The latest edition of the Seattle International Film Festival begins Thursday, May 19 and we at Seattle Screen Scene are once again planning on some extensive coverage. We discussed the festival and some of the films we’re looking forward to on the last episode of The Frances Farmer Show, and here are some more titles to look out for over the week ahead. We’ll add links to our reviews here as we write them.
With the Seattle International Film Festival fast approaching, we discuss earlier films by two prominent directors whose films will be bookending this year’s SIFF. Terence Davies will be kicking the festival off with his Sunset Song, while Kiyoshi Kurosawa will bring it to a close with Creepy, and so we talk about Davies’s 1992 masterpiece of poetic memory The Long Day Closes and Kurosawa’s 2008 surreal domestic melodrama Tokyo Sonata. We’re joined as well by Melissa to preview this year’s festival, running down some new obscurities, interesting documentaries, much-anticipated archival presentations and more. All that, plus cameo appearances from TS Eliot and Paul Verlaine.
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A sequel in name only to the 2005 Donnie Yen/Sammo Hung hit, Soi Cheang’s SPL 2: A Time for Consequences is being released here in North America as Kill Zone 2 by the WellGo organization, opening Friday at the AMC Pacific Place. The two greatest martial arts performers of their generation, Tony Jaa and Wu Jing, team up with Simon Yam to take on an international organ-trafficking ring led by the always-degenerating Louis Koo. With an outlandishly interconnected plot, Cheang, as in his brilliant 2009 film Accident, pushes Milkyway Image’s metaphysics of coincidence beyond the most daring ploys of Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai, and what are quite simply the best hand-to-hand combat scenes of the decade, whatever you call it, SPL2 is without a doubt one of the most vital and necessary martial arts films since Jackie Chan and Jet Li went Hollywood. We talked about it on the last episode of The Frances Farmer Show, along with Edward Yang’s classic A Brighter Summer Day.
In Wide Release:
Even before their Seijun Suzuki series wraps up (with Branded to Kill on Wednesday), the Northwest Film Forum and Grand Illusion have combined to bring yet another welcome series of films to Seattle Screens. Featuring a selection of 35mm prints of films restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. The first week features Mary Pickford in My Best Girl, Bela Lugosi in White Zombie and Bing Crosby’s first feature starring role The Big Broadcast. In coming weeks, the two theatres will present John Ford’s atmospheric Eugene O’Neill adaptation The Long Voyage Home, with cinematography by Gregg Toland and Swedish accent by John Wayne, Anthony Mann’s apocalyptic Korean War drama Men in War, J.L. Anderson’s Spring Night, Summer Night, Adolphe Menjou in the fast-paced pre-Code comedy Bachelor’s Affairs and Erich von Stroheim in The Crime of Dr. Crespi.
In Wide Release:
With Mike on vacation this week Sean is joined by Seattle Screen Scene writer Melissa Tamminga to discuss Edward Yang’s long sought after 1990 epic A Brighter Summer Day, which has just recently been released by the Criterion Collection, and Soi Cheang’s action film SPL 2: A Time for Consequences, starring Tony Jaa and Wu Jing, which will be released here in the US as Kill Zone 2 in a couple of weeks. They also pick their essential Violent Youth films, take a look ahead to what’s coming soon to Seattle (and Bellingham) Screens and talk about Prince’s classic 1984 film Purple Rain.
You can listen to the show by downloading it directly, or by subscribing on iTunes or the podcast player of your choice.
Links:
Continuing this week at the Northwest Film Forum is the latest from accomplished French director Arnold Desplechin. A coming-of-age story, it’s a kind of prequel to his 1996 film My Sex Life… or How I Got into an Argument (which I haven’t seen, yet). Mathieu Amalric plays Paul Dedalus, a middle-aged man who recalls three keys passages from his youth: his abusive mother, a teenage trip to Soviet Russia that involved some low-level spy work, and a lengthy examination of his first major love affair. Packed with Desplechin’s trademark eclectic approach to filmmaking, integrating silent movie irises and other long-abandoned techniques into the modern international art house style, with carefully nuanced and shifting characterizations and a slippery point of view, it’s a worthy follow-up to his great 21st century films A Christmas Tale and Kings & Queen.
In Wide Release:
Following up their co-presentation with the Northwest Film Forum of a weeks-long retrospective of the films of German director Wim Wenders earlier this spring, SIFF this week is playing at the Uptown a condensed version of the series, a kind of Wenders Greatest Hits, with four of his best-known films. Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire and The American Friend are the familiar titles, but the real gem is a second chance at seeing the recently restored five hour Director’s Cut of his 1991 sci-fi epic Until the End of the World. At the same time, the SIFF Film Center is kicking off a two-week series on the late Belgian director Chantal Akerman. They’re playing her final film, No Home Movie, along with a documentary about Akerman called I Don’t Belong Anywhere. next week the Northwest Film Forum continues the series with From the East (D’Est), Down There (Là-bas) and a second documentary, Chantal Akerman, From Here. We talked about Akerman and her film Je, tu, il, elle last fall on The George Sanders Show.
In Wide Release:
How does one make a zombie film scarier? One option is to swap out the undead for the more earthbound terrors of pit bulls and neo-Nazis. Director Jeremy Saulnier takes this approach with the grisly thriller Green Room, the follow-up to his other movie from the color spectrum, the acclaimed indie Blue Ruin.
“The best weapons are the stories, and every time the story is told, something changes. There are no photographs to be introduced as evidence[.]”
“All we can depend on are slow-motion replays of our lives.”
~Sherman Alexie, “Captivity”
Joachim Trier, in his newest and third feature film, is interested in story-telling and in the peculiar power of stories, a theme he explores by way of a particular family, a man and his two sons, struggling with the loss of a wife and mother. Each survivor constructs and reconstructs their memories of the dead woman, reconstructions that reveal the particular viewpoints and obsessions of each, perhaps more than they reveal the woman’s own story and identity, for each character, we see, is adrift in his own life, alienated and unsure, and the reach back to the past, to the memories of this woman, is a way of coping with the present, a way of constructing a sense of self. Continue reading “Louder Than Bombs (Joachim Trier, 2015)”
One of the interesting things about actors who have worked for a long time (and have a recognizable on-screen persona) is that when they get older, they begin to interrogate those personae, and what they mean. Clint Eastwood has been doing this since the 70s. In Fan, the latest film by director Maneesh Sharma, the subject is Shah Rukh Khan, arguably the most famous Indian actor of the last 25 years.
Shah Rukh Khan is a great ham. He’s a shameless entertainer, doing anything to ensure that the films he’s in work. SRK is great because you can see the effort behind his work, the flop sweat. It’s been that way since the beginning. SRK began acting in films in the early 90s in a series of villainous roles (Baazigar, Aanjam) before becoming more of a romantic hero. His iconic role in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge paved the way for a new type of hero (and film) that directly addressed the Indian diaspora. The films in this period with SRK in the Swiss alps, his arms outstretched waiting for his love, often fell into cliched territory, but SRK always gave everything to the role. He’s branched out from these roles to become an action hero, a comedian, all while finding time to work with prestigious directors (Mani Ratnam, Kamal Hasaan). While the last few films have seen him make a few lazy choices (his work with Rohit Shetty is pretty uninspired), Fan acts as something of a rejuvenation for him. He hasn’t been this engaged in quite a while.
Fan stars Shah Rukh Khan in a dual role. He plays Aryan Khanna, the biggest Bollywood star in the world, as essentially himself. He also plays Gaurav Chandna, Aryan’s biggest fan, in a performance aided by visual effects that transforms him into a slightly askew version of his younger self. Gaurav moonlights as an Aryan impersonator, and it’s his dream to one day meet him. So, one day he sets out to the big city in order to accomplish this. Things get complicated from there.
Seattle Screen Scene 