EVENT COVERAGE

Seattle Int'l Film Festival 2003

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The documentary award winners were Kim Shelton’s Seattle-based story of three Sudanese immigrants A Great Wonder and Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain’s examination of the Venezuelan coup The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. While I am quite sure both docs are just fine (I missed them, so I can’t really talk about their quality) how the heck do they beat out Andrew Jarecki’s potent and powerful Capturing the Friedmans? This acclaimed look at an upper-middle-class Long Island Jewish family disintegrating under the glare of accusations of child molestation is unbelievably affecting. Watching them get ripped to shreds from all corners, even though no proof whatsoever is linking them to the charges, is one of the more surreally unsettling experiences I’ve had all year.

Two other documentaries I really enjoyed were Richard LeGravenese and the late Ted Demme’s affectionate look at ‘70’s cinema A Decade Under the Influence and Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud’s saga of birds in flight Winged Migration. Completely different and quite good, it’s hard to think of two documentaries I’ve flat-out enjoyed watching more than these two. Not award-worthy, to be sure, but definitely worth seeing.

Even though I wasn’t completely satisfied with it, I was very happy to see Aisling Walsh pick up the Women in Cinema Lena Sharpe Award for Song for a Raggy Boy. While flawed, this depiction of corruption and domination in a 1930’s catholic school for wayward boys is still quite astonishing and features a performance by Aidan Quinn that borders on the stellar. Taking six years to get from screenplay to screen, Walsh’s persistence to see her vision come to fruition is inspiring. All faults of the movie aside, she’s got talent, and I can’t wait to see what she does next – and I’m not just saying that because she’s a fascinating interview subject. [Click here for an interview with Aidan Quinn and Aisling Walsh.]

Even better, though, is the similarly-themed Magdalene Sisters from acclaimed director Peter Mullan. Fascinating and disturbing, the Catholic Church gets an even worse going-over in this story of three women sent to one of Ireland’s infamous Magdalene convents. Starting with a rape and ending with the complete dehumanization of woman’s soul, Magdalene Sisters is a hard, uncomfortable sit, completely uncompromising in its vision. This was one of the festival’s best films but also one of its most difficult to handle. This film is decidedly not for every taste, sure, but it’s undeniably powerful, too.

Korean cinema had its own presence at this year’s SIFF with the Cloud Kingdom – Films of South Korea special focus section. Unfortunately, other than Oasis, the examples I saw did little to make me think this spotlight was warranted. Both Kang Woo-suk’s Public Enemy and Kim Sang-Jin’s Jail Breakers were little more than over-long genre fodder, while Lee Jong-hyuk’s psychological thriller H might be one of the worst films I’ve sat through this year.

Stylishly filmed and scored, H is nothing more than a Silence of the Lambs-inspired hunt for a serial killer where the cops seem don’t do much more than stand around and sexily smoke. But, I don’t think smoking is sexy and I need more in my script than veiled illusions to the power of hypnosis to get my pulse racing. What’s more, the similarity of this film to another SIFF favorite from 2001, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s beautifully creepy Cure, is downright stunning. Both films revolve around a brilliant serial killer and use hypnosis as a catalyst for murder, but where Kurosawa’s (no relation to fellow Japanese master Akira) film is potently structured with characters full of flesh and blood, H is nothing more than a puppet show. It only goes through the motions of being scary, not having any real clue as to actually go about startling an audience.

Granted, nothing was more painful than Bill Fishman’s inept and amateurish My Dinner with Jimi. Based on the memoir by Howard Kaylan, former lead singer of ‘60’s American pop group The Turtles, the movie recounts the band’s rise to fame. At the start of their first tour in London, Jimi recounts one fateful night where the band meets a plethora of rock legends, including the Beatles, culminating in a drunken dinner between Kaylan and icon Jimi Hendrix. It’s so bad I almost broke my unwritten rule of never walking out of a screening. Luckily, just as I was about to finally do so, the movie is nearly made palatable by a final 30-minute stretch – the actual dinner portion – that’s surprisingly decent. But this one-third aside, My Diner with Jimi is like some failed student film made by a supremely untalented rich kid who only got into school because his father is the dean of admissions.

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