Seattle International Film Festival

Review: Starry Starry Night

Starry Starry Night, the second feature film by promising Taiwanese filmmaker Tom Lin, is a visually stunning, lovely coming-of-age tale and one of my favorite films of SIFF so far this year. Based on a Taiwanese picture book by Jimmy Liao, the film takes common themes of death, divorce, and growing pains and weaves them…

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DP/30 @ SIFF ’12: The Savoy King: Chick Webb & the Music That Changed America, documentarian Jeffrey Kaufman

FYI: The history of Mr. Kaufman goes through Pauline Kael’s house, if you’re interested.

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SIFF 2012 Dispatch: It’s a Wrap

It never ceases to amaze me, just how quickly 25 days of film festival awesomeness can fly by. I usually cover SIFF inside and out, but this year having a film in the fest, with industry events on top of press stuff, and going off to Oklahoma City most of last week to support Bunker‘s…

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SIFF 2012 Review: Fat Kid Rules the World

I dug Fat Kid Rules the World a lot. I went into this screening thinking, “Oh, great. Jacob Lysocki’s playing a fat high school student again? And directed by Shaggy?” Aza Jacobs Terri was a great little film, in no small part due to Wysocki’s subtly wrenching performance as the depressed, overweight teen. So why…

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SIFF 2012 Dispatch: Review Roundup

Here’s one last roundup of some more films from this year’s SIFF that I’m finally getting around to writing up … Gayby Charming, lightly funny tale of Jenn (Jenn Harris), a single, 30-something hot yoga instructor who decides she wants to grow up and have a baby, and Matt (Matthew Wilkas), her gay BFF who…

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SIFF 2012 Reviews: Xingu and The Art of Love

Xingu A compelling and gorgeously shot tale of three real-life brothers who were instrumental in the protection of indigenous Indian tribes in Brazil, Xingu, directed by Cao Hamburger (The Year My Parents Went on Vacation), tells a little-known and important tale, but suffers somewhat from trying to cover 18 years of story in 102 minutes….

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SIFF 2012 Review: John Dies at the End

John Dies at the End, the much-hyped film adaption of the book of the same title by David Wong (a pseudonym for Cracked editor Jason Pargin), isn’t a great film … but it is a fun film for what it is. I mean, look. I saw some of the reviews out of Sundance and SXSW,…

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SIFF 2012 Dispatch: ShortsFest Weekend

Here we are, already at the halfway mark of this year’s Seattle International Film Festival, and the days have gone by in a blur. I’ve been covering this year’s fest in “more of a trickle than a flood,” as one friend observed, and that’s certainly true. My short film, Bunker, is in the fest this…

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SIFF 2012: Opening Weekend Preview

Because Seattle’s fest is so sprawling — we’re talking 25 days of movies here, folks — I’ve decided to try something a little different this year and do weekend previews of what’s coming up at the fest and my picks each week. I’m hoping that this will allow me to focus a little more on talking up films I’m excited about seeing and what you might want to check out at the fest as it rolls along.

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SIFF Dispatch: Last Review Round-Up

The Seattle International Film Festival has wrapped now, but I wanted to mention here a few other films that stood out from this year’s fest. Early in the fest I caught Red Eyes, a spectacularly shot and edited doc that follows the Chilean national soccer team, La Roja (The Red), on their eight-year quest to…

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SIFF Dispatch: It’s a Wrap!

It’s hard to believe, after nearly six week’s immersion in the Seattle International Film Festival, that we’re already at closing weekend. At most longer fests like Sundance and Toronto, the time flies, sure. But SIFF lasts so long, it always takes me a few days to realign my brain around not checking the SIFF schedule…

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37th SEATTLE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL WRAPS WITH 2011 GOLDEN SPACE NEEDLE AWARDS

Jury, Audience Awards Given for Best Film, Documentary, Director, Actor and Short Film SEATTLE – The 37th Seattle International Film Festival, the largest and most highly-attended event of its kind in the United States concluded today with the announcement of the SIFF 2011 Competition Awards and Golden Space Needle Audience Awards. The 25-day Festival, which…

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SIFF Trailer Park #2

It’s hard to believe it’s almost over, but it is — this weekend is your last chance to immerse yourself in SIFF this year! But what to see? Here are trailers for some of the film playing this weekend that you might want to check out … Buck

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SIFF Dispatch: In Which Our Raptured Car is Found, Safe and Sound

Good news! My mom’s car, which was raptured/stolen from the parking lot during the Renton SIFF screening of The Sound of Mumbai a couple weeks ago, has been found in an apartment complex in Auburn, empty of gas and littered with burrito wrappers but otherwise fine. Whew.

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SIFF Review: A Thousand Times Stronger

I can’t think of the last time I saw a film about teenagers in which the female protagonist does not flirt with boys, talk about boys, obsess about boys, dress to attract the attention of boys, or engage in rivalry with another girl over a boy. Can you? Swedish film A Thousand Times Stronger, directed…

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SIFF Review: Microphone

This charming, energetic film out Egypt — shot before the recent Middle East revolutions — had its inception in the director, Ahmad Abdalla, wandering the streets of Alexandria like a tourist, when some graffiti caught his eye. A little research revealed the graffiti artist to be a 19-year-old girl, and thus was planted the seed…

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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…

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SIFF Review: Kung Fu Panda 2

Important lessons are learned along the way, blah blah blah, and there are plenty of fights that are exciting without being too scary or violent for most small fry. Yes, it’s predictable, but so are the books you probably read to the kids at bedtime, right? Kids like predictable. They have their whole lives to care about character arcs and dramatic tension and movies being interesting.

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SIFF 2011: The Preview

Thursday evening, the 37th edition of the Seattle International Film Festival will kick off with a Gala opening screening of The First Grader, followed by a sure-to-be-packed opening party. Justin Chadwick’s charming drama about an 84-year-old Kenyan freedom fighter who decides to take advantage of the government’s free education program by enrolling in his village’s…

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Quote Unquotesee all »

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