SIFF Dispatch. 1.

Cannes is over but the Seattle International Film Festival has just begun with a long Memorial Day weekend of screenings and guests. The Gala Opening Night choice was a sweet but slim crowd pleaser: the first public screening of Son of Rambow [site] since its world debut at Sundance. The British comedy about a naïve young member of a repressive religious sect and a belligerent school troublemaker and petty thief who become unlikely friends while shooting a video action film is at its best when embracing the freedom of imagination unleashed as they indulge in their fantasies, whether they involve reckless stunts that leave them miraculously unharmed or a world scribbled over in animated doodles imagined by the repressed religious boy. Writer/director Garth Jennings creates a powerful sense of adversity in the background and then loses it in wish-fulfillment triumphs that come too easily. The complexities and defining control of the "real worlds" of these boys come into sharpest focus when they exert their power from the edges of the story.

There was of course the usual collection of soon-to-open features, from the mainstream (Judd Apatow's Knocked Up [site; entry] which sneaks a smart and sneakily mature character comedy under the conventions of sex comedy and gross-out humor) to the indie (Werner Herzog's Vietnam escape drama Rescue Dawn [site], adapted from his own documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly with a little too much restraint) to the classy French import (Paris je t'aime [site; entry], a colorful anthology of 18 vignettes that proves, if nothing else, that Paris is the most photogenic city in the world). The list also includes Satoshi Kon's animated mind-blower Paprika [site; entry], the CGI extreme surf docu-parody Surf's Up [site] and the British stalker horror Severance [site], a conventional horror film with a satirical twist.

Golden Door [site; entry], Emanuele Crialese's sublime film about the journey of a Sicilian peasant family to the new world of America (the original Italian title is Nuovomondo), is my favorite of the pedigreed art-house imports already slated for release. Thick with visual texture, a mix of hyper-charged naturalism and magic realism, it may be the only "coming to America" odyssey that leaves the new world unseen by the camera, merely a dream of possibility that buoys the hope of the emigrants as they endure the passage. Crialese's magnificent imagery is like a sensory immersion in an experience somewhere between dream and nightmare, alien and unreal yet utterly genuine and immediate.

As Cannes 2007 handed out its prizes, SIFF was screening 12:08 East of Bucharest [site; entry], winner of the Camera D'Or at Cannes 2006. Corneliu Porumboiu's satire of the national myth of revolutionary heroism is insidiously, slyly funny, but also a shrewd look at how people have rewritten (or at least recast) history to suit their own purposes in post-Soviet Romania. It's all accomplished through inference and ambiguity, as callers to an amateurish joke of a pretentious TV news program challenge a history professor (and well-known drunk) who claims to have been at the vanguard of the 1989 revolution in their town. "Truth" is inseparable from motive and we're left a pragmatic observation of both grudging generosity and pragmatic resignation: "One makes whatever revolution one can, each in their own way."

Hollywood has already snapped up the remake rights to The King of Kong [entry], which begins as a portrait of obsessive classic arcade game players and the competition surrounding the record high score for Donkey Kong and turns into a game-geek conspiracy complete with a charismatic and confident champion who transforms into a scheming dark prince when an everyman underdog challenges his record. It's hard not to share the exasperation of talented upstart Steve Wiebe, a high-school science teacher from Redmond, Washington, as the organization ostensibly created to promote integrity in video game world puts him under suspicious scrutiny to protect their hypocritical ambassador Billy Mitchell. Director Seth Gordon makes no pretense at objectivity, which calls into question a few of his own tactics, but he creates a human drama more compelling than any underdog sports fiction.

Reviews from the festival are pouring in, too, at the Siffblog and the Stranger.

Posted by dwhudson at May 29, 2007 12:51 PM