness running throughout David Hambridge’s extraordinarily moving documentary about the life and death of “Sudan”, the last male white rhino. The film is as much about his dedicated caretakers James and JoJo, workers at Kenya’s Ol Pejeta wildlife conservancy. Thankfully, we are given hope for the future (thanks to the miracles of modern science).
Rating: ***½ (Plays June 3)
I Am Cuba (Cuba/Soviet Union) – There is a tendency to dismiss this 1964 film about the Cuban revolution as Communist propaganda. Granted, it was produced with the full blessing of Castro’s regime, who partnered with the Soviet government to provide the funding for director Mikhail Kalatozov’s sprawling epic. Despite the dubious backers, the director was given a surprising amount of creative freedom.
On the surface, Kalatozov’s film is in point of fact a propagandist polemic; the narrative is divided into a quartet of rhetoric-infused vignettes about exploited workers, dirt-poor farmers, student activists, and rebel guerrilla fighters.
However it is also happens to be a visually intoxicating masterpiece that, despite accolades from critics over the decades, remains relatively obscure. The real stars of the film are the director and his technical crew, who will leave you pondering how they produced some of those jaw-dropping set pieces and logic-defying tracking shots!
Rating: **** (Special revival presentation; Plays June 4 only)
Barbara Rubin and the Exploding NY Underground (USA/France/Israel) – Just when I thought I knew everything about the Warhol Factory scene, this fascinating documentary introduces an overlooked player. Barbara Rubin was a Zelig-like character who moved to NYC at 18, became enmeshed with some of the era’s most culturally significant artists…then became one herself as a pioneering feminist filmmaker. And many years before Madonna dabbled in Kabbalah culture, Rubin embraced it full-bore, taking the traditionally patriarchal Orthodox Jewish community head on while re-inventing herself.
Rating: *** (Plays June 5)
Go Back to China (China/Hong Kong/USA) – Writer-director Emily Ting’s family dramedy/fish-out-of-water story concerns a young woman (Anna Akana) living high off her trust fund in L.A. who gets cut off by her prosperous dad in China. If she wants back on the gravy train, he demands she must first come back to China for a year to work at his toy factory. Not groundbreaking-but all-in-all it’s an amiable, audience-pleasing charmer.
Rating: *** (Plays June 5 & 6)
International Falls (USA) – Steve Martin once said, “Comedy is not pretty.” He was being facetious; but there is a dark side to the business of funny (everybody loves a clown, but nobody wants to take one home-if you know what I’m saying). Punchline meets Fargo in this tragicomic love story directed by Amber McGinnis and written by playwright/comedian Thomas Ward.
A disenchanted, middle-aged Minnesota mom (Rachael Harris) with a crap job and crappier marriage finds her only solace in attending weekly comedy shows at a local hotel lounge and toying with the idea of one day going into stand-up herself. One night, she hooks up with a cynical road comic (Rob Huebel) who seems to have lost his, how do you Americans say…joie da vivre? The pair realize they might have something special going on between them. Problem is, she’s married, and he’s just there for the week. Funny and sobering, with fine performances by Harris and Huebel (both real-life comics).
Rating: *** (Plays June 6 & 7)
Driveways (USA) – There is beauty in simplicity. Korean-American director Andrew Ahn and screenwriters Hannah Bo and Paul Thureen have fashioned a beautiful, elegantly constructed drama from a simple (and oft-used) setup.
A single Korean-American mom (Hong Chau) and her 8-year old son (Lucas Jaye) move into her recently deceased sister’s house, ostensibly to clean it out and sell it. To her dismay, she discovers her estranged sis was a classic hoarder and it looks like they will be there longer than she anticipated. In the interim, her shy son strikes up a friendship with their next-door neighbor (Brian Dennehy), a kindly widower and Korean War vet.
That’s it. I know…sounds like “a show about nothing”, but it’s about everything-from racism to ageism and beyond. Humanistic and insightful; never preachy. Wonderful performances all around, but the perennially underrated Dennehy is a particular standout.
Rating: **** (Plays June 7 & 8)
Halston (USA) – Fashion…turn to the left! Beep-beep. If I had to name my two “least favorite” subjects, they’d be: sports, and fashion. I usually have to be dragged kicking and screaming into films dealing with either. However, it’s my duty as a critic to cover all the bases (how I’ve suffered for you people…and fashion). Nonetheless, I found this portrait of the enigmatic gentleman who designed Jackie K’s first pillbox hat to be fascinating and engrossing.
Rating: *** (Plays June 7 & 9)
Here Comes Hell (United Kingdom) – Jack McHenry’s feature film debut is an homage to classic black-and-white “haunted mansion” thrillers, mixed with contemporary gore film sensibilities. A bit reminiscent of Ken Russell’s Gothic (although not quite in the same league), the story takes place over the course of one eventful and unsettling evening. A group of people converge at an isolated country estate and accidentally open the door to Hell (I hate it when that happens!). There’s a fair amount of mordant humor, and the special effects are pretty good for a low-budget production, but it’s all rather rote.
Rating: **½ (North American Premiere; Plays June 7 & 9)
Previous posts with related themes:
2019 SIFF Preview
More reviews at Den of Cinema
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— Dennis Hartley