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.
