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SIFF - 6/6/2006 »

SIFF - 6/4/2006

Films Today: 4
Running Total: 24
Second Sunday of SIFF, and the second Secret Fest film. No real comments, but the film was fun and entertaining. Secret Fest has far surpassed last year already and we’re only two films in. Thumbs up SIFF programmers.

Second film was a Roya pick - The Puffy Chair. Now I wil say up front I expected this movie to suck. I figured it was going to be another dumb indie comedy in the vein of last year’s Max And Grace (which I see now has gotten a new title.) Well, I was wrong. This is actually a film of surprising depth and feeling. It’s not really a comedy at all, its more of a relationship drama with comedic elements, or elements that are so over the top that they’re funny. You may laugh in the last half hour, but it’s not funny. All three of the leads are excellent, but in particular lead actress Kathryn Aselton gives a nuanced and touching performance. During a late night party scene and its aftermath, she moves from one emotion to another completely convincingly. The film’s ending hits just the right note, it couldn’t be more perfect, especially a conversation with the lead character and his father. I believe this is getting a release so i recommend going to check it out. This is my most pleasant surprise of the fest. Great soundtrack too.

Back across town to Neptune for Wristcutters: A Love Story, about the place where people go when they commit suicide. It’s not heavy though, it’s a light comedy drama. I found it to be fine, it never really took off for me but it held my interest throughout. Some of the nooks and crannies of the story are fun, and watching Tom Waits do his thing is always entertaining. The ending was a little too precious for my tastes.

Finally it was back to Egyptian to meet up with Chris for Little Red Flowers which currently holds my award for most irritating film of the festival. This movie is a bout a small child who is taken to a boarding school where the rules are very strict (right down to when you take a crap every day.) This child is not a fan of these rules and starts to rebel in a variety of ways, peaking with an admittedly effective scene in which he convinces all the children to attempt to capture the teacher because she’s a child-eating monster. After this fails he just continues to flaunt the rules and make an annoyance of himself. This is obviously supposed to be a statement about individuality in the face of oppression or something, but it didn’t work for me. The biggest problem was that I found the lead character completely irritating, and apparently I was alone in this because the whole audience would go “awwwwww” whenever he did something.

A bigger problem for me was undoubtedly the rampant child nudity throughout the picture. Every single scene had a 5 or 6 year old boy with his wang hanging out, and a couple even showed him peeing (like actual pee streaming out not just an implied shot of him peeing.) After a while this became totally distracting and irritating to me. I mean, does the filmmaker not know that real perverts are going to discover this film and use it for their own pleasure? If it was me I would cover the kids up simply to deny the freaks the opportunity. I suspect this is a cultural thing. This was the third Asian film I have seen at SIFF that feature child nudity and/or bathroom activities (one actually showed a child shitting, like the poo coming out and everything.) Also, Roya stated she wasn’t bothered by this but then admitted that she is sick of seeing rape scenes in films. This of course reminded me of a discussion I once took place in regarding Irreversible in which someone had mentioned that the rape scene had been removed from the context of the film and distributed on the internet standalone. My feeling at that time is perverts will do what they will and one shouldn’t compromise their filmmaking to avoid them. So, you know, who knows. Maybe its a personal thing. So this movie was annoying to me but I will acknowledge that the problem may lie as much with me as it.


This entry was posted on Sunday, June 18th, 2006 at 4:01 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.

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