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Jun. 5th, 2018
what i saw June 04, 2018 at 08:43PM
Jun. 5th, 2018 04:04 amThe audience at Pick of the Litter was packed with puppy-raisers. And puppies.
catching up on SIFF
Jun. 5th, 2018 07:39 pmCook Off
I had this one on my list, then dropped it due to scheduling conflicts, then put it back.* it's a Zimbabwean film about a single mom street food/unlicensed restaurant cook who enters a reality show competition with the encouragement of her son and grandmother. her mom, she's kind of an asshole. anyway, it's a mashup of sports movie and rom-com, with a fellow competitor becoming a mentor that helps her practice the techniques she doesn't know. as with all reality shows, there's a nemesis, as with all rom-coms, there's some drama but a Happily Ever After. it's a bit rough-and-ready, but it's clear that so is television in Zim. nice slice-of-life moments, and fun to watch people code-switching between English and other languages, often in the same conversation. i missed some plot details due to a combo of muddy sound mix and trouble with the accent, but it was still sweet and funny and quite satisfying.
Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts
oh wow, this movie. first of all, i was completely ignorant of the geographic variety of Indonesia. i think of it as a mix of big cities and wet tropics; this was set on an island that is hilly and dry and mostly empty. (if i saw a shot of its rolling hills covered in dry grass and empty dirt roads out of context, i would have assumed it was from Mongolia or one of the 'stans.)
this film is both terrifying and dryly funny. some very bad people discover Marlina's husband has passed away, and they show up on her isolated farm intending to steal her livestock and rape her. however, Marlina is a very resourceful lady and so are her neighbors. people die, a lot of bad stuff happens (TW rape, domestic violence...) everything is complicated by Marlina's past, life in the sticks, and bureaucracy.
A Rough Draft
this one was very divisive on the passholder mailing list. Russian fantasy film about a man who is pulled into a shadow world of beings who control access to a multiverse of alternate worlds, based on a novel by Sergei Lukyanenko (the dude who wrote the Night Watch books, who holds pretty gross political views and is probably the reason that the film has such dismal ratings on IMDB). it has some Matrix-like qualities; our hero is a video game developer who comes home one night to discover a stranger in his apartment and that he's slowly being erased from our reality and eventually he turns out to be the best at a thing and also a kickass fighter. *eyeroll* but seriously there are angry matroska doll robots and steampunk Moscow and a woman blacksmith. i enjoyed the heck out of it in the same way that i enjoyed Jupiter Ascending. it has a cliffhanger ending :/ (i'm curious about the books but Lukyanenko is in the corner with Orson Scott Card - i only read the book if there's no way that the author will be rewarded.)
Making the Grade
Ireland has some kind of standard testing system for piano proficiency? this was about people learning to play the piano and their teachers, organized by "grade" level. charming and sweet slice of life, lots of lovely characters. nice editing pattern of cutting together the individual interviews of students and teachers with class footage, often wryly commenting on the work and their relationship. (odd note: i found their accents to be very subtle, unlike many Irish folks i've known. not sure if this was a regional thing or a class thing, but there were several times when i wondered if a subject was an immigrant from the US or Canada.)
Pig
dark comedy. a serial killer is taking out Iranian film directors. our hero is a director on probation with the government wishing that the serial killer would notice him. i saw this in a packed house of mostly Iranian-Americans. they were LOVING it. i thought it was fun, but i was definitely missing nuances between cultural illiteracy and the subtitles. anyway, he's got a thing for metal music of a certain era (giant canvas of Angus from AC/DC in his bedroom) a live-in mother, a wife, a mistress, a stalker, and then there's all his friends and colleagues dying and the murder investigations.
The Last Suit
YAY. cranky old holocaust survivor makes the trip of his life from Argentina back to his old hometown of Lodz, Poland (for the first time in 70 years). seriously, dude is kind of an asshole, which is one of the things that makes the whole trip worthwhile. this could have been saccharine or schmaltzy, and instead it manages to be funny, moving, and thought-provoking.
Pick of the Litter
squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
documentary following a litter of five Guide Dogs for the Blind puppies from birth to graduation as guide dogs. only about 40% of the dogs actually make it the whole way, the others get "career changed" into breeding stock, other kinds of service dogs, or family pets. the film was everything the trailer promised - an overview of the GDB process with dogs being adorable and awesome. more awesome was that the house was packed with GDB "puppy-raisers" and THE PUPPIES. the actual guide training doesn't start until the dogs are almost a year old, so before then they live with volunteer families to get socialized and exposed to as many novel situations as possible. GDB raises about 800 dogs a year, so the puppies get spread up and down the West coast. here they all were, tucked into row after row of the movie theater.
*tl;dr first movie of the fest that exceeded the passholder allotment. I really wanted to see Waru, which is an anthology film from New Zealand - all female directors, about how the death of a small boy affects a majority Maori town. I keep an eye out for these films since Whale Rider. turns out pretty much all the passholders feel the same way, it was in the smallest venue, there was a screw up with the timing that let the passholder standby in early, which put me in wave two of the standby line and not first. fortunately three other movies were a five-minute walk away.
I had this one on my list, then dropped it due to scheduling conflicts, then put it back.* it's a Zimbabwean film about a single mom street food/unlicensed restaurant cook who enters a reality show competition with the encouragement of her son and grandmother. her mom, she's kind of an asshole. anyway, it's a mashup of sports movie and rom-com, with a fellow competitor becoming a mentor that helps her practice the techniques she doesn't know. as with all reality shows, there's a nemesis, as with all rom-coms, there's some drama but a Happily Ever After. it's a bit rough-and-ready, but it's clear that so is television in Zim. nice slice-of-life moments, and fun to watch people code-switching between English and other languages, often in the same conversation. i missed some plot details due to a combo of muddy sound mix and trouble with the accent, but it was still sweet and funny and quite satisfying.
Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts
oh wow, this movie. first of all, i was completely ignorant of the geographic variety of Indonesia. i think of it as a mix of big cities and wet tropics; this was set on an island that is hilly and dry and mostly empty. (if i saw a shot of its rolling hills covered in dry grass and empty dirt roads out of context, i would have assumed it was from Mongolia or one of the 'stans.)
this film is both terrifying and dryly funny. some very bad people discover Marlina's husband has passed away, and they show up on her isolated farm intending to steal her livestock and rape her. however, Marlina is a very resourceful lady and so are her neighbors. people die, a lot of bad stuff happens (TW rape, domestic violence...) everything is complicated by Marlina's past, life in the sticks, and bureaucracy.
A Rough Draft
this one was very divisive on the passholder mailing list. Russian fantasy film about a man who is pulled into a shadow world of beings who control access to a multiverse of alternate worlds, based on a novel by Sergei Lukyanenko (the dude who wrote the Night Watch books, who holds pretty gross political views and is probably the reason that the film has such dismal ratings on IMDB). it has some Matrix-like qualities; our hero is a video game developer who comes home one night to discover a stranger in his apartment and that he's slowly being erased from our reality and eventually he turns out to be the best at a thing and also a kickass fighter. *eyeroll* but seriously there are angry matroska doll robots and steampunk Moscow and a woman blacksmith. i enjoyed the heck out of it in the same way that i enjoyed Jupiter Ascending. it has a cliffhanger ending :/ (i'm curious about the books but Lukyanenko is in the corner with Orson Scott Card - i only read the book if there's no way that the author will be rewarded.)
Making the Grade
Ireland has some kind of standard testing system for piano proficiency? this was about people learning to play the piano and their teachers, organized by "grade" level. charming and sweet slice of life, lots of lovely characters. nice editing pattern of cutting together the individual interviews of students and teachers with class footage, often wryly commenting on the work and their relationship. (odd note: i found their accents to be very subtle, unlike many Irish folks i've known. not sure if this was a regional thing or a class thing, but there were several times when i wondered if a subject was an immigrant from the US or Canada.)
Pig
dark comedy. a serial killer is taking out Iranian film directors. our hero is a director on probation with the government wishing that the serial killer would notice him. i saw this in a packed house of mostly Iranian-Americans. they were LOVING it. i thought it was fun, but i was definitely missing nuances between cultural illiteracy and the subtitles. anyway, he's got a thing for metal music of a certain era (giant canvas of Angus from AC/DC in his bedroom) a live-in mother, a wife, a mistress, a stalker, and then there's all his friends and colleagues dying and the murder investigations.
The Last Suit
YAY. cranky old holocaust survivor makes the trip of his life from Argentina back to his old hometown of Lodz, Poland (for the first time in 70 years). seriously, dude is kind of an asshole, which is one of the things that makes the whole trip worthwhile. this could have been saccharine or schmaltzy, and instead it manages to be funny, moving, and thought-provoking.
Pick of the Litter
squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
documentary following a litter of five Guide Dogs for the Blind puppies from birth to graduation as guide dogs. only about 40% of the dogs actually make it the whole way, the others get "career changed" into breeding stock, other kinds of service dogs, or family pets. the film was everything the trailer promised - an overview of the GDB process with dogs being adorable and awesome. more awesome was that the house was packed with GDB "puppy-raisers" and THE PUPPIES. the actual guide training doesn't start until the dogs are almost a year old, so before then they live with volunteer families to get socialized and exposed to as many novel situations as possible. GDB raises about 800 dogs a year, so the puppies get spread up and down the West coast. here they all were, tucked into row after row of the movie theater.
*tl;dr first movie of the fest that exceeded the passholder allotment. I really wanted to see Waru, which is an anthology film from New Zealand - all female directors, about how the death of a small boy affects a majority Maori town. I keep an eye out for these films since Whale Rider. turns out pretty much all the passholders feel the same way, it was in the smallest venue, there was a screw up with the timing that let the passholder standby in early, which put me in wave two of the standby line and not first. fortunately three other movies were a five-minute walk away.