SIFF Day 4 (Secret Fest #1, In The Shadow Of The Moon, Rescue Dawn)

So I have pledged that I am going to go through and day by day reconstruct SIFF as if it were still going on until done. This is my pledge to you my reader!

So today was our first film of Secret Fest, and it was probably my least favorite of the four. I will not spoil anything about it, except to say that it was wayyyyy too loud. I almost pulled the earplugs out of my bag, it was that loud. This turned out to be quite commonplace at Egyptian screenings throughout the festival. Even though this was my least favorite of the secrets, I did like a couple of the performances and it held my interest throughout.

Next we joined socialretard for In The Shadow Of The Moon, a documentary about the Apollo program and America’s quest to land a man on the moon. I was somewhat skeptical of this, we’ve all heard this story a hundred times, but I’m interested in the topic so I checked it out. I’m glad I did too because this is extremely well done. At its core it is just a talking heads doc, but it had some fantastic production values including a pile of never-before-seen footage that the production team wrangled out of NASA’s vaults as NASA was preparing to digitally encode it in HD. Much of this footage was somewhat rough, but director David Sington chose not to clean it up. As he said in the Q&A aftyerwards, “Those scratches were made by moon dust! That’s what it was like up there! I’m not cleaning that stuff up.” I agree with this decision. The one noteworthy thing about the film is that Neil Armstrong does not appear, as he is apprently somewhat reclusive and almost never gives interviews. This is kind of cool though, if he had actually appeared in the film he would have overshadowed everyone else whereas now everyone gets their chance to shine.

If there is one negative, its the end of the film in which some of the astronauts go off on a tangent about the current state of affairs in America and trying to make some environmental points. I don’t begrudge them their right to say this stuff, but I made a conscious decision to avoid “issue docs” this year and I was a little peeved to have this stuff pushed in a doc about the moon landings. Even this had a bright side though, as a couple other astronauts were shown discussing their faith and how belief in god drives their life, so at least the choice to include the environmental stuff wasn’t simple liberal kneejerkism on the part of the director. I wish I could say the same about the audience, who actually hissed out loud during stock footage of Richard Nixon giving a speech. Man I really fucking hate Seattle audiences sometimes.

Our final film of the day was one of my most anticipated of the festival, Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn. I had been seriously looking forward to this every since reading an incredibly entertaining article about its filming in The New Yorker (sadly not available online.) Rescue Dawn is probably the closest thing we’ll ever see to a big budget Hollywood film from Herzog, a fictionalized remake of his documentary Little Dieter Needs To Fly starring Christian Bale and Steve Zahn. The film looks great, in typical Herzog fashion he dragged his entire crew into the jungles of Thailand, and you can really feel the atmosphere gushing from every frame. Bale and Zahn are both great as well. However I was not a fan at all of the ending, which was just… I won’t say it was wrong, but it really didn’t ring well for me. Especially the final scene was so rah-rah and over the top that it felt like we were watching Independence Day or something. I found it hard to believe this was a Herzog film, it was pretty much the polar opposite to what you would expect from him. It is still worth seeing, but I was prepared to be blown away and was not. <foreshadowing>This is a feeling I would get very used to by the end of SIFF</foreshadowing>

This entry was posted on Monday, June 18th, 2007 at 12:09 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.