SIFF Day 3 (Waiter, Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soapbox, Paris Je T’Aime)

The day started out badly with Waiter from Denmark, a shoddy entry into the “character in a script comes to life” genre. Lesson From SIFF: When a movie’s description draws a comparison to Charlie Kaufman, stay away. This whole thing has been done to death in the last few years, and far better than this. It is cute the first time but after the fifth time the character bursts into the screenwriter’s apartment yelling about how shitty his life is, I had had enough. This was the first but sadly not the last time I seriously considered walking out on a screening this year. The audience was howling, at what I have no idea. I even had one of those people behind me who would yell “OH NO!” whenever you could see that something was coming. A total waste.

Second up was Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap Box, a documentary about the life and family of E.H. Bronner, the guy who makes the soap with the wacky one world messages. I had never heard of this soap until Roya told me about this movie. I mean, I had seen it in supermarkets, I just didn’t know that all the words on it were this huge political rant. This was the second of many documentaries so far that, like the Lisa Gerrard film, had interesting characters and reasonably shoddy filmmaking. I am losing patience with this after a half-dozen or so, and I would have hoped SIFF programmers had set the bar a little higher.

Our third film of the day was the omnibus feature Paris Je T’aime, which featured 20 reasonably to seriously famous filmmakers each making a short film about a specific distrcit in Paris. We got there about a half hour early and noticed that the theatre was already half full of passholders. Then when I went upstairs to the bathroom, I noticed a very long line of about 50 more passholders waiting outside to get in. For those who don’t know, the seating hierarchy at SIFF works like this. Platinum Passholders get guaranteed seating for any film, up until showtime. So they are let in first. Then passholders are let in. A specific number of passholder seats are reserved out of the ticket pool for every film. If that allotment is reached, then the leftover passholders have to wait while the ticketed attendees are let in. After that if there are any empty seats left from no-shows, those seats go to waiting passholders, and if there are no waiting passholders then the seats go to the schlubs in the rush line. Now, the reality is that 95% of the time, the people in the rush line get in, and 99.9% of the time the full series passholders all get in. This was the first time I have ever seen the .1% happen. Apparently one of the passholders threw such a shit fit over not getting in that there was almost a fist fight. Keep in mind that this movie got released to the general public one week after this showing took place.

Anyways, back to the film. I enjoyed some segments more than others, and only about 1/4 were really dull. Top of the list, amazingly, was Alexander Payne, which was a shock to me since I so despised Sideways. I also greatly enjoyed Olivier Assayas’ entry which was probably the only one I could have really picked out of a lineup for its auteurial stamp. Possibly also Tom Tykwer who excelled as well. Certainly worth checking out on DVD.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 3rd, 2007 at 9:16 pm and is filed under Movies, SIFF 2007. 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.