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May 23, 2008

Sea Your Fest, 1

It's amazing how quickly I settle into a 5-film day.

Year after year I go to festival after festival and yet, it's easy to forget that it's second nature to me to juggle a bunch of movie experiences each day... as I think it is for most of my critical brethren.

The first film of the day was actually not a Seattle International Film Festival movie, but rather a terrific doc about Jimmy Carter by Jonathan Demme, The Man From Plains. And I watched it (well, most of it)… taa dah!... on my iPhone after renting it from Apple iTunes.

It was the first time I tried the rental experience and the results, for me, were mixed. The 30-day period you have to start watching the film is good. The 24-hour period you have to finish watching the film kinda sucks. As I imagine a lot of renters and potential renters for iTunes are, I was in a business traveling situation. And though I had 2.5 hours on an airplane, sleeping for an hour meant not seeing the whole movie… and landing in Seattle with other things to do meant that I would not return to my iPhone to watch a doc inside the allotted 24 hours. (The countdown pop-up on the phone each time I turned it on was cool… though doubly frustrating.) Thing is, the rental is much more profitable for studios than me renting a DVD via Blockbuster or Netflix… yet the experience is even more restrictive… for no real reason. I will never rent that movie again… and surely not buy it. So as good an experience as the movie was, the rental experience was not.

The festival’s opening night film was Battle In Seattle, the Stuart Townsend directed political potboiler starring an array of known faces. The film also played in Sundance, but remains without domestic distribution. Thing is, it was a perfect choice for Seattle, where a good half of the audience lived through the WTO riots. As a result, the screening was like going to a concert by your favorite 80s band… you love every minute but you do notice how creaky the old boys are.

Townsend did a decent job for a first timer, showing some of the classic mistakes, but getting what he needed on film. Townsend the screenwriter and concept creator, however, didn’t get the job done for the director. Simply, the documentary footage outshone every single idea he had for a dramatic narrative. There was no reason for this fictionalized feature to exist and all the reason in the world to wish Townsend had spent the last 6 years on a documentary about this… because that might have been sensational.

And of course – SPOILER – there is the old Hitler-in-an-argument thing… if you need to compare someone to Hitler to make the point, you have already lost the argument. Here, if you need to have the cops hit the pregnant woman in the belly with a club, you have lost an serious effort to make you narrative feel real and not just a mile over the top (even if such an event did occur… I have no idea, actually.) END SPOILERS

The cast was good. Andre Benjamin continues to show he will make it as an actor if he likes. And we continue to wonder if Michelle Rodriguez will ever get past her reputation as a handful to become the movie star she really should be… she really is insanely charismatic on camera.

Anyway…

The other three films I saw were festival films, two docs and one pseudo-doc. And I really was moderately okay with only one of them. As a rule, these are the kinds of films that I just don’t write about. Why kick a movie when it is seeking an audience that might appreciate them even when I don’t? And I do think that two of the films, made in highly stylized ways, will find some who are passionate about them. The third will also find a feel-good audience that isn’t too demanding.

And so it goes…

Posted by poland at May 23, 2008 04:45 PM

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Posted by: SJRubinstein at May 23, 2008 07:05 PM

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