TIFF12 Preview: TIFF Docs

There are 32 films in the documentary section of TIFF this year — that’s six more than last year. Of these, I’ll be able to catch maybe five or six. This year’s doc slate is diverse and filled with so many interesting subjects, it’s going to be hard to narrow it down. Which docs I actually end up seeing this year at TIFF will depend upon my interest in the subject matter or director, and how the schedule I’m putting together on paper actually ends up working out in reality once I’m on the ground at TIFF. I usually end up catching at least of couple of docs at TIFF that end up being among my favorites of the year, and missing more that I end up wishing I’d seen, and probably that will be the case again this year. Hopefully the really good ones I end up not catching will roll over to Sundance or SIFF and I’ll get another chance at those I don’t catch at Toronto.

As with all fest previews, take this one with the generous grain of salt that most of the films on this list are the ones whose subject matter or director most interested me; your list might very well be completely different. Such is the fun and randomness of TIFF.

The Act of Killing
Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn, Anonymous, Denmark / Norway / United Kingdom

In this chilling and inventive documentary, executive produced by Errol Morris and Werner Herzog, the unrepentant former members of Indonesian death squads are challenged to re-enact some of their many murders in the style of the American movies they love … Unlike other nations where the perpetrators of genocide have been brought to justice or disgraced, in Indonesia the killers stayed in power, wrote their own triumphant history, and became role models for millions of young paramilitaries to this day. Co-director Joshua Oppenheimer has spent over a decade working with death squads and their victims, which comes through in his knowledge of and passionate investment in this subject. This is a film people will be talking about for years to come.

Comments: TIFF Canadian Premiere, playing Telluride Labor Day weekend before heading to TIFF; this doc doesn’t look terribly uplifting, but the premise is compelling enough to put it near the top of my “must see docs” list.

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TIFF12 Preview: Contemporary World Cinema

This year I thought I’d dive right into the deep end of my TIFF Preview with the category I tend to find most challenging: Contemporary World Cinema. I’ve seen some gems in this category and I’ve seen some real duds, and it’s a tough category to get a read on; there’s just not a lot to go on, other than fest catalog descriptions. There should be an award given out annually for the fest catalog description that least resembles the actual film, as chosen by a vote of attending film critics (Indiewire folks, get right on that, will you?).

This year I’m fighting my natural-born tendency to over-plan and over-think, and I’m taking a more free-form, “let’s see what happens” view of the massive TIFF schedule. There will be a handful of “must sees” on my list, but for the rest I’m going with my gut, with what looks most interesting, or what’s getting buzzed about at the fest over late night drinks on patios near the Lightbox. But still, the Preview must be done. So having culled through the entries, these are the films from the Contemporary World Cinema section that I’m most looking forward to at TIFF this year, based purely on which films looked most interesting to me based on their catalog descriptions. We’ll see how they turn out.

3
Pablo Stoll Ward, Uruguay / Germany / Argentina

Dissatisfied with his new life (and wife), a man tries to insinuate himself back into the home of the ex-wife and daughter he left ten years before, in this heartwarming and hilarious comedy-drama from Uruguayan director Pablo Stoll Ward (25 Watts, Whisky) … Stoll uses wonderfully ridiculous, absurd situations to convey the lack of communication and understanding between these three characters, each of them caught up in their own world and largely oblivious to the wants or needs of the others. With its sharply drawn scenarios and larger-than-life performances, 3 is a refreshing and heartwarming exploration of a divided family still bound together by a shared past.

Pedigree: Cannes Debutante

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Adventures in Parenting: Hospital, Schmospital

Just when you think things are all settled down, they unexpectedly go awry. This was going to be a post about our fantastic camping trip to Ocean Shores, in which I actually went completely off internet for five days and survived. It did, actually, feel very good to unplug for that long for the first time in forever. And we did, actually, have a terrific time on our camping adventure, cooking many fairly extravagant meals and desserts, playing in the ocean, building sandcastles, watching the sun set over the endless blue Pacific, and sitting around the campfire. It was a lovely trip.

The one dark spot of the whole thing was that Neve, my 15YO, had a couple of bouts of extraordinarily bad abdominal pain, so bad I thought we’d have to trek to the nearest ER. But then both times, the pain resolved, and we thought all was well. Until Thursday afternoon, when the pain came back with a vengeance. Called our doc’s office, and fearing a burst appendix, they sent us directly to the nearest ER, do not pass go, do not delay. So off we went. Six hours, a very high white count and a suspicious but not conclusive CT scan and ultrasound later, Hospital #1 decided to transfer Neve by ambulance over to Children’s Hospital to let the pediatric specialists figure it out. After more tests, and several visits by the surgical team, they admitted her to the hospital with the plan of repeating the ultrasound the next day and possibly doing some exploratory surgery.

The CT scan indicated a large softball-sized mass near her left ovary, and things didn’t look too peachy on the ultrasound, so in short order I was conferring with surgeons about emergency surgery, signing off on the surgery forms, and a couple hours later she was off to the OR, with a great deal of uncertainty about what exactly they’d find. The surgery was supposed to take an hour or two. Around hour three I was getting nervous, and when they finally paged me back to surgery, I raced back there, where the nurse said, “Oh, yes, Patient Allen. Uh, we’re going to put you in this family conference room, the surgeon will be in shortly.” Erg. Okay, so was my daughter out of surgery yet? “Doctor will confer with you as soon as he can.” Great. So I sat, and I waited, and waited some more, distracting myself reading Cloud Atlas, a fog of parental worry enshrouding me.

Finally, finally, the surgeon came in, bearing mostly good tidings. They had removed a softball-sized cyst, from my daughter’s ovary. The cyst was so large it had caused torsion, and the ovary had gotten twisted three times into a tight spiral, cutting off blood supply. They were able to save most of the ovary, but the fallopian tube was dead. As for the cyst, it was huge, all right, one of the largest the surgeon had ever seen. But it was fluid-filled, not solid, and the surgeon was clearly relieved to be able to say that he didn’t think it looked malignant. Not 100% sure on that, yet, as they have to wait a week for pathology, but much better news than they’d thought going in.

So now we’re back in a cozy room, Neve’s pain meds are keeping her comfortable, she’s eating and moving around okay. We can go home later today and she will be recovered enough to still perform next week in Alice in Wonderland, in which she’s playing the Caterpillar. Not exactly what we’d planned when we headed out for camping last Friday, being back at Children’s again (this time, thankfully, sans the absurdly cheery holiday music I had to endure every time I popped down to the Starbucks on the first floor last December), but also much better than it could be.

Children’s is still Children’s, the constant parade of worried parents shuffling about, with only the faces mostly changing out. Last night I ran into a dad I met here last December whose baby girl has hepatoblastoma and had been here since last March; when we were going home that time, they had also just been released and were heading over to the Ronald McDonald house for a respite. Sadly, his daughter has relapsed, and the haunted look in his eyes and the tremble in his arms when he gave me a warm hug spoke of the kind of bone-weariness that sets in when a child is terribly sick and you want to fix it but can’t. I had no words to help him, this erstwhile hospital friend of mine, nothing to offer but a hug and a kind word. What else is there to say, besides “I’m so very sorry.” Worried as he must be about his own child, he was also concerned for mine and offered his well-wishes that all will come back clean on the pathology report. If anyone knows what it feels like to be waiting for pathology reports, it’s a parent who’s been dealing with them for over a year now with little likelihood that any of them will ever come back clear.

The docs and nurses here are great, they’ve taken great care of my baby. We will go home this evening, after the last round of IV antibiotics, and it’s likely the pathology report will be fine and we will go on with our lives in the outside world. I feel very blessed, every time we’re here, that our hospital stays are brief and not semi-permanent, that my child will heal completely within a couple weeks and all will be well. I hope, for my hospital friend, that healing happens for his baby girl as well.

On Kids and Midnight Movies

There’s this sidebar discussion about the Aurora theater shootings that I’ve seen crop up a few times with people questioning why there were young kids, including a three-or-four-month-old infant, at a midnight screening. And they mostly tend to have this disapproving tone with regard to the babe-in-arms in particular, and I find that disturbing. Because really, how is the whole, “Why did these irresponsible parents have kids at a midnight screening anyhow?” thing different than a woman being raped and then being grilled on the witness stand by the perp’s defense attorney as to what exactly she expected if she was out late at night in a skirt that short?

As a mom of seven kids (five mine, two stepsons), I can say that I brought my kids to movies, even late-night movies, when they were that tiny. Why? Because a three-month-old baby could be expected to just sleep through it, in his mom’s arms or a baby sling, and if they woke up and made noise, I’d just put them on the boob to nurse back to sleep, or step out of the theater. I stopped bringing them at around seven months or so because it was less reliable that they’d sleep and not disturb other patrons. Really, not the big deal some folks are making it out to be, that these parents brought a baby to a late-night thing. Geez, my parents took me and my brother to the drive-in until 2AM all the time when we were growing up.
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For &*%$@ Sake. Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Over on his blog, Some Came Running, Glenn Kenny stirred up some of the most interesting conversation I’ve seen lately in a comments thread with this piece he wrote yesterday asserting that the culture of film blogging is, at least in part, responsible for this ridiculous deluge of Batman fanboys making death threats – death threats! – against certain film critics who dared to post less-than-positive reviews of The Dark Knight Rises. I got into a back-and-forth late last night on Twitter with Matt Seitz and Devin Faraci about the issue, but given that Twitter’s not the best forum for intelligent conversation, I thought I’d expand a little on all this in a space that allows more than 140 characters at a time.

I do agree with Glenn that the bloggers who target the fanboy market are, at least in part, responsible for sparking some of the flames that occasionally get fanned out of control in that realm. If you’re a film journalist or a film blogger (and the distinction between the two is all but disappearing these days) and you’re out there on Twitter getting into heated arguments that get blown all out of proportion and spiral into name calling and what have you – you know, the general kind of pissing contests that happen almost daily in this industry – you are creating a certain perception, a “brand,” if you will, of decorum, that I do think in turn encourages the kind of vitriolic fanboy reactions that have become so commonplace they’re becoming the new normal.

Film bloggers have helped to create this space where it’s not just about journalists and other industry folks talking about what we like or don’t about movies, but equally about what we like or don’t like about each other. And Christ, I hate that. That negativity we as a community put out there not only makes it okay for commenters to be just as hateful as they see us being, it encourages it. But that’s what we want, isn’t it? After all, those anger-fueled back-and-forths of commenters lobbing grenades of mean-spiritedness wrapped in snark at each other drives the comments up, and then readers see comments spiking on a particular post, so they click to see what the big deal is, and that’s a CLICK, hey! That creates traffic numbers that in turn can be sold to advertisers!

It doesn’t matter to your traffic counter if the 497 comments on a blog post have anything to do with the actual movie you started out talking about, or if it’s turned into some playground dick-swinging contest of clashing personalities. For fuck’s sake, guys, who cares about the personal battles and bullshit? Why can’t people just stay on topic, argue about trailers and box office and a given person’s subjective opinion about a film, without it having to turn into chest-thumping machismo nonsense? Except … that it’s those personal battles and bullshit that the commenters really love, it’s what they come back for, right? When comments on sites like The Hot Blog or Hollywood Elsewhere do stick to actual discussion about a relevant topic, people bitch about how boring it is. It’s much more entertaining to watch a train wreck in progress than to read an intellectual discussion about film. Traffic is traffic, those number are what sells the ads, so who cares what’s driving those numbers up? Until you post a negative review of a fanboy movie and the shit hits the fan, and the fanboys are coming after you with death threats. Over a fucking movie.

All of us who work in this space have, in one way or another, contributed to the problem of internet assholerly among commenters, even if we started out with the best of intentions, with the idea that it was cool to be able to engage in the kind of immediate conversations with our readers that print media could never allow, like every blog was its own office watercooler around which cool conversation could happen. The difference is that if we were standing around a real watercooler talking face-to-face, I think (or geez, I certainly hope) that most of us would be politer to each other, more respectful of the fact that we’re speaking with another human being. Kinder. I’d like to think things wouldn’t deteriorate from “Man, those box office numbers for Big Tentpole Movie are gonna tank after the first weekend!” to “You’re the stupidest cunt on the entire planet” to “go fuck yourself” in the spate of 30 seconds. It’s exhausting, it’s dehumanizing. This aspect of the internet sucks.

Thing is, the problem isn’t just film bloggers, and it isn’t just fanboys, it’s this culture of internet anonymity that allows people to think it’s okay to spew hatred and negativity without the restraint that face-to-face social interaction forces us to uphold. Even when we’re posting under our own names, when we’re talking over Twitter or Facebook or in blog post comments there’s this illusion that the words we say don’t matter. Not really. That it’s okay to bully, to target people for personal attack, to make accusations, to name call. And apparently, even to make death threats.

I stopped writing for parenting sites years ago because the hormone-fueled rages of women attacking each other over parenting choices, and the need to police comments when the personal attacks got out of hand, was just awful and soul-sucking to deal with. In many ways, the fanboys and the generally vitriolic movie blog commenters have nothing on defensive, angry mommies when it comes to sheer viciousness. But take a stroll around the internet, folks. Go on any news site, pick a random story, and scroll down to the comments; the things people say to each other, and about the person the story is about, make me cringe. Lindy West regularly gets shockingly misogynistic comments on her posts on Jezebel from men attacking her for the way she looks, or just because she’s a woman and who the hell told people with vaginas they were allowed to have opinions? And the political blogs, criminy. Even on sites you would think would be completely innocuous, you see the ugly come out. The other day I happened on a blog site for a neighborhood in my town, and saw a discussion that started with someone very nicely asking folks to please take down garage sale signs once their sale is over deteriorate rapidly into insults and personal attacks. Cyberbullying among school kids has become so common we speak of it as something that’s just to be expected, not something to be abhorred. But our kids get it, at least in part, from what we adults put out there, and what we choose to tolerate as acceptable behavior, do they not?

I don’t have any answers for how to fix the way our technology has corrupted our sense of decency in interacting with each other. Hell, I’m not even sure there are any answers, other than to just attempt, as much as possible, not to allow arguments about things like movies or parenting techniques or garage sale signs to deteriorate into full-blown wars, to ignore (or even delete) non-germane comments that veer into personal attacks, and to generally just try to be as positive and kind and compassionate to each other as we’d probably all like everyone to be to us. It’s mid-July, and the battles of the Oscar film bloggers will soon be upon us. Post-Toronto, we’ll be past the summer tentpoles and the fanboy Dark Knight orgasms and death threats, and the opinions on what’s awesome and what’s not for this awards season will really kick into high gear. Passions will run high as we advocate for or against this film or that one. We can all agree that making death threats over a movie isn’t a nice thing to do. Can we maybe also agree to keep our discussions this awards season civil and relevant to the films, and not personal? To try to see the other person we’re engaging with as more than just target practice for our quick-witted barbing? To just agree to follow Wil Wheaton’s catchphrase: Don’t be a dick?

Yeah, probably not. But it’s worth hoping for.

Review-ish: The Amazing Spider-Man

Warning: Spoilers contained herein.

We took the kids to see The Amazing Spider-Man at the midnight screening so I wouldn’t have to do a coin toss to see who got the golden ticket to see it with me at a press screening, and then I ended up not reviewing at the time because I felt pretty meh about it, and I was irritated about that. And I’ve been so buried in work this last week and over the weekend that I didn’t take time to read any reviews of it. But reading David’s glowing, ecstatic review of the film, and some of the comments on that review, made me seriously wonder if we’d even seen the same movie, so I wanted to jot down some thoughts on ASM while they’re still relatively fresh in my head.

So, okay. I know many of you really dug this version of Spider-Man, but c’mon guys. This movie has some problems. Tonally, the script nails the character of Peter Parker as the writers and (presumably) director imagined him to be, and that take on who Spidey is works very well. Much of the rest of the story, less so. It’s clumsy, sloppy. There are just problems is all over the place, believability holes — even within the context of a superhero movie based on a comic book character — you could drive a truck through. And given that the screenwriting credits here are James Vanderbilt, Alvin Sargent and Steve Kloves, I don’t know what the excuse is. Too many otherwise solid cooks spoiling the broth? Studio heads with an eye toward big bucks from the video game?
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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 into this beautifully imagined and creatively rendered story of Mei (Jiao Xu), a young girl dealing with the unraveling of her once-happy family and the death of a beloved grandfather whose love has been her anchor. Untethered and emotionally bereft, Mei finds a kindred spirit in new student Jie (Hui-Min Lin), a sensitive, artistic boy whose talents are unappreciated by most of the kids at school.

When Mei’s parents announce they’re getting a divorce and Jie’s mother informs him that they have to move yet again to stay a step ahead of his abusive father, the teens embark on a fantastical journey back to Mei’s safe harbor, her grandfather’s remote mountain cottage, through a world inspired by Van Gogh’s Starry Night and the jigsaw puzzles that serve as a symbol for both Mei’s family life and her sorting through these complicated familial issues. Along the way, Mei is accompanied by fantastical, larger-than-life, colorful carved animals – Mei’s link to her woodcarving grandfather – and the watchful shadow of a protective dragon.

My one issue with the film is the ending, which drags on a bit, although it kind of pays off; still I wanted the film to end maybe 10 minutes before it actually did, leaving things a bit more open. I loved almost everything about this film, in particular the way in which Lin composes shots with a meticulous care and attention to detail; nothing ever feels like it’s there by accident or without purpose, I could go back and watch the film a couple more times just to catch all the minute details to which the filmmaker has paid such attention. Every frame of this film feels like a painting brought to life.

Lin’s seamless and lovely use of the jigsaw puzzles as metaphor for life, which comes to fruition with an emotionally engaging sequence in which picures of Mei’s life with her parents fall apart in her hands as she desperately tries to make all the pieces fit together, is one of the best uses of symbol in storytelling I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a literal way of conveying Mei’s inner turmoil that could come across as contrived, but it’s done in such an honest and heartfelt and literary way that what could have been cheesy in a lesser director’s hands here becomes the emotional center of the film.

Note: Starry Starry Night played as a part of the 2012 Seattle International Film Festival

Review: To Rome with Love

Warning: Minor spoilers contained herein. But really, it doesn’t matter.

Like many of you, I have a love-hate relationship with Woody Allen that’s not unlike my love-hate relationship with Nic Cage. Both Allen and Cage have this infuriating thing they do where they’ll make a film that makes you go, “Wow! Now THAT’s why I love Woody Allen/Nic Cage!” and then Nic Cage will turn around and make some steaming pile of dung like Knowing or Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, and Woody Allen will make some mess like To Rome with Love that doesn’t quite gel, and you sigh and shake your head. But you forgive them, you don’t hold a grudge forever just because Nic Cage has a flaming skull for a head or Woody Allen’s made an episodic clunker. Hell, everyone’s entitled to a bad day, right?

One of the four interwoven (but not intersecting) vignettes in To Rome with Love features Allen as Jerry, a retired opera director who discovers that his soon-to-be son-in-law’s simple mortician father is secretly a brilliant tenor — so long as he’s singing in the shower. In many ways this character feels like vintage Woody Allen, so much so that a forgiving audience might be inclined to play along and chuckle appreciatively when he tosses off a one-liner about being afraid to fly because he’s an atheist. Judy Davis plays Phyllis, his psychiatrist wife, which allows Davis to drily shoot off some lines of her own that sound like they might have been culled straight from one of Woody Allen’s therapy sessions. Not that I’m saying Woody Allen needs therapy, but it’s easy enough to imagine him talking through screenplay ideas while reclining on a psychiatrist’s couch, isn’t it?

The underlying theme of To Rome with Love, I guess, is supposed to be about chance, and the way people’s lives get shifted or set in motion by random happenings. So Jerry’s daughter Hayley (Alison Pill) and her fiance, Michelangelo (Flavio Parenti), meet cute when she stops him to ask directions, thus setting in motion the events that lead to Jerry hearing Michelangelo’s father singing in the shower. Roberto Begnini shows up in another segment as an everyman whose life is turned on end when he inexplicably finds himself an instant celebrity being hounded by paparazzi and pop press — a segment that could have, with a bit more attention paid to the writing, been very clever. Hell, by all rights it should have been brilliant: Begnini is a comedian gifted at the farcical, and Allen himself has certainly had enough experience dealing with celebrity to have some smart things to say about it. Instead it feels tossed off, awkward, as if Allen just told Begnini to take the idea and run with it, but never quite nurtured it enough to make it come together properly.

The weakest bit involves a drawn-out, insipid tale of a naive newlywed couple who get separated in an unfamiliar city by perhaps the most contrived set of circumstances ever written in a Woody Allen script. Milly (Alessandra Mastronardi), the wife, leaves the hotel to get her hair done before dinner with some of her new hubby’s uptight relatives, gets lost, loses her phone, and blah blah blah blah eventually falls into bed with a movie star and a burglar. Oops, I hate it when that happens to me. But it’s all okay because her brand-new hubby not only bangs Penelope Cruz (it’s okay, she’s playing a hooker, and she was already paid for) AND passes said hooker off as his wife when his uptight relatives walk into his hotel room (without knocking? Who does that?) when he’s in his boxer shorts and accidentally in bed with her.

And then there was the bit I found to be both the best segment of the film, and the most infuriating by virtue of the potential it had that wasn’t developed. It revolves around architect John (Alec Baldwin), visiting the city where he lived briefly in his 20s, who randomly meets Jack (Jesse Eisenberg), a young architect who lives in the same neighborhood where John once lived. Jack lives with Sally (Greta Gerwig), who’s a nice girl. So nice that you know Jack’s going to do something to screw it up — which he does, of course, when Sally invites her femme fatale friend Monica for a visit. Jack may or may not be John’s younger self — I thought it was obvious he was, but the older couple next to me was having a spirited debate about that point on their way out of the theater.

Now the second biggest problem this vignette has is the casting of Ellen Page as Monica. Don’t get me wrong, I love Ellen Page, and on the surface she has the frank, open delivery that the part calls for. But this part also calls for someone a little more sultry, who when she talks about a lesbian encounter you can picture that happening and it makes you feel all tingly; Page just can’t deliver on that here. The biggest problem with this vignette, though, is that it really needed to be the entire film, that it needed to be for Rome what Match Point was for London, and what Vicky Cristina Barcelona was for Barcelona, and what Midnight in Paris was for Paris.

If Allen had focused just on this story, and cast Scarlett Johansson — ooh! — or maybe Elizabeth Olsen, instead of Ellen Page in the part of Monica, and if he’d taken the time to hone it the way he’s certainly capable of, he could have had something much closer to great Woody Allen here than what he ends up with by stitching together four half-baked ideas, and it’s that — that loss of the potential to do something great — that I find truly frustrating here. Allen works at this impressively frenetic pace, churning out films right and left as if, like Jerry, he’s trying to fend off death and retirement with work. Maybe from a film history perspective it will be more interesting fifty years from now to compare Allen’s lesser works to his greater ones, but dammit, at this point in his long and prolific career, I just care more about Woody Allen making what he thinks is the best film he has in him than tossing out a mediocre one. And this just isn’t quite his best.

Review: Take This Waltz

Note: This review originally ran as part of our TIFF 2011 coverage. Take This Waltz opens this weekend in NY, with a limited release to follow July 6.

Take This Waltz completely slayed me.

With her 2006 feature film debut, Away from Her, Sarah Polley examined the intricacies of a long-term relationship through a couple married for many decades, who were faced with one of them dealing with early-onset Alzheimer’s. In that film, she explored marriage, infidelity, and commitment with a deeply innate understanding of the complexity of relationships that was remarkable for a director who was, at that time, only 27.

Five years later with Take This Waltz, she explores a similar theme through a different lens, with a story that revolves around what happens to the marriage of a late-20s couple, Margot (Michelle Williams) and Lou (Seth Rogen), when Margot makes a connection with Daniel (Luke Kirby), a handsome, charming neighbor who gives Margot the attention she craves from her well-intentioned but distracted husband.

Among the many things Polley nails with both her script and direction is the way in which we tend to grow complacent in long-term relationships. That’s just the way it goes, right? At the beginning, when things are budding and new and fresh, there’s a palpable excitement to this connection you’re making with another person, when the sexual chemistry is so intense it feels like it colors the world. You feel tingly and giddy and everything suddenly seems to be made brighter, more vivid, by the feelings flooding through you that you can’t quite explain or get a handle on.
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(60) Days of Summer

Today was the first official day of summer for us; last day of classes was last Friday, but since Luka was in the hospital Monday and Tuesday I’m not counting them as summer. Usually, summer is a time I set aside for being a little lazy and spending a lot of time relaxing with my kids before Toronto and awards season. This year, though, there’s just so much I want to get done and this is the time to do it. My plate is very full right now, and it’s a good thing I’m skilled at multitasking and being well-organized (yet another unexpected side benefit of my years as a project manager in tech).

Right now I’m working with some amazing women to organize a massively structured Homeschool PTSA that could end up being a model for similar groups nationwide. It’s exciting to be breaking new ground, and while it’s a lot of work and a bit of a time and energy suck, it’s also very important work we’re doing here, in building this foundation of connection for homeschooling families in our region. It needs to be done, and we’re trying to do it well; fortunately we have some formidably brainy businesswomen on our Board and we are kicking butt and taking names getting things organized.

I’m very excited also about an indie film collective I’m working on with a carefully curated group of ridiculously talented Northwest filmmakers. There is so much potential in what we’re starting to work on, if we can just organize it right and maintain a commitment to the ideas we’re batting about. Much more on that later as it starts to gel.

My other major summer project, work-wise, is finishing up two scripts I’m working on, and getting a good start on a third. I want to be work-shopping and peer-reviewing the script I want to develop first by August, which is an ambitious deadline given that I want to get in a couple of revision passes myself before I bring it to a group of peers. I’m also going to be doing make-up design for Alice in Wonderland, which means two casts of roughly 70 faces to get fantasy make-up on, fast. But I’ve done make-up for Alice before, and it’s one of my favorites to design. Besides which, my kids are all in the play so I have to be a the theater for tech week anyhow. Might as well be doing something fun, right? Oh, yeah, and I got called for jury duty on July 5.

And then I do intend also to spend some lazy days at the beach with my kids, and we’re going camping a couple times with some groups of families with kids. I’m really looking forward to both those trips, and to hanging out with some good friends while our kids get to spend a few days unplugged, playing in the sand, frolicking in the ocean, fishing, and climbing trees.

Theater: Alice’s Anthem

This weekend we finally made it over to Ballard to check out Alice’s Anthem, an original musical adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. The play was produced by Copious Love Productions, an impressive little theater collective in Seattle that my daughter Meg (who did the costumes and makeup design) and son-in-law Dick (in the ensemble) are involved with. I can’t claim to have a great deal of objectivity about the folks involved in Copious Love, so I won’t; this isn’t a formal review, therefore, just a write-up of my thoughts about the play after seeing it twice.

***
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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 first screening at the deadCENTER Film Festival, and all the usual end-of-school-year kidstuff, all conspired to keep me from getting to as many screenings as I intended.

I’ve been covering SIFF for a many years now and I have to say, I think this is one of the strongest years programming-wise they’ve had (and I don’t say that just because my daughter Neve was an intern on the programming staff this year, or because they programmed my film). Over and over in conversations I had at parties or standing in line, the recurrent theme was how impressed people were with this year’s overall slate. Sure, there were a few films that some folks weren’t crazy about, but if a fest is making everyone happy, they probably aren’t curating as well as they should, right? For me, the best fests offer a diverse slate of programming and counter-programming, balancing accessible crowd pleasers with films that tackle more challenging subject matter or style. The SIFF programmers, perhaps in part because they have 25 days to work with, always do a solid job, but this year they just really hit the sweet spot.
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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 make a movie that immediately evokes that by casting the same actor in a similar setting? But in all fairness, this is a completely different story, both in plot and tone, and Wysocki here is portraying a completely different, but equally nuanced fat kid. And Lillard, as it turns out, isn’t a half-bad director. Actually, he’s pretty darn good.
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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 agrees to father her child. In the wrong hands, this material would be completely one-dimensional and contrived, but writer-director Jonathan Lisecki (expanding off his 2010 short of the same title) manages to pull off a likable film in spite of it often feeling like an extended sitcom pilot. That’s not in and of itself a bad thing, by the way … if they’d sharpen the dialogue a bit and keep delving into all the potentially challenging issues of these characters having and raising a child, they could have a funny television series out of this.
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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. The film tells the tale of the Villas-Bôas brothers, Orlando, Claudio and Leonardo, who started out leading the charge of colonization across central Brazil, but fell in love with the diversity and richness of the Indian tribes they found there and instead led the charge to protect them from the impact of colonization by Whites.

Ultimately Claudio and Orlando Villas-Bôas were responsible for the creation of Xingu National Park, an indigenous-only park in central Brazil in 1961. It’s a tale of breathtaking scope, and one that American audiences are probably completely unfamiliar with, and it’s particularly relevant given that the continued deforestation in the Brazilian rainforest (problematic in and of itself) increasingly encroaches on diverse and unique way of life the tribes residing within the preserve have maintained.

There are moments in the film that feel like some storytelling was lost in the editing room. For instance, early on we see Claudio and Leonardo lie about their intelligence and literacy in order to get accepted into the military group that’s going to explore central Brazil, but we don’t know why they’re lying, and there’s never a reason given for why they wouldn’t have just enlisted by saying, “Hey, we have these skill sets, and I’d like to join this expedition.” And yet, in spite of presenting themselves as illiterate peons (unskilled laborers) to be a part of the expedition, when we next see them they are leading it. We see an officer who looks gloweringly suspicious of the brothers as they enlist, which foreshadows his involvement later, but this never really pays off later even when he reappears.
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