Seattle Dispatch. 4.

The 34th Edition of the Seattle International Film Festival, the biggest and longest film festival in the US, screeches into a busy final weekend.

There are various world premieres and the dozens of guests arriving for screenings and audience Q&As, but the highlight event will surely be the screenings of Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky at Benaroya Hall, with Sergei Prokofiev's score performed live by the Seattle Symphony and Chorale with mezzo-soprano Kathryn Weld.

The film is undeniably a classic, and just as undeniably a bald piece of nationalist propaganda that celebrates the salt-of-the-earth heroism of Russian citizens who rise up to defeat the invading German Teutonic Knights (backed by the blessing of the Catholic Church), not just to defend their homeland but to bring glory to their national honor. It's largely pageant until the famous battle on the ice, which is a thrilling work of cinema and illustrates just what a magnificent action painter Eiseinstein was. The epic scenes of the Teutonic Knights on horseback (looking like some unholy combination of Viking invader, aristocrat soldier and Klu Klux Klan grandmaster) overwhelmed by the onrushing armies of Russian peasant foot soldiers is as evocative a portrait of action cinema as you'll see.

The other exciting development for the last weekend will be the three days of screenings at The Cinerama, the crown jewel of Seattle cinemas. Not that it's necessarily showing the big screen spectaculars that should have been reserved for this venue, but it should be a kick to see the Hong Kong collaboration Triangle and the French war movie Female Agents thrown across the Cinerama's huge screen.

Chuck Workman's new documentary, In Search of Kennedy [site], makes its World Premiere at SIFF this weekend, but he seems to have released it before finding anything of note. Ostensibly an investigation of the legacy of John F Kennedy, the film attempts to clarify what JFK represents to people today beyond his political record while in office. Why is he revered, why has he become almost mythic in stature, why is he the name resurrected to represent hope and possibility? A lot of people weigh in, from pundits on the right, journalists on the left, political professionals of all stripes, cultural figures, and political leaders from both within and without the US (especially in Germany), to everyday folks on the street or visiting DC, but few have anything new to add or offer any insight to what has been said before.

Workman himself fails to organize his interviews and familiar archival clips into any meaningful structure, this from a man whose fame lies in his editorial wizardry. And even more confounding is his decision to frame it all within context of the 2008 political campaign. It does nothing to illuminate the man or the myth, and illustrates little more than the way the media and its coverage of politics and politicians has changed in 40-some years - but it instantly dates Workman's film as last week's news.

Bottle Shock [site] is as generically inoffensive and blandly forgettable a film as we've had close SIFF. A fascinating true story - the rise of California wines in the eyes of the world when a Napa Valley wine won the top prize in a 1976 blind wine tasting in France against revered French vintages - is buried in a mundane story of generational conflict.

Bill Pullman is the bull-headed gentleman vintner who literally drives away anyone who offers to help save his vineyard (which is so far in debt to the bank that it will take the inevitable third act miracle to save it) and his beach bum son (Chris Pine) who works the fields for lack of anything better to do. A gorgeous blond intern (Rachael Taylor of Transformers) arrives to learn the business and the director/co-writer Randall Miller sells out the closest thing it has to a surprise - she actually sparks to the passion and commitment of hired hand Gustavo (Freddy Rodríguez), a landless dreamer who treats winemaking as both art and cultural legacy, over the directionless apathy of the generically hunky leading man - with third act matchmaking that is, in retrospect, as inevitable as every other tired narrative cliché that thuds into place in the unimaginative script. What, did Miller have a checklist of tried and untrue tropes for instant, superficial audience gratification?

Alan Rickman is the British wine expert who organizes the event and is, against his expectations, surprised at the quality he finds exploring the Napa Valley wineries - except the film doesn't know what to do with him apart from playing off his innate British stuffiness for easy laughs. The biggest lesson the film has to tell us, however, is that a twentysomething guy with long, dirty blonde hair and a sun tan driving an old pick-up to the sounds of the Doobie Brothers is effortless shorthand for California in the mid-70s.

-Sean Axmaker

More from Seattle: KJ Doughton (Film Threat), the Siffblog, the Stranger and NP Thompson (House Next Door).

Posted by dwhudson at June 13, 2008 12:13 PM