Seattlest at TIFF: Take One
One film you won't find on 2007's best-of lists is the first movie we caught on Saturday night, Nothing is Private, the debut feature from American Beauty-scribe/Six Feet Under-creator Alan Ball. It's not that his adaption of Alicia Erian's semi-autobiographical novel Towelhead--the coming-of-age story of a seriously messed-up thirteen-year-old girl living with her strict Lebanese father in early 90s suburban Texas -- is bad, just fundamentally flawed. We just didn't buy that an adolescent so used by nearly every person in her life would be so relatively undamaged, though we did appreciate Ball's restraint in not further abusing a victim via exploitative camerawork. Issues of post-traumatic stress disorder aside, big ups to the ensemble cast, including a hugely pregnant Toni Collette, a seriously conflicted army reservist/creepy racist Aaron Eckhart, and dynamic newcomer Summer Bishil as the young girl at the heart of this darkly comic, occasionally absurdist tale.
Sunday offered a full slate of films, starting out early with the latest gangster flick from hometown boy David Cronenberg, Eastern Promises. Like History of Violence, it's got Viggo Mortensen, but this time around he's dealing with the ruthless Russian mob, see? Since this is a Cronenberg film, the blood is freely and explicitly flowing, though at ninety minutes the movie is short enough (and well-paced enough) to avoid wearing out its gory welcome. Plus, there is a brutally bad-em-effing fight scene, in which a butt-ass nekkid Mortensen takes on two Chechnyan goons. If you like the idea of Viggo getting stabby with his scrotum a-flappin', [Ed: Now that's defining your audience!] this is a must-see.
Immediately after that was not so much a film as a conversation, with Bill Maher and Larry Charles (he of Seinfeld-writing and Curb Your Enthusiasm/Borat-directing fame) discussing their work-in-progress doc entitled Religulous. Skewering the borderline insanity often associated with followers of all three major world religions, the film, with an anticipated release in spring '08, may result in a fatwa or two. In person as well as in the ~20 minutes of footage we saw, Maher never shied away from his view on organized religion (its delusions are dangerous), and he's got a friend in Larry Charles, who could easily pass for an Orthodox rabbi, were it not for the bright orange Crocs. Charles brings the same sharp use of music, snappy editing, and self-incriminating interviews to Religulous that he did to Borat, guaranteeing that the film is sure to be both beloved by those who get the joke and derided by those who hold their faith too dear to examine it more closely and with a sense of humor.
Then it was time for things to get heavy. The Girl in the Park is the directorial debut of David Auburn, the Tony and Pulitizer Prize-winning playwright of Proof. With a writer at the helm, we expected things to be wordy and precise, and they were in this drama about a woman forever changed by her child's kidnapping and the young woman who becomes a daughter of a sort. Nothing in the film was too unexpected (here's the betrayal of trust, here's the re-awakening), but really it's the fine acting job by Sigourney Weaver (yay!) and Kate Bosworth (surprise!) that sell the drama.
Earlier in the day we had seen twenty minutes of Religulous, but the last film we saw yesterday was more like two full hours of Retardulous, aka Chaotic Ana. It's a surrealistic Spanish film from the director of Sex and Lucia and Lovers of the Arctic Circle, and we're not quite sure how to describe it beyond that. Let's just say that you know you're in for an arduous journey when a film begins with a close-up of a flying bird. As far as we can tell, the plot is kinda about a hippy-dippy artist girl (Ana) from Ibiza, who repeatedly gets hypnotized to discover her myriad past lives, and the film is divided up in segments counting down from 10, a la hypnosis. We fell asleep mid-way through (somewhere around chapter 5) and woke up to find Ana on a boat to America. Then there was a whole bunch of drunk Indians (no joke) and all kinds of mumbo-jumbo about mother goddesses and the patriarchy being the ultimate cause of violence. Somehow the movie ends up tackling the Iraq War and the Bush Administration, and if we hadn't hated this sack of contrived bullshit already, that would've certainly sealed the deal. By far, the worst movie we've seen in a *long* time. Almost as bad as Crash.
