The Notorious N.P.T. Versus SIFF

N.P. Thompson went to SIFF, and we all benefit now that he's written about the best and worst films of the festival -- and launched a few broadsides at SIFF and select members of its audience:

The 33rd Seattle International Film Festival ended two weeks ago; it’s taken me this long to gain enough distance to sort and sift through all I might conceivably have to say on the subject. Even so, the movies under discussion here represent only a small fraction of what I took in. There were several screenings I walked out on, a few more I considered walking out on, and perhaps a baker's dozen of screener discs I couldn’t eject quickly enough. This year, as in other years, festival officials emphasized the sheer quantity of it all: 25 days, 600 screenings, X-number of North American premieres. They take this approach, because qualitatively, especially this time, there was almost nothing to point to. Which isn’t to say that weren’t some good films, but that they were in short supply.

We've been Thompson fans for a while -- no one since John Simon has made such vivid use of anger and spleen in his criticism. Thompson lambastes fellow members of the film critic community as zealously as he eviscerates the 90% of movies that are crap. We haven't obsessively followed his career post-Slate-rejection, but we were pleased to see his name as a contributor on Matt Zoller Seitz's essential film and TV site The House Next Door. Every good cop needs his bad cop.

Choice excerpts from his take on last month's SIFF 33 follow, but you should read the whole thing.

“Hypnotized by luxury and opulence” could go a long way in accounting for why the festival selection was so much worse than in seasons past. If you attend these things with any frequency, you see the same people at screenings year after year and overhear what may well be the same conversations or points-of-view expressed again and again. This was my fourth SIFF, beginning from 2003 and skipping 2006, and I knew from the self-congratulatory beams emanating from pass-holders and members of the press alike over the turgid period piece Golden Door, that it was going to be a long festival. When people love crap, why offer them anything better, unless it’s only by mistake. Conversely, some of the small films from abroad that took the greatest number of risks were the same ones that I could hear the white, affluent, mostly elderly, and mostly overweight pass-holders vilifying. Made on small budgets, yet with generous insight into humanity, Malaysia’s Elephant and the Sea, Sweden’s Falkenberg Farewell, and South Korea’s Woman on the Beach met with an unwarranted amount of pass-holder grumbling; it rapidly became a truism that if the pass-holders were upset by it, then you have a movie worth making every possible effort to see or get seen. You could hear idiotic remarks made about almost anything outside a pass-holder’s comfort zone.

On Seattle film audiences:

And that reminds me – a lie that’s often trotted out during SIFF has to do with how “sophisticated” movie audiences are here, but based on the caliber of the films derided and the ones championed, I’ve yet to encounter evidence of that.

On passholders:

One thing I noticed about the festival pass-holders: They will grant inordinate amounts of slack to bad, poorly-paced films from Italy and France, whereas they are not as forgiving to other countries, especially not to Asian countries.

On local filmmakers:

It seems almost heretical to write anything negative about John Helde’s documentary Made in China, but this 70-minute home movie, in spite of some extraordinary footage, fails in so many obvious, easily preventable ways that I have to say the following. To begin with, Helde is a Seattle filmmaker, and while that theoretically isn’t a crime, it should send off alarm bells that he’s surrounded by a support system of yes-persons who aren’t going to criticize constructively or otherwise, rather than by tough-minded mentors. Certainly, the finished film supports such a theory.

On the programmers:

I’ve found that in attending the same festival (not just SIFF) for a number of successive years, or mostly successive years, that I come to know the programmers’ taste, or lack of taste. And while the titles of films change from festival to festival, what doesn’t change is a certain kind of underlying awfulness that informs the programming choices being made, that is, the bad films tend to be bad in the same way and predictably so. There’s a recognizable type of inept or coarse or sentimental or bludgeoningly jokey or shallowly pessimistic film that a festival programmer will be unable to resist, as it fits in so snugly with her or his own myopic standards.

Movies into Film, you're back in our regular reading rotation. We'll be a little surprised if you're flattered by that sentiment, though.