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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Posted Friday, May 27th, 2011 - Comments Off on At SIFF This Weekend — May 27 – 30
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At SIFF This Weekend — May 27 – 30

It’s Memorial Day Weekend, which means an extra day off work to enjoy checking out some films at the Seattle International Film Festival! You don’t really want to hang out outdoors in the sun, do you? That’s bad for your skin. Being in a dark movie theater, however, is probably very good for keeping you wrinkle-free without Botox.

You can view the complete SIFF schedule for the holiday weekend on the handy-dandy fest calendar, or, if you’re not sure what to watch, you can try out The Siffter for suggestions!

If you’re looking for recommendations, my own picks for Friday begin with Films4Families offering The Sandman and the Lost Sand of Dreams, a stop-motion animation playing in West Seattle at the Admiral at 4:30PM. If grownup fare is more your style, SXSW double winner Natural Selection (highly recommended) is playing at 4PM over at the Egyptian. The film is about a sexually repressed woman who, after 20-plus years of a sexless marriage, learns that her husband, who’s just had a stroke, has secretly been donating sperm and has fathered a son. She goes to retrieve the son and bring him to meet his father, and what happens on that road trip is much more thoughtful and interesting than it sounds on paper. Check it out, you’ll like it.

Later tonight, Sundance standout Gun Hill Road is playing at 7PM at the Harvard Exit, and Takeshi Kitano’s violent retribution flick Outrage plays at 9:30 up in Everett. If you’re into midnight fare, tonight’s late-night offering is the insane-looking Karate-Robo Zaborgar.

Saturday offers the longest film of the fest, the 270-minute long Mysteries of Lisbon at the Egyptian. Cafe Vitta is just up the street, so caffeinate yourself well up beforehand. Also filed under “longer films,” The Interrupters screens Saturday at 6PM over at the other end of Capitol Hill at The Harvard Exit. There’s another coffee shop right across the street for your caffeine needs, and they usually let you bring your coffee into the theater with you. You can thank them for that by purchasing a delicious bag of popcorn dripping with real butter.

Saturday night’s midnight fare, back over at the Egyptian, is The Last Circus, a parody of the Spanish Civil War that involves a clown in a bishop hat, carrying a machine gun and wearing an ammo belt. Okay, I’m intrigued.

Sunday I’m taking my dad for an early Father’s Day date to see Co-Dependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same, a fun, campy film with a B-movie feel and hilariously bad effects wrapped around a sweet story about lesbian aliens who come to Earth to get their hearts broken so their emotions won’t destroy their planet’s ozone layer. I know, I know. But it’s pretty entertaining, and the filmmakers are super nice. Hoping for a Q&A. After that, I’m taking him to We Are the Night, the much-buzzed femme vampire flick out of Germany.

Monday, if I can drag myself out of bed early enough, I’m hankering to catch La Dolce Vita at Harvard Exit at 10AM. It’s been a few years since I saw it on a big screen. Monday afternoon I may try to finally catch Page One: Inside the New York Times, or perhaps the Fly Filmmaking Challenge, which is always fun. And then Monday night offers a screening of multiple Goya Award-winner Black Bread, which I’ve been wanting to catch. That one’s at 7PM at the Neptune, my favorite of the SIFF venues, which happens to be conveniently adjacent to one of my favorite coffee and Chai shops, Trabant.

Have a great long weekend, and if you’re here in town for SIFF, drop me a line. Maybe we can meet for a coffee.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon