Seattle Dispatch. 8.

26 days later, the first film I saw under the auspices of the SIFF, Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion, seems as fading as an old radio battery. This juggernaut of a film festival is the long distance marathon of fests and at times an exercise in patience. But every year, I look back at the festival like one would recall their freshman year at college; there are a lot of late nights and there's a little too much drinking. But you can check in with the classics and you always discover new films that carry you to the next year.

Although Prairie was the first film I saw (and, despite living in a NPR-heavy town, I was not familiar with the radio show and therefore more confused by the film version than appreciative of it), I did catch up with some films I missed at other festivals. I found Wristcutters: A Love Story (Sundance 06) to be just the quirky light touch I needed that day. While I was prepared to take a stand on which segment of Hou Hsiao-hsien's Three Times (Toronto 05) I liked best, I found all three to be satisfying in their own way. Closing Night film The Science of Sleep (Sundance 06) proved to be the most disappointing. While Michel Gondry's Dave Chappelle's Block Party never seemed able to finish a thought (or rather, a song), Sleep's half-baked main character Stephane (Gael García Bernal) has not even a quarter of the staying power of the mighty Dave Chappelle (who can hold together a film that teleports through time like a crew member on the Star Trek Enterprise with ADD) and has woefully much less narrative caulk than the resonant Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Bernal's character and the story overall have a weak pulse, but Sleep still has a lot of strength in terms of its whimsical art direction and imagery. It's an eyeball's feast of arts and crafts.

I had seen The Heart of the Game, Seattle's favorite hometown documentary about girls' high school basketball, in Toronto where it created a lot of buzz and was picked up by Miramax. This leaner, re-narrated version was just as good and affecting the second time around. Another hometown doc with less buzz coming to the plate ended up being a pleasant surprise and warranted a special jury mention at the awards banquet atop the Space Needle. Walking to Werner, a nearly real-time chronicling of Linas Phillip's on-foot journey from Seattle to Werner Herzog's home in LA, was funny, desperate and hit a raw nerve in the best way. Phillips, a fan of Herzog and a first-time filmmaker, was inspired to walk the 1200 miles along the Pacific Coast by Herzog's own walking journey from Munich to Paris. Narrated at times by Herzog commentary lifted from interviews and DVDs, Walking to Werner feels like a companion piece to Herzog's Grizzly Man. Once Phillips films himself inside a tent, his similarity to Timothy Treadwell, the doomed grizzly bear preservationist, becomes visually soldered - but Phillip's grizzly bear is Herzog himself.

I went to a lot of the music events, mostly out of curiosity and to find evidence of the simpatico relationship between film and music that the festival and the City of Seattle was trying to impart. (Could it be because Seattle's film office is officially the Mayor's Office of Music and Film?) Sometimes the programs under the "Face the Music" banner worked. The screening of Tod Browning's The Unknown with a live score by Portastatic worked for me, but a lot of people, who perhaps favor the tinkling pianos of yore, disliked their modern, funky take. Robin Guthrie and Harold Budd popped into town to do a loose, transporting score to a variety of avant-garde and experimental films. While it had no narrative shape, the music felt spacey in a good way, and it doesn't hurt to revisit Maya Deren's Meshes in the Afternoon every once in awhile.

The oddest, but no less fun event was the Face the Music Rock Party, which featured a number of local Seattle bands doing covers of songs related to various music documentaries that played in the same program. The audience got a smattering of Devo, The Police, and Harry Nilsson to coincide with a visit from Mark Mothersbaugh, the Stewart Copeland doc Everyone Stares: The Police Inside Out and Who is Harry Nilsson (And Why is Everyone Talking About Him?). If anything, the event got us out of the movie theater and on our feet, which at a festival like the Seattle International, is pretty hard to do.

Posted by dwhudson at June 21, 2006 3:55 AM