Jason goes to SFIFF--Day 11

It was the big marathon Sunday--6 films.

First up, the super-secret member's screening. All we knew was it was supposed to be ~100 minutes, so we would have time to catch the first regularly scheduled shows. Well, it turned out to be LIBERAL ARTS, written, directed, and starring Josh Radnor (HAPPYTHANKYOUMOREPLEASE.) He plays a 30-something English major working in New York. When his professor from Ohio calls up and invites him to his retirement party, he returns to campus. And he meets a girl who is way too young to be so into him, meets a young but troubled alleged genius, and Zac Efron actually impressing me as a pseudo-wise stoner. It's a story of revisiting youth, and growing up. It's pretty telling of my generation that our coming-of-age stories are about 35 year olds. It's got laughs, charm, and a light-hearted moral about learning to improvise and enjoying life for what it is instead of cursing it for what it should be.

And now, as an engineer/physicist, I just have to go off-topic and explain his muddled thinking re: age appropriate relationships. He's right that as a 35 year old he shouldn't get involved with a 19 year old. But he's wrong to just calculate the 16 year age difference. The important thing isn't absolute age difference, it's half your age plus 7 years. He shouldn't get romantic with her because 35/2 + 7 > 19. But what he should calculate is that when he's 46, she'll be 30 and just in his age range. So maintain a platonic friendship, subtly sabotage her romantic relationships, and in 11 years when she's in the appropriate range--pounce. Physicists get this, I don't know what's wrong with English majors that they try to complicate things.

Anyway, then I bounced over to the New People Center to catch the kid's shorts program The Storyteller's Show. Just adorable and charming.
THE STORYTELLER:A grandpa tries to tell the story of how the coconut got its face, but his memory is failing and his granddaughter knows the story better than he does.
KEENAN AT SEA: An animated musical video about getting lost at sea, hunger, and stinky feet.
PLAY LUNCH: A charming Australian short about big lunches, (Australian rules football), friendship, and fitting in.
LITTLE BOAT: The adventures of a little boat around the world twice--once getting torn apart and once getting rebuilt.
PANYEE FC: The amazing true story of the first football club from a tiny Thai village of Panyee. They're a floating village with no room for a pitch, so they built a floating pitch out of scrap wood. Out of bounds is water, and it turns out the cramped field actually made them excel at their footwork, and when they went to a tournament on the mainland they vastly exceeded expectations.
THE BOY IN THE BUBBLE: Magic, love, heartache, and the protection of a bubble and a hard heart. Narrated by Alan Rickman.
THE VACUUM KID: A documentary about 12-year old Kile Krichbaum and his amazing collection of and obsession with vacuum cleaners. Now 15, he's the youngest owner ever of a vacuum dealership.
PAPER PIANO: The story of El Sistema, a youth orchestra organization in Caracas, Venezuela, as seen from a young girl in the program navigating the dangerous city to make it there.
THE GIRL AND THE FOX: An animated tale in a snow-covered forest. About hunting, danger, and natural foes becoming friends.
ORANGE O DESPAIR: A hilarious story about a little orange who dreams of being a pineapple. They just look like they have so much more fun.

Then the next three shows I saw constituted the DREILEBEN program. Originally made as German TV movies, three different directors tell the stories of thee different lives (aka Dreileben) that all take place in the fictional forested town of Dreileben and all deal in some way (some more tangentially than others) with a police drama about an escaped convict. In the first one DREILEBEN: BEATS BEING DEAD, young male nurse intern Johannes accidentally lets the convict Frank Molesch escape while he's viewing his dead mother's body. But that's not the real story. The real story is his tumultuous romance with Ana. Actually, let's back up a bit. Johannes is friends with the head doctor at the hospital. The doctor, in fact, would probably like Johannes to date his daughter. But the daughter has other plans. So Johannes hooks up with Ana, a girl he helps out after watching her get attacked and left behind by the bikers she was rolling with. They end up having quite a bit of sex, apologizing a lot to each other, and studying English in hopes of Johannes winning a scholarship to Los Angeles. But perhaps fate has other plans, and there's an escaped psychopath roaming the woods.

Then part 2, DREILEBEN: DON'T FOLLOW ME AROUND. I should mention that they're presented in this order, but each can stand on its own, and I think it would be interesting to watch them out of order and see if you pick up on different things. Now we get a little bit more into the manhunt for Molesch. Specifically, we see it from the point of view of Johanna--a police psychiatrist brought in to aid in the hunt. The police seem incapable of catching the guy, and perhaps even a little uninterested (the third movie turns this on its ear quite a bit). But they really show surprisingly little of the police work. It's more of a police non-procedural. It's more about how she stays with her old friend Vera who happens to live in town with her husband. Her presence, while they insist is welcome, seems to draw some wedge between them and muddle up their seemingly perfect relationship. Particularly when Johanna and Vera realize they have a remarkable coincidence in their past. Ultimately, when her work in Dreileben is done, Johanna will return to her absolutely adorable little daughter greatly changed.

And finally, we get Molesch's point of view in DREILEBEN: ONE MINUTE OF DARKNESS. We see his escape (with a brief cameo by Johannes from the first movie) and the manhunt closing in on him. Stefan Kurt is brilliant as Molesch, escaping and then inhabiting the woods in a kind of wide-eyed stupor that is alternately paranoia and wonder. Secrets from his past are revealed, and the minute of darkness in the title is revealed as the crucial minute of security video footage when he allegedly killed a woman. In fact (as contrived as this is,) the tape went dark just at the wrong (or right) moment and so he was actually convicted on circumstantial evidence and might be innocent all along. Innocent, but still crazy.

So I liked all three films, and I think I liked them in this order with increasing appreciation for each one. But I also think that's because I like the process of seeing things from other points of view and how that changes what happened before. There's actually surprisingly little of that here--it's not so much intersecting stories as much as simultaneous stories that intersect as little as possible. But what there was, I enjoyed quite a bit. But I can't help but wonder if I saw them in a different order would I have a different opinion.

And finally, I ended my marathon day with Johnnie To's latest, LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE. Some people had warned me that it's a bit of a departure for To, as it focuses very little on his trademark violence and more on the drama. Personally, I've always thought the violence in To's movies (as expertly and excitingly choreographed as it always is) is often the least interesting element. There are hundreds of filmmakers who can film violence (many of them also working in Hong Kong), but To always captured something more--be it revenge, loyalty, camaraderie, desperation, etc. In fact, LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE is a departure for To, not because there's only a little bit of violence, but because it's so aggressively, in-your-face political. It's set against the global banking crisis and the Greek bailout, and interweaves the story of a mid-level investment manager for a bank with an incredibly loyal mid-level organized crime gopher. The underlying message--there's no difference between the banks and the triads--is simply unavoidable. It's often steeped in banking jargon about products, markets, risk levels, etc. If it leaves the audience a bit bewildered, that bewilderment is reflected on the blinking, twitching face of Panther (Lau Ching-wan,) the triad flunky who seems to constantly be trying to raise money to bail his boss out of jail, or bail his brother out of debt with his creditors. He even thinks he's found the pattern in the stock market and knows when it will rise. Of course, it does have to have some trademark violence in the end, and To delivers, but never in a way that will overshadow the plot or the message.

And that was Sunday at SFIFF. Now on to the final drag through the week, ending with the closing night on Thursday.

Total Running Time: 536
My Total Minutes: 281,888

Jason goes to SFIFF--Day 10

Wow, has it been going on that long already? I guess so. Anyway, 4 more movies Saturday, including my first (and probably only) trip to the PFA this festival (for the first two movies.)

First up was the epic 3+ hour documentary IT'S THE EARTH, NOT THE MOON. Corvo is a small island in the Azores. In land area, it's a bit smaller than San Francisco, and is home to one village, one street, one airport with one runway, and between 440 and 450 people (population has fluctuated from 300 to 900 over its history.) It's the ideal location for director Goncalo Tocha to spend four years making a documentary about absolutely everything there. The butcher, the fishermen, the cheesemakers, the farmers, the volcanic cone, the beach, the pigs, the cows, the...everything. Divided into chapters that don't have a thematic organization so much as a sense of an evolving story and increasing familiarity with the island, it can be an exhausting project (I admit I checked my watch more than once) but a rewarding one. It really is an exercise in trying to capture everything about a place, and it's undeniably rewarding when Tocha gets his cap at the end and is declared a real man of Corvo. I get the sense that if he could, he would've included all 180 hours he shot there from 2007 to 2011. I wouldn't have stayed around quite that long, but 3 hours was long enough (and, according to Tocha, a half-hour longer than most visitors spend in Corvo)

IT'S THE EARTH, NOT THE MOON plays again April 29 at 1:00 at the Kabuki

Next up was another documentary, a very intimate bit of hero worship with ETHEL. The Ethel of the title is Ethel Kennedy, widow of Bobby Kennedy and matriarch to 11 children (9 surviving) and 33 grandchildren. The director is the last of her children, Rory Kennedy, who was only 3 months in Ethel's belly when Bobby was assassinated. So it's forgivable that it's a uniformly positive portrait. And given the importance of the family to history, it's understandable and forgivable that it veers from Ethel to the extraordinary accomplishments and untimely deaths of both her husband and her brother-in-law Jack. But Rory manages to steer the focus back to Ethel repeatedly, despite Ethel's often cantankerous reluctance to talk about herself. Luckily, she has several other kids who were happy to talk about her, and they put together a pretty engaging, loving portrait of a woman who was in her own way more outgoing and adventurous than Bobby, who pushed him to push himself to greatness, but who usually shrank back into the shadows behind him. That is, until he was gone, and she took her own role, a chapter the movie is unfortunately light on.

Next up, I made my way from the PFA in Berkeley to the Castro for TWIXT. Francis Ford Coppola has thrown his hat into the 3-D ring and returned to genre filmmaking (has it really been 20 years since his version of DRACULA?) As well as making an oddly personal film. Actually, he only uses 3D in two scenes, kind of a throwback to some of the classic 3D schlock pictures, and really I don't think the 3D was necessary at all, but it was fun. The movie itself is an immaculately crafted surreal tale of a moderately successful horror writer Hall Baltimore (Val Kilmer) and his strange dream-world adventures in Swan Valley, a fictional small town in Northern California (actually, I'm not sure if they establish where it was, but it was shot is NoCal and the fact they had In-N-Out there establishes it as somewhere in the west.) He's there for a book signing, but there's no bookstore so he signs at the hardware store. And he only signs one book--for the local sheriff/aspiring horror writer (Bruce Dern) who convinces him to stay and collaborate on a tru-ish story about a local serial killer with vampiric overtones. In fact, legend has it the whole town is haunted, and there's some pretty weird stuff. Motorcycle riding goth teens across the lake who might be evil. A seven-faced clock tower with no two faces telling the same time. Ghosts, a legend of a child-murderer, and Edgar Allan Poe as a guide. They might all be there, or they might all be a dream. Back in the real world he's got a wife nagging him to get and advance or she'll sell his rare copy of Leaves of Grass, and a publisher demanding a foolproof idea, complete with an outline and a dynamite ending. In tone, it veers from classic horror to melancholy to dark humor to very personal tragedy (there's a plot element that's eerily similar to Coppola's own son's death in a boating accident.) I'm not really convinced that it works as a pure genre piece. And I'm less convinced that it works as some dark satire or deconstruction of genre literature/filmmaking. But it does work simply as Coppola playing around, and if that seems indulgent, well Coppola has earned that.

Plays again (in 2D) May 3 at 8:15 at the Kabuki

And finally, I ended the night much as I ended last Saturday night,with a Who musical, this time their classic QUADROPHENIA. What can I say? Disaffected youth, mods vs. rockers, motorcycles, pills, sex, and music. And most importantly the rowdy crowd that TOMMY deserved but didn't really get last week. What a blast!

And that was Saturday at SFIFF. Tomorrow (Sunday) is my real marathon day with 6 movies, starting with a member's screening at 10:00 am.

Total Running Time: 489 minutes
My Total Minutes: 281,364

Jason goes to SFIFF--Day 9

Friday (and the big second weekend) started off with a couple of shorts programs. First up, Acting the Part, a selection of shorts showcasing the nature of who we pretend to be and who we really are. Here's the rundown:
AARON BURR, PART 2: Historical revision gets a new take, with Aaron Burr as a hero, and the founding father using cell phones. A fascinating and funny take on how history makes losers out of winners.
BEAR: A birthday surprise goes badly wrong. The ending was exactly what I was hoping for. Wonderfully sick humor.
HELLION: These kids totally live up to the title, torturing the baby-sitter and their little brother. But then they have to deal with their stern father.
THE LOVE COMPETITION: In Stanford, a group of volunteers agree to undergo an fMRI while thinking about love and see who can make their MRI light up with the most love. It's an interesting way to examine the myriad of ways of thinking about love, and the participants all come out transformed (whether the MRI has anything to do about it or it's all from focusing on love is at this point a matter of opinion.) I'd feel much better about the results if I believed that fMRI was more than just a few steps above phrenology.
MOBIUS: A hotel clerk has a unique hobby revolving around learning what he can from all the guests. You can learn a lot from how someone says hello.
MUSIC FOR ONE X-MAS AND SIX DRUMMERS: From the makers of SOUND OF NOISE, we get their percussive take on Christmas caroling in a rest home.
NOTHING: A visual story with minimal dialogue about a maid, the repetitiveness of life, and an attempt to break free.
RANDOM STRANGERS: Insomnia leads to meeting strangers online leads to an international romance. Very sweet, while also a statement on how online life can become more real than your regular life.

Acting the Part plays again April 30 at 3:15 at the Film Society Cinema (formerly VIZ, in the New People Center)

Then I caught the animation program Shanimation, yay cartoons!:
BELLY: A little elephant-faced boy goes to the beach with his older horse-faced brother, has to save him, and has to leave behind his best friend.
DUST AND GLITTER: A bit of a love letter to San Francisco and the homeless, from Slovakian animator Michaela Copikova who lived here for a year on a Fullbright Scholarship.
LACK OF EVIDENCE: A letter requesting political asylum in France, from a twin who survived an attempt at a ritual killing at the hands of his father. Very moving.
LA LUNA: Pixar's latest, an apprentice moon janitor figures out his own way of doing things.
M. WARD: THE FIRST TIME I RAN AWAY: A music video about running away and finding something (or someone) to run to.
OEDIPUS: Paul Driessen is up to his insane best, with a story of a man who kills his girlfriend's husband, but is then shocked when she freaks out just because he takes his head off to go to sleep. Why would she do that? It features a support group of characters from Driessen's previous films.
PLUME: A beautiful image of a winged man and his adventure losing his wings but finding a new self.
663114: The life cycle of a Japanese 66-year cicada, and a glimpse of 66 years in the future.
20HZ: A fascinating and beautiful experiment in the visual display of information. A geomagnetic storm seen and heard at 20 Hz.

Shanimation plays again April 28 (today!) at 12:15 at the Film Society Cinema

Next up was the feature THE LONELIEST PLANET, a story about relationships and split-second shocking change. Gael García Bernal and Hani Furstenberg are Alex and Nica, an engaged couple trekking through the Caucasus mountains in Georgia with their guide Dato (Bidzina Gujabidze, who really is a guide in real life.) We get to enjoy the scenery, their leisurely pace, their sweet, romantic back-and-forth, their discussions with Dato. And then (and I have to be careful about spoilers here) there is a brief, shocking run-in. A split second of comic relief, and then shock, anger, and shame that changes and tests their relationship. I loved how realistic their reactions were, and how so much can be said with very few words (in fact, often not saying anything is a powerful statement.) I talked to some people in the festival who found it dull or slow, but I was constantly fascinated by it.

And finally, I ended the day with OSLO, AUGUST 31. Early in the film, Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie) weights his jacket down with stones and jumps into the water, hoping to drown himself. As it is, he just loses his jacket, but this half-comic suicide attempt will hang tensely over the entire movie. Anders is a recovering drug addict. He's been doing well in rehab, hasn't even had a beer in 10 months. And he's a smart guy, from an intellectual family and was doing well until he fucked up. He now has a one day leave from rehab, and he returns to Oslo to catch up with old friends. He's depressed about being a 30-something failure and jealous of his friends' seemingly more accomplished lives. He also feels guilt that his parents are selling their house (they claim they want a smaller place in retirement, he knows they went into debt putting him through rehab.) And, of course, he talks way too much about suicide (and how if he makes it look like and overdose no one will really be surprised or care that much.) It's an interesting and tense character study, and as a day with glimpses of hope (a job interview seemingly goes well, but he walks out after the interview gets too tense) becomes a night where everyone else is partying and it appears the temptation and despair might just be too much.

Total Running Time: 387 minutes
My Total Minutes: 280,851

Jason goes to SFIFF--Day 8

This is getting to be something of a refrain, but four more movies yesterday (Thursday).

First up was WOMEN WITH COWS, a funny, sad, touching, strange documentary from Sweden. It's the story of two sisters who grew up on a farm. Inger is the younger sister. She has moved to the town where she has a husband and kids and her own life. Britt has stayed on the farm, tending to the cows as best as she can, despite being completely doubled over from spinal injuries. She looks like she would be miserable--it can't be comfortable, she's constantly covered in flies and cow dung, and she really needs help to take care of the cows (and there's really no reason to, nobody buys fresh milk anymore, even they buy 2% milk from the store.) But she insists she's happy and would never leave the farm. Inger, meanwhile, is happy to leave the farm and never wants to go back--but constantly does, even though it seems every time she insists it will be her last. It's the epitome of the "truth is stranger than fiction" adage, and a touching story of the death of the family farm system and the inseparable bond between sisters.

Next up was the film that has been burning up box office records in France and all over Europe (and which the Weinstein company is bringing to America) THE INTOUCHABLES. Based on a true story, it centers on the friendship between Philippe (François Cluzet) and Driss (Omar Sy, who won the César for his performance.) Philippe is a millionaire who is paralyzed from the neck down (and Cluzet does a great job acting with only his head and face mobile.) Driss is a Senegalese immigrant who applies for a job as Philippe's assistant/caregiver. He doesn't really expect the job, but he needs a signature to prove he applied so he can get his government benefits. But Philippe sees something in him, and gives him a one month trial period. There's plenty of fish out of water comedy and TRADING PLACES style hijinks. And Driss is such a charming character and Sy such a charming actor that he rather quickly wins over everyone. The movie is funny all the way through, which is pretty remarkable for a foreign film, especially one that plays so clearly on France's race/class tension. As a fan of humor about racism (or perhaps racist humor, the line is pretty blurry) I was pretty delighted with this film.

Next up was the on stage interview/clip show David O'Reilly Says Something. I didn't know who David O'Reilly was, although I had seen and loved THE EXTERNAL WORLD before (at last year's SFIFF, in fact.) He's best described as a low-tech computer animator. His works are often explicitly pixelated (or MS Paint, in the case of OCTOCAT), and they seem to always trick, befuddle, and (in my case) delight the audience. He also uses cats a lot, although he revealed he's never owned one. Oh yeah, and the interview and Q&A session were really interesting, talking about how little he actually knows about computer animation (he's decided to finally learn how to program) and how often he's surprised when something he makes takes off. Oh, and how awful his 71 minute feature film THE AGENCY (made with Xtranormal) really is. For what it's worth, I loved the two brief snippets they showed, but he insists that watching it all the way through gets tedious in under ten minutes.

And finally, I ended the night with a long short and a short feature. First, the long (35 minute) short, THE SHADY SAILOR. Shot in black and white (and it struck me that this might be the first B&W film I've seen this year at the festival, odd since I loved the B&W films at Cinequest.) To girls narrate the story of a road trip, of meeting the titular sailor, of love (or lust), and missed chances. Very charming.

And finally, the short (59 minutes) feature, PALACES OF PITY. We open with some pretty striking shots. Two girls practicing and stretching for soccer. Perhaps the way they're shot stretching each other is supposed to make me think they're lovers, or maybe it's just my pervy mind, because actually they're sisters. In the next shot we see an old woman, watching them while framed by rows of empty concrete bleachers. She's their grandmother, who sets up the whole movie with the line, "The country [Portugal] has changed, but we are the same." And then things get weird. There are knights, a mansion, two other girls, nightclubs, and a conflagration. And maybe I was just too tired to pay attention (I know I halfway nodded off at one point,) but fuck if I know what was going on. Many, many shots were absolutely beautiful, but I confess I was lost. Oh, well.

Total Running Time: 379 minutes

My Total Minutes: 280,464

Jason goes to SFIFF--Day 7

Four more movies on Wednesday, so let's jump right in with A CUBE OF SUGAR. It's a slice-of-life tale of the preparations for an Iranian wedding. Passand is getting married, and all the family is gathering at the house of her aged Uncle Ezzatolah (the house was built for the movie, and is a classic old-school compound meant to house an extended family.) Kids run wild, the elders (especially Uncle Ezzatolah) pass on their wisdom, and everyone prepares by gossiping over food preparation, or lights, or whatever. They deal with regular power blackouts and an extended family that doesn't seem to see each other often and sometimes doesn't get along. What plot there is (at least a big twist that changes everything) I won't reveal for spoiler etiquette. But it's a colorful and food-filled slice of life. I have many times echoed Hitchcock's pronouncement that I prefer my movies to be a slice of cake instead of slice of life. And that applies here (as it applies to a lot of Iranian cinema,) but if you're a fan of slice of life movies, this would probably interest you.

The next movie was definitely a slice of cake--grand, thrilling, visceral, darkly comic cake with a plethora of plot twists. HEADHUNTERS stars Aksel Hennie (probably Norway's most famous actor) as Roger Brown, an executive recruiter who overcompensates for his 5'6" height with money. He buys his wife Diana--who towers over him--a big house he can't afford and lots of beautiful jewelry. He can't pay for that just on a headhunter salary, but he has a second stream of income--art thief. He learns about a genuine Rubens painting worth possibly $100,000 (or was it Euros? I forget the currency, but worth enough to never worry about money again) and moves quickly. Too bad the owner is a former army tracker, and the former director of development at a GPS company, and can find him anywhere and take torturous revenge. It's graphic, it's occasionally disgusting, and Roger is essentially put through various stages of hell. This is apparently the first film adapted from a novel by author Jo Nesbø, with Martin Scorsese set to direct his SNOWMAN next. Apparently I now have a new author I should get acquainted with.

Next up, a bit of Caveh Zahedi provocation and button-pushing in THE SHEIK AND I. Caveh was approached to produce a film for the Sharjah Biennial, one of the biggest and most popular art exhibitions in the Middle East (Sharjah is one of the emirates of the UAE.) At first he was told there were no rules and the theme is about art as a subversive act. So he pushes them, and finds there really are three rules. First, no frontal nudity--he has no problem with that. Second, no demeaning the prophet Mohammad--he thinks about that for a bit, thinks of what happened in Denmark with the cartoonists or with director Theo Van Gogh, and decides he can avoid demeaning Mohammad. And finally, no making fun of the Sheik of Sharjah, Sheik Sultan bin Muhammad al-Qasimi. This rule, he obsesses over. What would constitute "making fun?" Can he mention the Sheik at all? So with no idea what to do he decides to fly to Sharjah with his family and a small crew and make a movie about his attempt to make a movie in and about Sharjah. In a paranoid moment in the car ride from the airport, he dreams up a kidnapping plot, and starts making a film about his paranoid fantasy. But beyond that, he asks everyone he meets about the sheik, about Sharjah, about their customs. There are scenes of him learning to pray, then choreographing a group of Indian children (of guest workers) using the praying moves in a Bollywood-esque dance sequence (okay, even I could understand how that could upset people.) Mostly, he sort of flaunts his American ignorance and naivety, and uses it to hold up a mirror to their culture. I get the feeling that Caveh was invited because he has a Middle Eastern name (his parents are Iranian, but he is thoroughly American) and therefore would understand the culture and what he can and can't do instinctively. Ultimately, he doesn't turn in anything that could play at the Biennial, and he even had to fight for permission to show it elsewhere. And I, for one, am glad he did because the end result is pretty fantastic.

THE SHEIK AND I plays again April 28 at 9:00 at the Kabuki

And finally, my last screening was LAST SCREENING, a French horror film for cinephiles. Sylvain is a projectionist at the Empire Cinema, showing classics like FRENCH CANCAN and displaying posters for CAPTIVE and LAST DAYS. He loves the theater, he even lives below it, and has a secret room hidden behind his poster of PLAYTIME. He's also completely psycho. So when he learns the cinema is closing he goes on a bit of a killing spree. And keeps souvenirs in honor of famous Hollywood stars. And remembers a bit of trauma with his mother (did I mention he's PSYCHO?) Pascal Cervo is brilliant as Sylvain, who doesn't really talk much but has a wonderfully intense stare. It's a pretty odd way to fight against the demise of single-screen arthouse cinemas, but at least for an onscreen fantasy, I approve. Although I do have to say it wasn't exactly what I expected, and it took me a night of thinking about it to decide I really liked it. I was expecting more of a campy feel with gratuitous fake blood. But (despite what the festival photo looks like) it's really more interesting in the restraint of what it shows, leaving just the right amount to the imagination. Like how in PSYCHO you never see the knife penetrate skin in the shower scene, but everyone thinks they remember seeing just that. It's definitely not the style of modern horror films. So not only is it about a cinema of a bygone era, it's really for people who prefer that classic cinema that relies just as much on what's implied but unseen.

LAST SCREENING plays again April 28 at 10:00 at the Kabuki

Total Running Time: 411 minutes
My Total Minutes: 280,088

Jason goes to SFIFF--Day 6

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Jason goes to SFIFF--Day 5

The first Monday of the festival, and I celebrated by seeing four films. That's right, I celebrate Mondays by watching movies.

First up was an absolute delight, ¡VIVAN LAS ANTIPODAS! Antipodes are spots on Earth diametrically opposed to each other. Since most of the Earth is covered in water, antipodes with dry land on both sides are kind of rare. Antipodes with people on both sides are even rarer. But this film takes a contemplative, poetic, and highly visual adventure to four sets of such antipodes (eight location in all) as a way of exploring the diversity and similarities of human existence. Entre Rios, Argentina is paired with Shanghai, China. Lake Baikal in Russia is paired with Patagonia in Chile. Miraflores Spain is paired with Castle Point, New Zealand. And the lava beds of the Big Island of Hawai'i is paired with a village in Botswana. And the film is full of beautiful cinematography, inverted cameras, clever transitions (the lava beds to the elephant's skin was my favorite.) I don't think I can tell you in words how beautiful it all was. This film doesn't just celebrate the diversity and possibilities of human life. It also celebrates the endless possibility of cinema to change the way we see the world around us.

¡VIVAN LAS ANTIPODAS! plays again April 26 at 6:00 at the Film Society Cinema and April 30 at 9:00 at the Pacific Film Archives. And the director Victor Kossakovsky is supposed to be there for those screenings. My only regret is he wasn't around for a Q&A at this screening.

But then, I didn't really have time to stick around for a Q&A, because I was off to Kirby Dick's (THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED, TWIST OF FAITH) new film, THE INVISIBLE WAR. Right to the point, it's about rape in the military. And Kirby gets right in there and interviews the victims, bringing painful personal stories to light. And he backs it up with statistics, all of which come from government reports. About 20% of women serving in the military have been assaulted at some time (a smaller percentage, but larger total number of men are also assaulted.) New recruits into the military are twice as likely to have committed or attempted rape than the corresponding demographics in the civilian population. And most upsetting is how rarely anything is done about it. Since you don't report to an outside police force but to your chain of command, often the victim has to report the assault to either a friend of her attacker or sometimes (bizarrely) to her attacker himself--and then he gets to decide whether to investigate.

You know, I hate this argument but I can understand that in a macho, high-testosterone environment rape will sometimes happen. Heck, it happens in the civilian world and maybe it can never be totally eliminated. But the military can address how they respond to incidents. Some of the most distressing moments of the film is when it shows the pathetic efforts at training to prevent assaults. The words "security theater" have been tossed around a lot lately, well this is nothing more than "rape prevention theater." The best prevention is harsh punishment of rapists, not the buddy system or a cheesy rap video telling you to help prevent assaults.

I remember the Tailhook scandal being in the news when I was in high school back in 1991. And it appears nothing has changed since then. Maybe this movie, and the take action page on its website, can force some change. So far, it's a very well made movie that's painful and difficult to watch.

THE INVISIBLE WAR plays again May 1 at 9:15 at the Kabuki.

Next up, my doc day afternoon continued with AI WEIWEI: NEVER SORRY. Back in 2008, there was a documentary I saw at SF Indie's Docfest called BIRD'S NEST: HERZOG AND DE MEURON IN CHINA. I thought it was moderately interesting, but there was this one character--a dissident Chinese artist who helped design the Bird's Nest stadium but then spoke out against the Olympics. I thought they totally missed the boat on that movie, because he was by far the most interesting character. There should have just been a movie about him. And now, thanks to Alison Klayman, there is. At one point, Ai Weiwei describes himself not as an artist but as a chess player--his opponent makes move, then he decides his next move. His opponent, of course, is the Chinese government. He really came to prominence not from the Olympics but from his work in the Sichuan earthquake shortly before. He was upset at the shoddy "tofu" construction of schoolhouses that led to thousands of students dying in the collapsed buildings. And beyond that, the government wouldn't release the names or numbers of students who had died. So he researched it himself and on the one year anniversary of the earthquake he released his list of names. That was just the start of an ongoing career of challenging the powers. Luckily, his fame makes him a little hard to touch. Hard...but not impossible. After the earthquake incident, when he was going to testify at the trial of another earthquake activist, he was beaten by cops to the point where he needed surgery to reduce swelling on his brain. Later, he is "disappeared" for months, and when he's released the government declares he owes the equivalent of $2.4 million in back taxes (donations come in from all over the place.) Currently he's forbidden to travel outside Beijing, but that ban is supposed to be up in June, and I guess we will all find out more then. As it is, I'm very happy this movie was made, I'm happy to get a better look at this remarkable man, and most of all I'm happy that people like this exist in the world.

AI WEIWEI: NEVER SORRY plays again April 25 at 9:15 at the Kabuki

And finally, I saw my one and only narrative film of the day, but GUILTY was still based very closely on a real incident. Alain Marecaux (Philippe Torreton, who does a magnificent job) is a family man--a bailiff with a wife and three kids. If there's one thing wrong in his life, it's that he works too hard and doesn't spend enough time home with the kids. And then in the middle of the night he and his wife are arrested, accused of being part of a widespread pedophile ring. There's not a shred of actual evidence, just an allegation by a mother who admitted to prostituting her own children and named tons of names. An overzealous investigating judge (I don't know the French legal system at all, they call him a judge but he didn't seem to be the same as a judge in an American court) makes things worse, and Alain is in jail for years. He can't even get released on bail, despite no physical evidence against him and completely inconsistent statements from his accusers. Of course, if any cellmate finds out what he's accused of, his life could be in danger. As it is, he attempted suicide many times, including a harrowing hunger strike. Since it's based on a true story you can look up, I won't worry too much about spoilers. I'll just say it became the biggest French legal scandal in living memory. And I'll say the film is expertly made and often (appropriately) hard to watch.

GUILTY plays again April 25 at 6:00 and April 27 at noon, both times at the Kabuki.

Total Running Time: 389 minutes
My Total Minutes: 279,308