The Spy And The Sparrow

Another Seattle film, featuring several cast members from that earlier abomination, The Whole Truth. At least this one does a bit to convince me that they're not terrible actors, although the overall tone is still pretty amateurish.

The story focuses on a newly retired spy trying to reconnect with his daughter who he hasn't spoken to in 30 years. A series of odd coincidences and unlikely characters contribute to a relatively weak climax, and the only thing anyone really learns is that the guy wasn't a neglectful father.

The direction and acting was decent, but the number of plot holes here is really irritating. For starters, the idea that nobody would notice random transfers of half a million dollars between bank accounts is a pretty big thing to just gloss over. An "offbeat" lawyer would fit better in a college stoner's basement, and isn't convincing at all.

But even with those aside, the entire plot hinges on characters doing random things for no reason, and especially on the main character's half sister hiding information for no reason, and in a way that's never explained at all. In a mainly character-driven piece like this, pivotal plot events hinging on stupid and unexplained actions is a problem.

The Dark Harbor

A lonely fisherman discovers that a woman and boy are living in his cupboard when they appear in the background of a dating video he has made.

Several humorous scenes throughout, but the characters are really, really weak basically the whole way through. The main character has an annoying tendency to pantomime instead of speaking as well, which I guess is supposed to characterise him as a buffoon, but just comes across as weird.

With no strong characterisation, it's hard to really care as the plot moves forward. Individual moments are okay, but as a whole piece it really doesn't work that well.

Prodigal Sons

The introduction from the SIFF volunteer described this as "a very brave" documentary. I can see some elements of that, certainly, but there's also a strong element of in-your-face attention grabbing, and a large amount of personal family stuff that really doesn't need to be aired in public.

The doc starts with Kim going back to Montana for a high school reunion, the first time she will see most of her high school friends since she ceased to be Paul, the starring quarterback. Even at this point, it feels like Kim is going into it with a mindset to seek out confrontation, but her old schoolmates don't rise to the bait.

At that point the focus switches to Kim's family, including her older adopted brother who sustained a head injury at 25 and is now prone to random violent mood swings. What follows is a litany of physical abuse followed by sobbing contrition. At one point they call the cops. The brother discovers he's the grandson of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth, which only puts him in a couple of extremely uncomfortable scenes with distant relatives in Bulgaria, and serves no real purpose in the documentary aside from a role which Kim admits she tried to force him into for her own feelings of acceptance.

In the end, there's really nothing interesting here. Yeah, families have a hard time with mentally damaged people. But framed from the point of view of a transgendered individual insecure in her own background and trying to force acceptance from a family member obviously not willing to give it doesn't really make for a good stage to make any real point.

Grace

The "demon baby" thing is not new to horror. And this may be my peculiar sense of the horror genre, but I think it's done best when there's some element of actual evil or malice to the child.

In Grace, a woman's husband dies in a horrible car accident, and shortly after she nearly miscarries. However, despite the insistence of her midwife, doctor, and meddling mother-in-law, she delivers the baby who is miraculously alive.

At this point the movie seems to be going down the road of some kind of demonic possession or something supernatural, since the baby starts to stink, attract flies, bleed when bathed, and feed only on human blood. But the film never really commits, as the child never shows any kind of intelligence, and heals from his decrepit state for no particular reason.

This, plus a poorly supported lesbian relationship with the midwife that comes completely out of left field, make this more confusing than anything. Well directed and acted for the first part, but the lack of any satisfying conclusion made this one pretty forgettable.

Egon & Dönci

I'm usually pretty forgiving of animated films. Stuff aimed at kids can be pretty basic and unpolished and still very charming. But this was just irritating. Featuring almost no dialogue, the characters instead make retarded grunting and wheezing noises to communicate. And while there does seem to be a plot, the entire thing also feels more than a bit like an extended music video, breaking out into 5 minute techno light shows more than a couple times. Probably great to watch stoned, but not really my thing right now.

Bluebeard

Bluebeard is based on a very charming idea. Two young girls are playing in an attic when one of them starts to read the story of Bluebeard to the other, and we are presented with a re-enactment of the story they read (a folk tale in which a young girl marries a misunderstood rich-but-ugly man).

At first the execution seems good. The young girls in the meta-story are charming and very cute together, and the fairy tale portion is done pretty well. However, before it really gets a chance to go anywhere, the story begins to take odd turns. Poorly placed breaks to the meta-story to reveal random details of their school and home life, or discourses on marriage and homosexuality, while charming, don't seem to really fit. And the folk tale takes an odd turn from somewhat realistic to fairy tale logic. One or the other would be fine, but the shift in tone is confusing.

In addition, the cinematography becomes increasingly cheesy as the film progresses, not least due to a sequence of staircase ascent/descent shots which are done by repeating a single shot of the actor walking past a camera 4 times in a row.

*** SPOILER ALERT ***

The last five minutes really kills it for me, though. At the climactic moment of the fairy tale, one of the meta-girls scares the other and she falls to her death, while the French cavalry show up in a complete deus ex machina moment and save the heroine from her suddenly murderous husband. The film ends with a 20 second shot of her staring at the camera stroking his bloody severed head on a platter. Basically it's a total cop-out in both stories, and while it seems like it's supposed to be climactic, it falls completely flat.

Not a total loss, since the first half or so is pretty nice, but pretty deeply flawed as well.

Warlords

A friend had this to say after seeing this movie: "There are movies where Jet Lee cries, and then there are good Jet Lee movies." I'm paraphrasing, but the point is valid. There's something about a movie that requires Jet Lee to cry, and further that fails to require him to kick a tremendous amount of ass, that just doesn't really work.

Warlords is the story of three friends who rise through the Chinese military in some ancient dynasty in a series of daring victories. Fighting, betrayal, and intrigue end up with a lot of people dead, but by the end I was having a hard time caring. The visuals are beautiful as always in this type of film, and the acting and music are fine as far as that goes. The plot gets pretty fragmented in the second act, though, which really doesn't help make me care about the climax. Maybe worth seeing if you're into this particular sub-genre, but as someone who really isn't, I can't say that I recommend it.

Sleep Dealer

Sleep Dealer is an interesting but unfocused attempt at a pretty rare category (Mexican sci-fi). The science fiction elements could be compelling; bio-feedback interfaces allow day-laborers in Mexico to run construction robots and other unappealing jobs in the USA by remote, and poor quality electronics and working conditions leave many blind or worse.

On the other hand, the acting is not great, and the second half of the story turns pretty milquetoast. The ending packs no punch, and the science aspect could have been left out almost entirely without the plot changing, which makes its inclusion a bit confusing.

Fields of Fuel

It's hard to come in to a documentary about such an important and interesting subject and be so badly disappointed. Bio-fuels have a nearly endless amount of material to talk about, but from the first minute Fields of Fuel launched head-on into a glowing biopic of "a lone bio-fuels champion fighting against corporate America." Which might not be too bad, except the lone hero is also the director of the film. Ridiculously indulgent scenes such as staring straight into the camera and exclaiming in a shocked voice, "I'd been back and forth across the country educating people, and nothing had changed!" made me want to throw things at the screen.

The focus broadened out a bit in the second half, but never seemed to get beyond "Documentary Light." Easy on the facts, heavy on the "think of the children" rhetoric, and not particularly good at either. Since the director was present people had a chance to ask about the recent media backlash against bio-fuels, and his responses to those questions were far more interesting than anything in the film itself, which is really a shame.

Stalags - Holocaust and Pornography in Israel

You'd think there would be some easy subject material in the fact that for 30 years the only pornographic literature you could buy in Israel was Nazi dominatrix themed. And while there are a couple interesting interviews, this documentary mostly falls flat.

The main problem seems to be a lack of focus. The film jumps around to different events and time periods in direct contradiction of basic causation, leaving the viewer disoriented. Even worse, the subject of the film seems to switch halfway through from the Stalag publications of the title to a since dis-proven account of sexual slavery of Jewish women in concentration camps.

Both potentially interesting subjects, but the change in subject is jarring and disorienting, and the film seems to make no point upon reaching its conclusion, nor even really provide the raw material with which the viewer can draw their own moral.

Blood Brothers

I have to be honest: I fell asleep during this filming. Partly because I was worn out from a full weekend of SIFF, and partly because, well, it's just not that great.

Blood Brothers is trying to be a classic gangster film retold in an asian setting. Men wear vests, suits, and fedoras, and smoke cigars. Women wear slinky dresses and sing jazz in smoky lounges while their mafia don boyfriends look on. Young kids from the country move to the big city and get caught up in a world of crime. Oh, and lots and lots of people get shot.

Maybe I just don't get asian facial expressions. I'm sure there's some cultural disconnect there. But none of the acting struck me as particularly believable. The sets were pretty, and the overall feel had some good character, but there were a lot of little details missing -- the smoky lounges weren't smoky, the don's girlfriend wasn't sophisticated enough, and everything felt a bit plastic. Just not my thing.

They didn't completely fail at what they were trying for, but they really didn't get all that close either.

Vexille

Dystopian technophobe futuristic sci-fi with Japan cast as the villain is, well, pretty unusual to find in anime. Vexille follows a group of elite commandos in the US army and their mission to infiltrate Japan, which has been out of contact for ten years. It seems someone's been building totally life-like androids, and it's our job to find out who.

Great CG and effects make this extremely easy on the eyes. Japanese voices playing supposedly American characters are a little less impressive. Bad, really bad, horrible dialog is a shame, since much of the rest of the film is pretty neat. The characters are pretty light; this is a plot movie, and saying any more would ruin the surprise.

Stands up well against most other one-off anime films. Decent if you're into sci-fi, even if you're not an anime fan. That's about it, though. If cheesy lines and bad science piss you off, you might want to skip this one, because they're peppered throughout.

Epitaph

Following on from such a gripping thriller as TransSiberian, I'm not sure what could have competed in the horror genre. Epitaph wasn't it, but it wasn't bad.

A mildly confusing prologue leads in to three intermingling ghost stories set in a Korean (I think) hospital around WWII. Beautiful period sets and outfits are enjoyable, and the scenes are pretty enough. The acting is quite decent, although maybe nothing special. The plot itself, though, is overly confusing and a bit cliche.

Maybe I was tired, but it took too long to make the context switch between the first and second ghost, which pulled me out of the narrative. And of the three ghosts, only the second was really scary. The others went for cheap shocks and triple-bluff surprises, and were not scary at all. Maybe that's the point, since classic ghost stories are not necessarily supposed to be terrifying, but the stories aren't quite strong enough to carry it without that strong emotion to draw you in.

Worth seeing if you're a fan of the Japanese Horror genre, or maybe horror in general, but otherwise you won't be missing much.

Eat, For This Is My Body

I haven't seen a lot of art school output, but from this film I feel reasonably certain that some teachers at the New York Film Institute like slow walking nudes and phrasal repetition just a bit too much.

Eat is surrealist to the extreme, featuring little or no coherence between scenes, and no meaningful dialog for the bulk of the movie. Some cinematography was certainly striking and beautiful, and the acting was quite good, what there was of it. Personally I'm going to blame the writer/director for indulging a bit too much in basic art film gotchas, but whatever the reason this movie dragged.

Now, while I really disliked the pacing and overuse of slow walking, it's obvious that the film contains nearly critical levels of symbolism, and did a decent job of getting people to try to think, provided they could stay awake to see the imagery. Sadly, it may have overshot its goal there; you can only get so abstract before watchers stop thinking about the target of your symbolism and start thinking about the symbolism itself.

Here's what I gleaned from the movie (don't read on if you want to be surprised, but I can't imagine this movie being spoiled by anything you might hear about it): the writer thinks the natives of Haiti are spoiling the island and using up its bounty without giving anything back or protecting renewable resources. He also thinks that white, foreign nations are disingenuous and self-serving in their offers of aide, and that Haitian culture lusts after the first world's lifestyle. Call me a philistine, but I think those points could have been made in less time, and with less self-indulgence, and without any of the many beautiful aspects of this film.

Mother of Tears

So it's the end of the first day, and I have something to confess... I love trashy B-reel horror films. Low budget, cheesy lines, bad acting, and buckets of blood. It's a guilty pleasure. Mother of Tears is apparently the third in a trilogy that I've heard of but never seen, beginning with Suspirio, and it does deliver all those elements in, well, buckets.

There's the prerequisite occult connection to the distant past, in the form of an urn dug up just outside church grounds in a small town in Italy and sent to Rome. There's the plucky heroine who narrowly escapes the gruesome murder of her co-worker by weird creatures who look suspiciously like the Plaque Gang from that old toothpaste commercial. There's chases, blood, nudity, more blood, bad dialog and suspiciously helpful coincidences, nudity, and more blood. But for some reason, it all fell a little flat for me.

I think it's that this type of thing needs a pretty solid narrative to structure the cheesy effects and bad dialog. As soon as the narrative becomes fractured enough that I start losing track of what's going on between scenes, I start to get bored. And while I don't need everything explained outright, I need weird events to at least fit into a framework of events or symbolism that doesn't take a film degree to come up with. That, and I really dislike it when parts are played by people who are very obviously Actors(tm), and there were a number of them here. Not the worst thing I've seen, but there were too many places where they were trying too hard to really get behind this one.