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    San Francisco International Film Festival 2010

    FILMLEAF SFIFF 2010 COMMENTS THREAD

    San Francisco International Film Festival 2010
    ____________


    SFIFF 2010 (April 22-May 6)

    MY REVIEWS OF FILMS SEEN AT OR AFTER THE FESTIVAL:

    Air Doll (Hirakasu Koreeda 2009)
    Alamar (Pedro González-Rubio 2009)
    Brand New Life, A (Ouunie Lecomte 2009)
    Cargo (Ivan Engler, Ralph Etter 2009)
    Domain (Patric Chiha 2009)
    Famous and the Dead, The (Esmir Filha 2009)
    Gainsbourg (Je t'aime...moi non plus (Joann Sfar) (2010)
    Linha de Passe (Walter Salles, Daniela Thomas 2008)
    Lourdes (Jessica Hausner 2008)
    Loved Ones, The (Sean Byrne 2009)
    Man Who Will Come, The (Giorgio Diritti 2009)
    Moscow (Whang Cheoul-mean 2009)
    My Dog Tulip (Paul and Sandra Fierlinger 2009)
    My Queen Karo (Dorothée Van Den Berghe 2009
    Pianomania (Robert Cibis, Lilian Frank 2009)
    Practice of the Wild, The (John J. Healey 2010)
    Restrepo (Sebastian Junger, Tim Hetherington 2010) (
    Russian Lessons (Andrei Nekrasov, Olga Konskaya 2009)
    Seducing Charlie Parker (Amy Glazer 2010)
    Splice (Vincenzo Natali 2010)
    Transcending Lynch (Marcos Andrade 2010)
    White Meadows, The (Mohammad Rasoulof 2009)
    Winter's Bone (Debra Granik 2010)
    You Think You're the Prettiest, But You're the Sluttiest (Che Sandoval 2008)


    MY REVIEWS OF SFIFF FILMS I SAW PREVIOUSLY:

    Around a Small Mountain (Jacques Rivette 2009)
    Bill Cunningham New York (Richard Press 2010)
    Everyone Else (Maren Ade 2009)
    Father of My Children, The (Mia Hansen-Lřve 2009)
    Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont 2010)
    Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno (Serge Bomberg, Ruxandra Medea 2009)
    How I Ended This Summer (Alexei Popogrebsky 2010)
    Lebanon (Samuel Moaz 2009)
    Making Plans for Lena (Christophe Honoré 2009)
    Nénette (Nicholas Philibert 2010)
    Night Catches Us (Tanya Hamilton 2101)
    Oath, The (Laura Poitras 2009)
    Soul Kitchen ((Fatih Akin 2009)
    Tehroun (Nader T. Homayoun 2009)
    Last Train Home (Fan Tixan 2009)
    To Die Like a Man (Joăo Pedro Rodrigues 2009)
    White Material (Claire Denis 2009)
    Wild Grass (Alain Renais 2009)


    I ALSO SAW AT NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS BUT DID NOT REVIEW THESE SFIFF 2010 SELECTIONS:

    Northless (Rigoberto Pérezcano 2009)
    Pivellina, La (Tizza Covi, Rainer Frimmel 2009)

    Nénette and Soul Kitchen I saw in Paris; the others were included either in the NYFF 2009, the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2010, or New Directors/New Films 2010.



    THE SFIFF WILL BE HONORING WALTER SALLES AS WELL AS ROBERT DUVALL AND JAMES SCHAMUS THIS YEAR (ABOVE) .
    AWARDS ARE GOING TO ROGER EBERT AND DON HERZFELDT TOO.



    An overview

    The festival opening night film was Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Micmacs, a film about one man's war against weapons manufacturers. The centerpiece film is Josh Radnor's Happythankyouplease, a tale of twentysomethings livoing in lower Manhattan. The finale will be a showing of the documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (Ricki Stern, Anne Sundberg), with Ms. Rivers to be honored.

    "An array of first- and second-time directors are competing for this year's coveted New Directors Prize with films including Alamar (dir. Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio – Mexico), The Day God Walked Away (dir. Philippe van Leeuw – France/Belgium), and Susa (dir. Rusudan Pirveli – Georgia).

    Entries into the World Cinema category include Cyrus, the new, mature film from mumblecore heroes the Duplass brothers starring Marissa Tomei, John C. Reilly and Jonah Hill that was a hit at Sundance. Other highlights are Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (dir. Jan Kounen – France), Air Doll (dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda – Japan), and I Am Love (dir. Luca Guadagnino – Italy) starring Tilda Swinton.

    In addition to the films, there’s a multitude of awards and tributes during the festival. This year’s recipients include actor Robert Duval (Peter J. Owens Award), director Walter Salles (Founder’s Directing Award), and screenwriter James Schamus (Kanbar Award). All three will be honored with screenings, clips, and live interviews discussing their work. Roger Ebert will also be honored with the Mel Novikoff Award for his work in influencing the public’s knowledge and appreciation of world cinema. Don Hertzfeldt will receive the prestigious Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award for his outstanding work in animation

    One of the biggest changes to this year’s festival is the expansion of the Live & Onstage program. Rachel Rosen, director of programming for the San Francisco Film Society notes “live appearances by special guests are one of the most exciting aspects of the festival,” and she’s not lying.

    This year there are some great interactive events with influential names in the business. A Conversation with T Bone Burnett has the Oscar- and Grammy-winning musician discussing his experience working on acclaimed films like O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Crazy Heart.

    Those looking to laugh should check out A Drunken Evening with Derek Waters and Wholphin.Writer/actor Derek Waters will screen some of his acclaimed short films, including his internet sensation Drunk History series, followed by a conversation with Wholphin editor Brent Hoff."--Martian Malloy, SFStation.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 08-06-2014 at 12:55 PM.

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    Giorgio Diritti: The Man Who Will Come (2009)--SFIFF

    Giorgio Diritti: The Man Who Will Come (2009)--SFIFF


    GRETA ZUCCHERI MONTANARI

    Flawed telling of a horrific story

    Between September 29 and October 5 1944 from Monte Sole, an area of the Appenine Mountains near Bologna, a Nazi SS. officer named Weder reported "the execution of 728 bandits," according to one writer; most accounts say the actual number was 770. The victims in fact were simply villagers -- women, children and old men for the most part -- massacred in the Marzabotto incident, an act of vicious revenge carried out after the Italian partisans in the region had killed a few German soldiers and it was suspected that the locals were protecting them.

    Diritti meticulously builds up his picture of the period and the people with a large and talented cast speaking in Bolognese dialect so remote from standard Italian the film is subtitled for Italian viewers. This is a story never told on film before, an eye opener for anyone and a deeply moving story for Italians: L'uomo che verrŕ was a sensation at last year's Rome Film Festival, where it won both the grand jury prize and the audience award. It is powerful festival material.

    Precise realism and a harrowing viewing experience as the horrific murders of the innocent are depicted in a prolonged sequence do not save the film, however, from a measure of sentimentalism and artificiality that grows out of the loving cameos of villagers and picturesque scenes that romanticize their harsh life whether in dazzling winter snow or in a summer of bursting flowers and CGI lightening bugs.

    The villagers are mostly farmers whose rustic charm and simplicity director Diritti heightens. There are various points of view presented, though only Italian; the German dialogue is not even translated. At the center of the tale is an eight-year-old girl of preternatural beauty, Martina (Greta Zuccheri Montanari), who wanders around freely, miraculously managing to escape alive. She has already gone mute after seeing a brother stillborn, but ends by saving another newborn male child born at a time of horror. Her mother and father have been killed. Lead actress Maya Samsa (central in Bellocchio's Good Morning, Nightt) plays Martina's mother Lena, beautiful too but weary. One can wonder at the interiors, the clothes, the rangy boys with gaunt but handsome faces, the priests, the schoolteachers, the toothless old men, evoking Rossellini and Pasolini -- but, alas, with a mainstream touch, and looks outstrip words when some speeches are wooden or conversations lack natural rhythm. This is closer to the Taviani brothers of La notte di San Lorenzo. -- another tale of Italian villagers fleeing Nazis -- but without that film's clearcut narrative trajectory.

    The difference here, commendable in principle yet creating structural weaknesses, is that Diritti eschews a discernible story line. The early sequences are far too random, and even as the terrible event comes on, scenes tend to jump forward without any particular logic. What's made clear -- though this too is a kind of idealization -- is that the country folk are proud and independent, having no more use for the fascists than for the Germans, considering war a foolish game for the rich and powerful. Yet it's also noted that the local partisan leader, "The Wolf," "can't lead" in the view of some because he refuses to engage in politics. The film's effort to dramatize a peasant point of view is admirable, but tends to sentimentalize. There is no attempt to provide a rounded picture of the Germans, or to explain what led up to their atrocity.

    Italians sometimes complain their cultural heritage is so rich it's stifling, leaving them with nothing new to say. Some of their contemporary art suffers from refinement of technique; it's too steeped in tradition to move forward. Diritti's film faces that problem. Furthermore, chronicling a very specific event from wartime Italian history about which feelings are intense leaves even less wiggle room. Andrzej Wajda encountered the same problem with his Katyn.

    Seen at the San Francisco International Film Festival 2010, where the digital projection -- ironically because much of the cinematography is beautiful -- further heightened the digital camerawork's flat lighting effects. As Variety reviewer Jay Weisberg wisely comments, the use of a children's choir for background tips the scale dangerously into sentimentality, especially given the use of a mute girl as the central figure. Diritti wrote, directed, and edited. Diritti's 2005 feature, The Wind Blows Round, was well received.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 05-16-2010 at 01:39 PM.

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    Hirokazu Koreeda: Air Doll (2009)--SFIFF

    Hirokazu Koreeda: Air Doll (2009)



    Nobody feels

    Bong Joon-ho's contribution to the trilogy film Tokyo! was about one of Tokyo's hikikomori, radical isolates who carry Japanese shyness to an extreme and refuse ever to go outside. We've also seen Ryan Gosling in Lars and the Real Girl, which shows a young man whose significant other is a lifesize sex toy and whose family goes along with the fiction that "she" is real. Now we have Koreeda's Air Doll (Kűki ningyô) , which in a sense blends elements of both these stories. Hideo (Itsuji Itao) is a waiter living in a miserable industrial suburb who comes home every day to Nozomi, his lovely wife whom he bathes, has sex with, serves dinner to, chats with, and says goodbye to every morning. Nozomi is an inflatable doll. However Nozomi has a secret life of her own in the film, which is exquisitely filmed by Taiwonese cinematographer Mark Lee but succeeds more visually than otherwise. She comes to life after Hideo leaves, morphing into a real woman (played by Korean actress Bae Du-na of The Host and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance) who displays a sweet, innocent enthusiasm for the world. Unlike Bong's hiddomori episode or Lars, this film is a fairy tale rather than social and psychological study, and at times it becomes preachy, or slips into the realms of the sentimental or the obvious. A fundamental weakness of the concept is that when the air doll goes out into the world, she is played by a real live actress and no longer seems like an air doll, despite wide-eyed looks and jerky movements.

    Koreeda (After Life, Nobody Knows) has excelled in spinning out wafer-thin subjects about love, loss, and loneliness into compelling films. Here, working from a 20-page graphic short story published in 2000 by manga artist Yoshiie Gouda, he takes the material further than it is quite capable of going. For the Japanese audience the film may have more meaning, playing successfully as it does with the culture's fascination with cuteness, its predilection for extremes of politesse, and for imitation and mimicry -- and, needless to say, the passive role of women. And there is delicacy here, even though it risks being cloying, and there are thought-provoking moments, despite the didacticism.

    Nozomi goes out into the neighborhood and develops a life of her own, getting a job at a video shop (a showcase of the make-believe that teaches her about the world) , meeting her maker, discovering she has a heart and falling in love with another man, the young shop clerk, Junichi (Arata), and developing a friendship with a crippled poet, while still returning to perform her passive duties for Hideo. Eventually her two separate lives become incompatible.

    The material is fragile and seems the more so from being spun out too long, into nearly two hours. Air Doll would be better, and have more chance of an international life outside festivals, if radically cut, relieved of the many repetitious physical sequences and a lot of the gratuitous philosophizing. It has a nice electronic score, a fearless performance by Bae Du-na, good use of its old neighborhood overrun by ugly rebuilding, many subsidiary characters that rarely develop three dimensions. Perhaps it is best that no one competes with the manikin subject.

    Seen as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival 2010. Included in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Festival, 2009. To be released in the US by Palisades-Tratan Pictures.

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    Whang Cheoul-mean: Moscow (2009)--SFIFF



    A Korean look at economic realities, class, and friendship

    In this lively Korean study of how changes in social status restructure personal relationships, two young women who were friends as young girls meet again and decide to spend time together, with somewhat explosive results. Times have changed and their stations in life are now very different. One now is a lowly secretary at an international corporation, but living a relatively comfortable life. The other is a recently laid off part-time factory worker who has abandoned a hunger strike she shared with her comrades. When they're reunited at the corporate secretary's instigation and stay together for a while, their different economic realities and different perceptions of the world rapidly erode their childhood friendship. This may sound schematic, but intense acting and lively action make it real.

    Jin-hee (Sung Su-jung) and Ye-won (Lee Hye-jin) were middle school classmates. Jin-hee is a factory worker turned pro-union labor activist. The intense and nervous Ye-won is somewhat exhausted by the tensions of her corporate job, a job that, as Jin-hee eventually points out to her, is at a place that doesn't allow unions, where workers have to tow the line unquestioningly. When she gets the opportunity to reminisce about the good old days with Jin-hee, Ye-won is eager to do so, and invites her old friend to come for an extended visit even though they now have little obviously in common any more other then a lingering enthusiasm for acting. Ye-won took an acting degree but went nowhere with it. Jin-hee had no such opportunity but shares the dream of acting success.

    The fascination of this film is its representation of the economic and political through the psychological and social. This is a process narrative, and the process is one of disintegration and reintegration. At first the two women are like schoolgirls, going around hand in hand, laughing, singing school songs and getting drunk together. Then gradually things go wrong as the charade of comradeship is invaded by the realities of the separate and differently unsatisfactory lives. Jin-hee has no patience with Ye-won's lack of awareness of bad labor conditions in their country. When Ye-won gives Jin-hee a present of a locally made MP3 player whose company brutally exploits its workers, Jin-hee explodes with anger at her insensitivity. Ye-won lives in a bubble, totally aware of the local exploitation of labor.

    Later, Jin-hee, who morphs from critic to imitator, begins to seem like the roommate from hell by the way she invades Ye-won's life, wearing her clothes and partying with her work associates and pestering her actor friends to let her audition (she memorizes a scene from Chekhov). Ye-won seethes with resentment, but Jin-hee is disturbed inside too. The honeymoon is over. The gradualness of the process is possible because the two actresses are both young and pretty. You can imagine them as interchangeable, had circumstances been different. Jin-hee's intense, almost pathetic enthusiasm for acting seems to enable her to become another person at times.

    The film's title refers to Chekhov's Three Sisters, in which the lead characters long to return to the Russian capital and its imagined perfection. It's a scene from that play that Jin-hee learns. Chekhov's play becomes a constant theme. Its similar focus on vanishing wealth and personal discomfort and aimlessness of the sisters parallels the trajectory of Moscow. Ye-won's bourgeois origins grate on Jin-hee, whose family ran out of money and were forced to leave their home town and robbed her of the key to success -- a university education -- that was automatically provided to Ye-won. Resentment over this fundamental difference fills their current relationship with anger. At the same time Jin-hee is tormented by her loss of confidence in her labor union activities. Perhaps the two have more in common after all -- except for social awareness and economic circumstances.

    Lee is subtle in the way she lets Ye-won's unease gradually reveal itself through little details. Sung has to be more overt in her portrayal because her character is less restrained but she's very good in what is a demanding role, and the understated finale where Jin-hee finally finally lets out her true feelings gives her an opportunity to show some nuance too. Both give fine performances, and they make the film work even though it suffers from delayed exposition and an ending that's protracted and anticlimactic. The screenplay by Kim Kyung Hyun could have used some tightening up. But in a male-dominated Asian culture it's good to see a strong, unsentimental drama about the relationship between two women. This isn't as sophisticated as the ironic skewering of male ego in Hong Sang-soo, but it's forceful and engaging.

    Seen as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival 2010.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 05-04-2010 at 10:40 AM.

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    Paul and Sandra Fierlinger: My Dog Tulip (2009)--SFIFF



    Dog days are good days

    J.R. Ackerley was a writer for the BBC from its foundation in the late Twenties till 1959 who was openly gay, a thing unusual for the time. He wrote with wit, bluntness, and honesty about his remote, but important, relationship with his colorful dad in his remarkable little book My Father and Myself. His semi-autobiographical novel, We Think the World of You, was made into the 1988 film by Colin Gregg with Alan Bates, Max Wall, Liz Smith and Gary Oldman. Despite plenty of sex in his younger years, he never found a life companion in maturity, and he found that the most important emotional connection of his adult life was his relationship with his canine pet, his "Alsatian bitch," which he described in another book, My Dog Tulip. (The dog's actual name, by the way, was Queenie. )

    This hand-drawn animated film, which is narrated by Christopher Plummer and includes the voices of Lynn Redgrave, Isabella Rossellini, and others, was adapted from that book. The images are of the charming, old-fashioned, wavery sort, a mixture of black and white line drawings and (more often) drawings colored in with watercolor. The entire film is constantly narrated by lines from the book. Somewhat oddly, when you see Ackerley on screen, he is usually represented as mouthing the words of the voiceover. You can ask yourself if the images were needed, since the words tell he same story. Sometimes events are understood better and more fully experienced in the mind's eye than when drawn for us with painful (or even witty) literalism. But the film brings the book, and Ackerley's wit and honesty, to a new audience.

    The book certainly is suited to animation rather than other form, since it consists so largely of events it would be difficult to stage and unpleasant to watch. Events, that is, like Tulip relieving herself at untimely moments, "marking" objects outdoors; and a lengthy effort to mate Tulip with a male Alsatian. The latter fails, though she eventually mates with a little mutt and has eight puppies, which Ackerley is immediately forced by his landlord to get rid of. He considers drowning them, but gives them away. He admits he doesn't do so responsibly, since he kept no track of where they went. And Tulip herself had an unfortunate upbringing, which Ackerley thought led to her skittishness, excessive barking, and almost pathological eagerness to go on walks.

    Ackerley took in his adult sister for a time in his Putney flat, partly to keep Tulip company while he was at work. A competition developed for Tulip's affections, but Ackerley won. There are various other characters, rude shopkeepers, owners of would-be mates for Tulip. Through a weekend with a former fellow officer we learn something about Ackerley's service in WWI.

    This film is amusing. It is accurate in a way most accounts of canine pets are not. You won't get the profound understanding of canines of a Konrad Lorenz or César Milan. In fact Ackerley dramatizes how comically ignorant humans are of dogs' inner workings.

    The book does not tell all. Its focus is very limited. Ackerley's relationship with Tulip (Queenie) was central in his life during those 16 years, which he says were the happiest of his life. Elsewhere we learn they were his most productive, partly because of his happy state, partly because Tulip's behavior in company reduced Ackerley's social life and so gave him more time to be writing. Considering that this was the relationship's central importance there might have been more about the physical affection between man and dog, the companionship, and how Ackerley drew sustenance from these. It seems somewhat peculiar that when Ackerley is talking about the more complex side of male-female canine relations the animators switch to black-and-white drawings of upright humans with canine heads and paws. It's their choice, not Ackerley's. Oddly, there is nothing about feeding the dog. But you clearly see how much of Ackerley's life was devoted to Tulip's needs, and you get a sense of how satisfying that was to him.

    Despite shortcomings, My Dog Tulip is a significant contribution to the literature of canine-human relations and a chance to hear a wonderfully dry, articulate English voice of the Fifties. The film premiered at Cannes and was well received at Annency, Vancouver, Toronto, and other festivals. I saw it as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival in April 2010.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 05-04-2010 at 10:46 AM.

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    John J. Healey: The Practice of the Wild (2010)--SFIFF

    John J. Healey: The Practice of the Wild (2010)


    GARY SNYDER WITH HIS DOG AND JIM HARRISON

    A glimpse of Gary Snyder

    This rambling short documentary about poet Gary Snyder's life and poetry begins with him saying some words from his book, The Practice of the Wild: “The wild requires that we learn the terrain, nod to all the plants and animals and birds, ford the streams and cross the ridges, and tell a good story when we get back home.” At one point in the film, Snyder mentions his distinction in the book between "nature," "the wild," and "wilderness." These are tantalizing hints at what the film might have been, an elucidation and extension of Snyder's complex and fascinating 1990 book, a collection about mankind's responsibility to the wild and duty to maintain a proper place on the planet and in his own space.

    But that is not exactly what happens. The film instead mixes conversation at a dinner table, chats walking and sitting between Snyder and his friend Jim Harrison, readings by Snyder of a few of his poems, and historical footage with biographical notes on Snyder's whole life, his studies of Chinse poetry, years in Japan, some of it at a Zen monastery, his participation in the legendary Six Gallery poetry reading in San Francisco on October 7, 1955 (his poem about ritual, "A Berry Feast," came last, right after Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"), his move to the Sierra foothills, his long stint teaching at UC Davis. There are some valuable talking head comments on the "Beats" by Philip Whalen and Snyder's interest in the Orient by his former wife Joanne Kyge.

    Linguist, poet, mountaineer, environmentalist, archeologist, teacher, lumberman, Zen Buddhist -- the number of roles Gary Snyder has played, the places he has lived, would strain a long, detailed documentary. Since the Eighties he has been more an environmentalist and at times seemed less of a poet, though the poetry has continued and has always expressed similar concerns.

    This little 53-minute film is a nice introduction to Snyder or a souvenir for admirers. But as a treatment of the topic of the essay book it is a disappointment, and it seems like a hodgepodge, all relevant, because the man is so complex yet so unified, but superficial, when the ideas in the book are profound and challenging. Recommended: read what you can of Gary Snyder's Practice of the Wild. If you come away understanding a fourth or a fifth of it, you'll be lucky. And by all means read Snyder's poetry. Unlike Dylan Thomas, Edith Sitwell, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Yeats, and some others, Snyder isn't a poet whose speaking voice seems essential to the appreciation of his texts.

    The Practice of the Wild, the film, was produced by Jim Harrison and William R. Hearst III, and edited by Robin Lee. It is a production of San Simeon Films, San Francisco. Seen as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival 2010.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 08-06-2014 at 12:52 PM.

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