SIFF - 5/26/05

Films Today: 2
Running Total: 2

Ok lets get this shit on the road shall we? I should just scan the pages out of my notebook and upload them. That would be entertaining, I can hardly read them myself.

So this is Friday the first day of SIFF film attendance. We ended up first in line for Pusher by Nicolas Winding Refn from Denmark. Sitting first in line, it turns out, sucks. You become a magnet for every asshole with a question regarding anything. The most common of these is “what movie are you standing in line for?”, invariably asked by someone trying to see X Men: The Last Stand which was showing on like 20 screens at Pacific Place. At first I would respond “Pusher” and just get a blank stare, then I started responding “Film Festival” and that resulted in an only slightly less blank stare but I’ll take what I can get. The only exception to this was the guy who asked if this was the ticket holders line, then proceeded to attempt to get into a conversation about “how weird it is because they USUALLY do ticket holders INSIDE and pass holders OUTSIDE. I mean, isn’t that weird how they changed it? Aren’t I cool because I’ve been to the film festival before? Won’t you please validate my existence?” No. Go away. I hope to never be first again.

So on to Pusher, the story of Frank, a drug dealer who is having a really bad fucking week. The first half of it threatened to get bogged down in a series of overly Tarantino-esque conversational daily life scenes, but it really took off in the middle as Frank got beaten down by bad beats. Frank is developed far better than your standard gangster character, and some of the later scenes involving him and his sort-of-but-not-really-girlfriend Vic bordered on touching or even heartbreaking. There’s a scene where he reaches out to touch her shoulder but can’t bring himself to just you know, be a human being, that was pretty kind of amazing. The ending is a stunner, its one of those ones where I was saying to myself “Please stop here, please stop here, right now…YES!” So perfect. Everyone is great in it, and it has this rocking soundtrack from a pile of Danish metal bands. The hand-held cinematography looks great and does the job exactly as it should. Apparently this has a big cult following having come out in 1996, but I had never heard of it before the fest. It’s on DVD, go check it out. The director, Nicolas Winding Refn, was there for Q&A and he’s a really articulate speaker whose English is very good. He talks about how he really wanted to focus the films on the character’s internal struggles rather than making traditional gangster/drug movies, and he succeeds quite well in all of them (although the quality drops in the last installment as you’ll read later.) Many of the actors outside the leads are real gangsters in Denmark and some of the drugs were real. I remember hearing Darren Aronofsky say this same thing about Requiem For A Dream. I didn’t know how I felt about it then and I still don’t. Refn shoots all his films in chronological order! Thats all I have for fascinating Q&A facts until tomorrow.

Pusher II was up next, and it was a very different beast although still quite good. A much more quiet story, far less visceral, it takes on the life of Tonny who was Frank’s sidekick in Pusher. Tonny is kind of an oaf, and his dad is a big crime boss, and II focuses a great deal on their relationship and Tonny’s budding relationship with his just-discovered son. Another great set of performances in a much more low-key movie, but again great action combined with real emotional depth to make a quality film from all angles. I was struck by how much the ending resembles, of all things, The Graduate. I’m sure there are a lot of people out there comparing these films to The Sopranos, but I don’t know if I buy into that. I can see the comparison because both of them are trying to make serious drama within genre restrictions. However the Pusher films are more fractured and broken. I don’t have a real grasp on this feeling yet, so I’ll just leave it there and maybe expand later if I can (ha ha ha thats gonna happen.)

So there is Day One. Roya has been following the audience watch, however I have to make an additional comment - I do not understand these people who have to repeat back every word they see on the screen. During Pusher there were intertitles at various points, and the person behind us kept saying them out loud as they appeared … and she said them in the Danish! What the fuck is that all about? Are you so addicted to the sound of your own voice that you can’t go 15 minutes without hearing it? Do you just assume that the rest of us are too stupid to be able to read? Are you trying to impress your friends? That is one behavior that has always been completely mind-boggling to me.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 28th, 2006 at 8:28 pm and is filed under Movies, SIFF 2006. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.