Olympia. Overview.

Most small city film festivals are much like any other, a tasteful but undifferentiated mix of international festival standbys, American indies and documentaries, most of which would otherwise bypass the town entirely. The festival becomes a big city art house calendar crammed into a marathon lasting a week or so, sacrificing personality for public service.

The Olympia Film Festival, produced by the Olympia Film Society and based in their historic Capitol Theater, has a distinctive sensibility which distinguishes it from the usual formula. The annual festival, now in its 23rd edition, includes some the usual suspects, of course - it opened on Friday, November 4 with the warm, audience-friendly festival favorite C.R.A.Z.Y., the French-Canadian coming-of-age drama set in 1970s Quebec that swept the Canadian Genie awards, and ends on Sunday, November 12 with the music documentary When the Road Bends, a portrait of Romani bands on tour and in their native lands.

Give the festival credit for emphasizing the "independent" in its selection of American indies: Andrew Bujalski's acclaimed micro-budget comedy Mutual Appreciation, the San Francisco homegrown Colma: The Musical (set in a city of graveyards), and the Washington State indie Walking to Werner. But mixed in with such notable (if somewhat tardy) art-house staples as Iron Island from Iran and Ye Lou's dreamy Suzhou River is a decidedly idiosyncratic mix of offbeat contemporary features (the Quay Brothers's The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes and Jan Svankmajer's Lunacy), a section of "Fringe" cult items and an unpredictable collection of repertory titles.

Contemporary cult offerings include midnight screenings of Bong Joon-ho's modern monster movie The Host, currently the buzz of international genre cinema; Geo-Lobotomy, the latest genre mash-up of horror film and political commentary from avant-garde filmmaking twin brothers Kim Gok and Kim Sun; and Christopher Smith's Severance, a British gore fest with a stab of black comedy.

Such classy retrospective screenings as Fritz Lang's early sound masterpiece M, Claude Sautet's cool French crime thriller Classe Tous Risques and Akira Kurosawa's meticulous High and Low are joined by such funky choices as the three-hour-plus Bollywood "curry western" classic Sholay, about a pair of petty thieves hired to protect small town from a vicious bandit, and the Mexican melodrama In the Palm of Your Hand. The 1924 silent Peter Pan, a stage production suddenly transported to a genuine Neverland of tangled forests and clear blue seas, movie Indians and storybook pirates by Betty Bronson's plucky, androgynous playmate Peter, will be presented with a live score by Lori Goldston (of the Black Cat Orchestra), Andy Crow and Duneul Phurul. In an age when repertory screenings of cinema classics and international oddities, once a staple of big city schedules, have become events to seek out, this is my idea of a cinematic public service.

The "Kid Flicks" program includes the Nathan Juran-directed Ray Harryhausen production 7th Voyage of Sinbad, a blast of mythological fantasy and stop-motion monster craft, and the DIY special effects celebration The Wizard of Speed and Time, a charmingly innocent Hollywood romance made pretty much single-handedly by director/star/writer/animator/etc, Mike Jittlov.

The festival's defining event is easily All Freakin' Night, the midnight-til-morning marathon of exploitation cinema that tests the limits of festival diehards in the wee hours before the festival's final day. It's typically a free-for-all collection that tosses in genre classics with curious crap and this year is no different. William Castle's Mr Sardonicus, the director's entry into gothic weirdness, kicks off the festivities. Though the plot is less gimmick-laden than other Castle productions, the director is on screen for his interactive "Punishment Poll" in the closing minutes.

Future direct-to-DVD horror hack Ted Nicolaou's Terrorvision, a Charles Band production starring Diane Franklin, Gerritt Graham, Mary Woronov and a voracious garbage monster from outer space is up next, followed by Fred Dekker's high school zombie comedy Night of the Creeps and (according to the festival's notes) the American bastardization of Amando de Ossorio's Spanish horror classic Tombs of the Blind Dead which dubbing and recutting transforms into Revenge of the Planet Ape!

Survivors of this exploitation assault are rewarded with the Freakin' finale, Boarding House, John Wintergate's shot-on-video slasher film which (again, according to the festival notes) is the only such production from the 80s to get an actual 35mm transfer and a theatrical release. And that's what the festival promises here: Boarding House, like every film in the marathon, is projected from a 35mm print.

The 23rd Olympia Film Festival opened on Friday, November 3 and runs through Sunday, November 12 at the Capitol Theater in Olympia, Washington, with satellite showings of experimental shorts and other programs at The Mark, The Olympia Community Center, and The ABC House.

Posted by dwhudson at November 6, 2006 10:26 AM