Smart Words About Cinema
There is a defining contradiction at the center of Mr. Fix-It, the buoyant 1918 Douglas Fairbanks comedy directed and written by Allan Dwan, their sixth or seventh feature together (they made four films together in 1918 alone). Fairbanks’ Dick Remington is ostensibly a British student at Oxford and roommate to American Reginald Burroughs (Leslie Stuart). [...]
The biggest film history news of 2010 was without a doubt the discovery of Upstream (1927), a John Ford comedy from the late silent era previously thought lost, found in a New Zealand film archive along with numerous other American shorts, features and fragments. After screenings in Los Angeles, Pordenone, New York and elsewhere, San [...]
Updated through Sunday, June 12 The 37th Annual Seattle International Film Festival opened on Thursday, May 19 and ran for 25 days through Sunday, June 12. Here is Parallax View’s coverage and guide to SIFF resources. SIFF Week by Week: SIFF 2011 Dispatch 8: “Life in a Day” and “Norwegian Wood,” final screenings and return [...]
Screenings will continue late into the evening of Sunday, June 12, the 25th and final day of the 2011 edition of the Seattle International Film Festival (see below for the films scheduled in the numerous TBA slots of the program). But the festival marks the conclusion with its closing night gala film – the lovely [...]
SIFF’s program notes states that The Night of Counting the Years (1969, Egypt), directed by Chadi Abdel Salam, is “universally recognized as one of the greatest Egyptian films ever made,” a statement that isn’t quite accurate. I’m not refering to the “greatest” part of that statement, just that it is “universally recognized” for anything. While [...]
Seattle International Film Festival audiences bestowed top Golden Space Needle Awards on Paper Birds, To Be Heard and The Whistleblower (among others) while juried awards singled out Gandu and the documentary Hot Coffee at the awards brunch of the Seattle International Film Festival this morning. Over 450 features, documentaries and short films from more than [...]
The crime-gone-bad thriller is a staple of the crime genre. Na Hong-jin’s The Yellow Sea, a South Korean box-office hit making its North American debut at SIFF 2011, runs with the concept in a jittery thriller of a desperate taxi driver in Yanji (an autonomous region in Northern China dominated by ethnic Koreans) hired to [...]
The white meadows of Mohammad Rasoulof’s The White Meadows (Iran), a stunning and startling odyssey through the salt marshes of Iran’s Lake Urmia, are the desert islands where almost medieval cultures exist in isolated pockets on otherwise dead lands. The salt that coats every beach white has left this place bereft of vegetation, giving it [...]
“You know, the director will be in town on Friday. Would you like to interview him?” That’s how I was welcomed today by an eager young publicist to SIFF’s 10 a.m. screening for press and passholders of Hong-jin Na’s The Yellow Sea. “Let me check out the movie first,” I replied. But that was not [...]
While Cannes assumes its privileged position in the cinematic cosmos, the extant film world lurks in relative shadow, an eclisse that nonetheless calls attention to more modestly proportioned proceedings. Still flashy in its own west coast (relaxed) way, the recently wrapped San Francisco International Film Festival – 54 and counting! – soldiered on in relatively [...]
Week Two of SIFF opens with the promise that the screening experience at The Neptune will be, if not restored to previous standards, at least improved. According the Paul Constant in Slog, SIFF is replacing some of the sound baffles removed by STG in the ongoing renovation and transformation of the theater into a performance [...]
Opening night—rarely a strong point of SIFF—arrived with one of the least memorable films of recent memory, but more frustrating one that had already opened theatrically in New York to tepid reviews. The First Grader, the dramatized odyssey of an 84-year-old man who takes up the Kenyan’s government’s promise of universal education to learn to [...]
The line-up for the 37th Seattle International Film Festival, which opens on Thursday, May 19 with the Opening Night Gala screening of British/Kenyan film The First Grader, directed by Justin Chadwick, and runs for 25 days at venues throughout Seattle, Renton, Everett and Kirkland, was officially announced at its press launch today. Among the 257 [...]
I bring my VIFF 2010 Dragons and Tigers coverage to a close with short takes on a few films. One of Vancouver’s great services is to bring attention to young filmmakers and interesting films before they have been “discovered” by the film festival establishment at large, those major festival that put the stamp of acceptance [...]
Aftershock (Feng Xiaogang, China) Dragons and Tigers The buzz of dragonflies, thousands of them racing through Tangshan with the speed of a roaring railroad engine, fills the opening moments of Feng Xiaogang’s Aftershock, his epic story of the two devastating earthquakes that assaulted China in the past generation. Based on a real-life historical detail of [...]