Seen at 41st Seattle International Film Festival


There's something effervescently lovely about Gueros, the first feature film of Alonso Ruizpalacios.  Apparently critics agree, as the debut has come away with five awards in the Mexican Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Director.  Gueros is evocative, nostalgic, while being ever so present at the same time.  Shot in black and white with a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, it's an artistic romp that manages to evade pretension.

The movie opens with a dalliant act of teenager Tomas (Sebastian Aguirre), who is hereby banished to live with his older brother in Mexico City by his fed-up mother.  Sombra (Tenoch Huerta), his brother, probably isn't the good influence his mother hopes him to be.  He and his roommate Santos (Leonardo Ortizgris) live a slacker lifestyle: professing themselves to be on strike from the current student strike, stealing electricity from their downstairs neighbors and slumped listlessly on the couch as they watch the aforementioned electricity cord slide off the balcony before they're plunged into darkness.

The movie doesn't linger on this Linklater-esque deadbeat life, but morphs into a journey that picks up radio voice revolutionary Ana (Ilse Salas), and continues a legendary quest for childhood hero Epigmenio Cruz, whose songwriting prowess reportedly once made Bob Dylan cry.

Gueros has the same sort of meandering life that Sombra does.  Freewheeling between characters to give us an evenhanded approach to Tomas, Sombra, and Ana, we have a movie that is a sort of coming-of-age, a sort of slice of Mexican revolution life, and a sort of road trip.  It's evocative of Linklater, of Godard, of a Mexican beat generation, and yet it's completely unique.  Gueros is the closest thing to French New Wave seen in the past decades, and there's enough gorgeous creative manic energy to give the audience nostalgic and charmed pangs for the Nouvelle Vague era.

I can't say enough of these brief glimpses Ruizpalacios allows us -- the low-angled shots of Mexico streets at night, the staccato of heavy drum soundtracks to overtake our senses, or those few shots where a character listens to Epigmenio on headphones and the movie's sound cuts out entirely.  Shadows, peeks of light, close shots allow us an intimacy and an aching familiarity with what we see even if Mexico is a foreign land to us.  Ruizpalacios dips his toes into self-awareness, allowing us to delight as characters suddenly break out of their molds to talk directly with the director or to contemplate what they think of the ongoing movie ("not much"), but only enough to charm us.  Sombra talks of a tiger that haunts his nightmares and quotes Rilke's The Panther, only to come face to face with his fears later on.

It's hard to put a finger on what exactly is the pulse or the draw of Gueros.  The storyline doesn't quite solidify or coalesce, but it doesn't need to.  The fact that it doesn't quite shape lends itself to the playful, evanescent quality of it.  It's remarkable how something so light-touched can feel so vibrant and relevant.  We don't know why Tomas acts the way he does in the opening, but that's perhaps a motif that resonates through all of our heroes' actions and inactions.  And that's all right.  Ideas, themes, and meaning drift in and out of Gueros, but not without leaving an indelible mark.

Gueros can still be caught in Seattle at The Grand Illusion.

Seen at 41st Seattle International Film Festival

2.0/5.0 seemed like a good score to give this movie until I really considered and thought that I was being too generous.  Yes, I did give Man of Steel and Great Gatsby a 2.2, and to say that Chatty Catties was only .2 below them was unfair to both of those horrible, yet well-intentioned movies.

Chatty Catties takes place in an alternate universe where cats are able to verbalize and talk back to their owners.  They say pretty much everything you'd expect them to say:  they're lazy, independent, judgmental, and condescending.  Although the movie starts with equal treatment of several owners and their cats (or perhaps I should say several cats and their humans), it quickly focuses on the story of Shelby (Megan Hensley) and her cat Leonard (voiced by John Autry II).  Shelby is your typical directionless, aimless, basically horrible tween.

The first showing of Chatty Catties at SIFF got an enormous response:  SIFF actually moved the movie venue into larger and larger theaters to accommodate more people and played to a sold-out house in the largest theater at SIFF Uptown.  Seattle is kind of a perfect crowd to show a movie about talking cats and their often floundering owners.  I have to add that the gentleman I was sitting next to apparently enjoyed the movie so much that he was sometimes meowing back to the screen.  And indeed, everyone was enjoying this movie for the first fifteen minutes.  I was cracking up so much in my seat, I was convinced this was one of the funniest movies I had seen this year.

When the novelty of sassy talking cats wears off, however, there's not much to hold you except a host of contemptible characters.  If the movie had maintained an even handling of all the different owners, it would have allowed for more stamina.  Instead, we're stuck with perhaps the least likable of the group and there are only sparse interjections from the other owners that are less and less relevant as the movie continues and are awkwardly shoehorned in, like the artsy nonsensical video clips that also interject the storyline.  Shelby is like a Hannah Horvath from Girls, only even more destructive and debased.  The writing of Girls makes for some horribly compelling watching: even if the characters are often terrible people, it's still well-done enough that you relate and find yourself unable to stop watching.  Chatty Catties, on the other hand, makes you squirm and kind of kills you slowly, wishing you could escape as much as Shelby's customer at the dental office when she's bragging about the art films she makes.

Chatty Catties would have been more effective as a short, or a youtube series perhaps.  It's a humorous concept, but it would be much more effective if it had characters with heart.  If any of the characters had compassion for each other or even basic morals, it would be that much easier to root for them or to be invested.  As it is, the rapid disintegration of Shelby has a direct relationship to the disintegration of your soul while watching.

1.8 because I didn't end up walking out of this movie as I did with Strangerland.  It has a promising opening, the music choices are pretty on point, and the intent of the movie to illustrate the issues that contemporary society has in communicating and connecting is well-meant.  But not a movie I would recommend for any sort of viewing at all, unless you want to experience what mental claustrophobia feels like.

Played at SIFF 2015
May 30 - 9:30 PM (Uptown SIFF Cinema)
May 31 - 11:30 AM (Uptown SIFF Cinema)

Seen at 41st Seattle International Film Festival

50 people wake up in a room arranged in two concentric circles on a floor plan that looks like a board game.  Everyone is standing on a small red circle of their own and if they try to step off of their circle or touch anyone next to them, they die.  A small device (this one more of a dome than a circle, really) in the middle of the room zaps anyone that steps outside of their parameters.  Time appears to be running out anyway for the whole group, as the device starts zapping and killing one person every two minutes.  To further up the ante, it isn't long before the quickly dwindling group figures out they can vote who they want to die next, and ultimately who gets to survive.

Circle is the logical next step and first movie for co-directors and writers Aaron Hann and Mario Miscione who previously had a webseries called The Vault which is a sci-fi puzzle series that puts an individual puzzle-solver in a 6x6 room.  Circle does much of the same thing, only this time cramming 50 people into a room, thereby upping the stakes and creating instant psychological dynamics.

Hann and Miscione clearly wanted an opportunity to work with more people, but the basic idea of The Vault has carried over in that their goal was to create a simple concept, that was also interesting and sustainable for the audience.  The idea for Circle is indeed a simple one:  how do you determine the value of human life?  As stylized as Circle's appearance is, this question is what drives the movie.  Critics have been comparing it to other sci-fi ventures such as Exam and Cube, but director Hann begs for a far more classic example in 12 Angry Men instead.  At 88 minutes, the movie clips along rather rapidly, sometimes not allowing for more than slivers of stereotypes or the basics of human morality questions to poke through, but perhaps that's what happens when you have a killing machine on a two-minute timer in the room with you.

Despite spatial, time, and even child labor law constraints (or perhaps because of it), Circle makes for both a fresh and often humorous look at a crosscut of human society.  Some of the script and interplay feels a little too orchestrated, and admittedly the acting caliber is not evenly spread out -- but then again, how can it be with 50 players in a room?  As predictable as some of the actions are, Hann and Miscione provide enough spark in the interplay to make them enjoyable, and they're savvy enough to veer towards tongue-in-cheek rather than going too heavy.

Circle was shot chronologically on a soundstage in LA over 10 days, allowing the remaining actors to grow concurrently with the psychological claustrophobia.  Miscione reportedly would yell at the actors to maintain a constant feeling of mental strain (not be terrorizing, but more to remind) and would even have an earsplitting percussive sound cue every time someone was zapped to aid them.  However, Matt Corboy, one of the actors, cited the sheer pleasure at being able to constantly witness the skill of his comrades as helping the most in maintaining the actual atmosphere of the movie.  Some of this earned camaraderie was witnessed at SIFF as a whopping 47 of the 50 actors showed up for the world premiere, along with directors, film composer, and casting director.  It's an interesting setting and has generated a unique space for Circle.  Overall the concept is the driving point, but Hann and Miscione do an admirable job of juggling the different characters and create enough surprises to make it an entertaining jaunt.

Played at SIFF 2015 May 28 (SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival).

Seen at 41st Seattle International Film Festival Press Screening

As its name would suggest Gemma Bovery flirts with Gustav Flaubert's infamous masterpiece Madame Bovary, placing our titular heroine in the same provincial town but in modern times.  Gemma Arterton plays the disenchanted housewife, who finds that her romantic ideals and reality are unfortunately at odds.  Director Anne Fontaine's take on the old classic cleverly places the story in the hands of an elderly neighbor who is bewitched by his new neighbor as well as her eerily similar characteristics to both the name and the actions of Madame Emma Bovary.

Gemma Bovery is married to an older, dependable husband by the name Charlie.  They move from London to the French countryside at the bequest of Emma, who is dismayed when her romantic french cottage turns out to be a ramshackle fixer-upper.  Frustrated as well by her husband's complacency, Gemma soon turns to endeavors of her own, all while under the increasingly troubled and far too involved eye of Martin (Fabrice Lucchini), her ex-parisian neighbor who narrates the movie with a humorous aplomb.

The story itself doesn't merit a reworking of Flaubert's tale -- it's a rather trite tale of infidelity and a bored English housewife.  However, Gemma herself says of Flaubert's work that "nothing happens and yet it's so interesting."  The same could almost be said of Fontaine's film, which is more fluff than anything else but highly enjoyable if you take it as the self-aware sensual flirtation it is.  At times the movie appears to run long, with not much to hold the audience; however, there are plenty of comedic moments and some beautiful camerawork to enjoy in the meantime.  Arterton is luminous in every single shot, making it easy to believe that men are falling left and right for her.  Fontaine has somehow created a sort of magic hour that surrounds Arteton like an aura in every shot.  It's a good thing that the movie knows how to make fun of itself, or else its scenes of Arteton sensuously kneading bread would border on ridiculous and borderline pornographic.

There's an enjoyment of simple pleasures here, which make even mundane actions kissed with a light.  Much as Flaubert searched years for the right words to explain the most ordinary actions, Fontaine does the same with her camera here, making the sprinkling of flour and the rising of dough something wondrous to behold, and a crackle of senses bursting with flavor.  Besides this and its humor, however, there's not much to be said.  The film plods along to its inevitable climax and even the humor of the last couple scenes might not be enough to make the whole film worth it.  Martin's narration does help the movie's pace, but it unfortunately slims Gemma's personality so that we're not always convinced of her as a fleshed out character.

What is interesting about Gemma versus the novel's Emma Bovary is that she consistently defies comparison to literature, at one point insisting "Je suis moi!  Je suis libre!"  And even if she does resort to image or banal cliche at times, what she does to stand apart might be what makes Fontaine's work relevant as a whole.

Playing at SIFF 2015
May 16 - 3:30 PM (SIFF Cinema Egyptian)
May 19 - 7 PM (SIFF Cinema Egyptian)

Seen at 41st Seattle International Film Festival Press Screening

Me & Earl & the Dying Girl will probably be one of my favorites from this SIFF season.  People are erroneously and unfairly comparing it to the teenage cancer flick of last year The Fault in our Stars.  Me & Earl is about high school senior Greg (Thomas Mann) who has coasted through high school remaining (happily for him) under the radar.  He navigates the cliques and popularity warzones of school by avoiding them completely.  He spends lunchtime in his history teacher's office, watching old movies with Earl (RJ Cyler), whom he refers to as a mere "co-worker" despite the fact that they've grown up together.  "Co-worker" refers to the movies they make together: movies that are both a joyful homage and gleeful tongue-in-cheek to movie buffs, including titles such as "Sockwork Orange" and "Senior Citizen Kane."  The impetus to the movie is when Greg is coerced by his mother to hang out with his neighbor Rachel (Olivia Cooke) after they find out she has been diagnosed with cancer, despite the fact that Greg has had little to no interaction with her in the past ten years other than his classification of her being in what he has meticulously categorized as "Upper-Middle-Class Senior Jewish Girl Sub-Clique 2a".  Rachel doesn't want his pity, but she allows his presence and what turns into friendship because from the beginning, Greg neither wants to pity her or to even be there in the first place.

Me & Earl is charming and witty without ramming it down our throats and is filled with dialogue and snappy comebacks that are believable and topical.  One of the many problems with The Fault was that it was filled with words and lines that seriously made me doubt their authenticity, making me balk and wonder if there are actually any teenagers anywhere in the world that talk like that.  On the other hand, Greg is one of those guys you want to be friends with - for his wit, his ease and nonease in life, and for the genuine candor that comes only from an unaffected teenager's demeanor.  Rachel's illness and her struggle with it are very real, but it's not a movie that has to dramatize or use her disease as a crutch.

Mann, Cooke, and Cyler are the breathing pulse of this movie.  Never once did I doubt their authenticity or feel they were putting on a show - either through their acting ability, or their lives as teenagers.  Despite director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon's previous adolescent jaunts in highly produced television shows such as Glee and American Horror Story, Me & Earl is an unforced sensitive portrayal of a friendship that blooms because of a mutual expression of love.  There are certainly quirky highly produced moments, including some stop-motion work and the ever hilarious movie productions of Greg/Earl. One of my favorite cinematographers, Chung-Hoon Chung is also in force here giving an artistic eye to a different genre than the ones we're used to seeing.

Go see this movie.  The story isn't new, but the presentation is.  It's quirky without constantly proclaiming its cleverness, and its wit assumes that you understand its references without insisting that you're intelligent.  There might be a dying girl in the title, but the movie itself is an elegant snapshot of how adolescents live and how the current generation fails to connect.  It's a movie that had me both cracking up in my seat and even a bit of manly mist in the eye, which is saying quite a bit.

Playing at SIFF
May 16 - 6:30 PM (AMC Pacific Place 11)
May 17 - 2:30 (SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival)

Seen at 41st Seattle International Film Festival

In the first fifteen minutes of this film, my only regret then (and throughout the whole movie) was that I went into this movie slightly hungry.  By the end, I was ravenous and the only reason I wasn't embarrassed by my salivating mouth and the grumbling of my stomach was that there was an audible concurrence from the rest of the (packed) theater.

Little Forest is actually a four-hour quartet film developed from a manga of the same name by Daisuke Igarashi.  Ichiko (Ai Hashimoto) moves back to her small childhood home in a Japanese hamlet where the nearest grocery store is the next town over.  This quiet movie takes us through a different season each hour and gives us a different set of dishes for each season as Ichiko lives simply, drawing culinary inspiration from her surroundings and memories that crowd her cooking.

This movie certainly has some cutesy moments.  The music is mostly fluff and director Junichi Mori wisely cuts it away completely in the moments Ichiko enjoys the food she's created, allowing us the full tactile experience of it:  the crunch of fried panko crumbs, the swallow of a refreshing rice cocktail down her throat, and the crackle of a freshly baked bread.  There doesn't seem to be much in terms of narrative cohesion, but that's just because of the savored drawn-out pace of it.  There's plenty to glean from the memories Ichiko chooses to share with us and the bare conversations that are weighted with meaning.

There's plenty to enjoy from this film.  The audience I was with gave both envious sighs for the food and amused chuckles every time Ichiko would talk to herself, pulling a fresh loaf of bread from an oven with a trumpeting "ja-jahn!"  The food preparation (and the enjoyment) is shot sumptuously, gorgeous cinematography done by Yukihiro Onodera.  In the movie, Ichiko says she doesn't believe in words, but rather what she feels and Little Forest does everything to make us the tender, trembling hold of a life lived simply and appreciated wholly.  The experience is not merely in the taste of Ichiko's food, but her zen-like, all-consuming preparation of it -- the daily battle with weeds, the scraping and scraping of the berries for jam, and the constantly kneading away of her memories to reveal the truth that was previously obscured by an inexperienced negligence.

Little Forest is probably one of my favorites of SIFF thus far.  If you're able to catch it, they are doing one more showing of it at SIFF Uptown this Saturday, May 23rd.

Playing at SIFF
May 18 - 6:30 PM (SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival)
May 24 - 12 PM (SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival)

Seen at 41st Seattle International Film Festival

To date, this is the only movie I've ever walked out on in the theater.  I honestly didn't think I could rate anything less than Man of Steel, which had me fuming even while I was struggling to stay awake (not an easy feat, that).

We'll start with the good things about this feature to get it out of the way.  Nicole Kidman is a superb actress and she reportedly accepted the role because of the emotional range potential.  All around, the cast delivered what they could with the material they were given.  Joseph Fiennes is great at playing a tortured, emotionally unstable asshole husband.  Hugo Weaving gives a great turn in his role as well, even if he is introduced somewhat awkwardly and always seems like an afterthought.  I had such high hopes for this movie in the first two minutes which establishes an eerie, mysterious mood right from the get-go along with some stunning shots of the Australian Outback.  The idea of supporting Australian film encouraged me to try the film out, as well as experiencing the lens of first-time director Kim Farrant.  The extreme long shots of the shimmering Australian country are some of the best visuals of this movie, showing both a strange and unforgivingly barren landscape.

The same, unfortunately, could be said for the story and the characters.  We're given little to chew on, and what is thrown at us seems to be more to provoke rather than make any sense.  The characters are around only so that we can see them be tortured by circumstance, and I kept saying to myself throughout the movie and even after:  "I don't understand.  I don't understand!"  At no point did I understand the motivations, actions, or interactions of the characters.  They were so out of the bounds of anything explicable, I wish I could say that it amazed me more than it angered me...but in truth, it did both.  My movie date and I left after a particularly upsetting scene.  To be fair for the review of this movie, only about a half hour was left in the feature...and we had no hope that anything remaining would be enough to redeem the rest of it.

I have little wish to get into the plot, but in truth, as Strangerland has gotten some rather good press from Sundance and other critics and so I feel an obligation to at least offer a fair consideration of the movie.  Kidman and Fiennes play a couple who have recently moved to a small town in Australia with their two children -- one a wildly promiscuous 15-year old Lily, and a precocious younger Tom who takes to wandering the town at night when he can't sleep.  What is already a shaky foundation is pushed even further when the two children disappear the day before the town is engulfed in a dust storm.  Future suspicions mix with past incrimination as husband and wife, the town, and the local law enforcement doubt and turn on each other.

Does this sound intriguing?  Don't be fooled; I thought the same thing.  Don't go see this movie.  Stay in.  Put something on Netflix rather than suffer through this movie that just makes your insides chew themselves out for no good reason.  As my movie date said:  "If you're going to make a movie it should be a little more than 'some people are terrible, also Australia.'"

Playing at SIFF
May 17 - 9:45 PM (SIFF Cinema Egyptian)
June 2 - 8:30 PM (Kirkland Performance Center)

Seen at 41st Seattle International Film Festival Press Screening

Flowers or Loreak is a quiet, warmly filmed story of Ane (played by a subtle Nagore Aranburu) who starts mysteriously receiving flowers every week.  Part of a muted, lackluster marriage, the bouquets which come with no clue or note as to the recipient alter Ane's feeling of isolation.  Mysterious bouquets also create nuance in the lives of Lourdes (Itziar Ituño) and her mother-in-law Tere (Itziar Aizpuru), who has grown into a sense of impotence and harbors a desire for grandchildren that has all evidence of going unfulfilled.

Loreak is really beautifully shot, allowing us to feel Ane's numbness toward life with its shallow depth-of-field that puts everything around her in a blur.  We see things come into focus with the bouquets in her life, as co-directors Jon Garano and Jose Mari Goenaga draw in close for every single bunch of flowers she's gifted with.  Besides the bright colors of the flowers, everything else is muffled in a gray, almost monochromatic light.  There are some pretty sublime shots of hands layering on hands, intimately anonymous.

Each of the three women who serve as shifting points of this narrative triangle are portrayed elegantly by their actresses.  If we're unable to relate to the characters, I think that has more with how the story is written rather than their skill.  Their motivations and actions can appear opaque at times and too much of a caricature at others.  The men in their lives are not given ample opportunity to develop although perhaps that's all right in the context of the narrative.  Flowers are used here as a symbol of remembrance, romance, and of mourning.  Like memory, it requires attention and an almost routine upkeep.

The film inevitably loses some of its weight and purpose in its emphasized grace and slow pacing.  Also, the use of title cards to transition time-wise or between points of view for characters is jarring and unnecessary, bringing viewers out of the experience.  The rest of the movie achieves a glacial sort of pace that exemplifies how slowly we change as humans and the magnitude of what it takes to bring us out of habitual thoughts and the constancy of daily routine.  The title cards shatter that atmosphere and seem cheap at times.  Overall, although there are some worthwhile images and feelings, the movie doesn't always manage to connect and we're left feeling a bit unfulfilled at the end.

Playing at SIFF
May 15 - 4 PM (SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival)
May 16 - 6:30 PM (SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival)
May 20 - 6 PM (Lincoln Square Cinemas)