SIFF Day 5 (King Of Kong, Murch, Fly Filmmaking Challenge)

I expected to enjoy King Of Kong, a documentary about a Redmond man attempting to break the world record score at Donkey Kong. I did not expect it to be my favorite film of the festival, but it was. Easily. It could have been boring, like every other damn doc that showed this year, but it wasn’t because the filmmakers understood the concept that a documentary is more than a collection of facts. A documentary should tell a story. Stories have a structure - beginning, middle, and end. They have drama and passion, something to root for, someone to love and someone to hate. They engage you emotionally. King Of Kong had all these things, and to top it off the movie even has great production values. This gets a release in a couple months and everyone needs to go.

Murch, on the other hand, is the exact opposite. It was 90 minutes of legendary film editor Walter Murch (The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, The English Patient), talking about his craft and his days coming up with Coppola and Lucas. I do not mean to imply that this was not interesting, it was. However aside from a couple of editing tricks the filmmakers took absolutely no advantage of the language of cinema to tell their story. In fact there was no story at all, a story has a beginning and middle and end. This may as well have been an audio book. At the post-screening Q&A, co-director Edie Ichioka (herself one of Murch’s assistants) said that the project got off the ground when she was thinking that not only is Murch a very talented editor, but he’s also very articulate about his craft and that this should be captured for posterity while the opportunity presented itself. I was struck by this because so little of the material is unique, and had already been captured for posterity in in the two excellent books by / about Murch (In The Blink Of An Eye and The Conversations respectively. ) What was the point of this film? Couldn’t a more cinematic and interesting approach have been taken? For instance, Murch could be shown actually … I don’t know … editing??

You’ll be really sick of this rant by the end of the fest, I guarantee it.

Our third program of the day was the results of this year’s Fly Filmmaking Challenge. Every year three local filmmakers are presented with a set of guidelines and given ten days to produce a complete ten minute short film (five days for shooting and five for editing.) This year the filmmakers had to choose a topic out of a hat, and they each had to have some kind of product placement involving a specific festival sponsor. The best of these was by far Dayna Hanson’s Rainbow, a view of three teenagers/young adults whose lives intersect in various ways. It’s really just a slice of life with no real narrative (yes I know I’m contradicting what I just said but come on this is a ten minute short) but it had a real sense of place and mood. I was unsurprised to discover later that Hanson is developing it into a feature. High kudos to her DP Sean Porter, the whole piece looked really great.

I was less into the other two pieces. Matt Daniels’ Numb had the advantage of a unique look and high production values with its integration of animation and live action, but it didn’t gel for me and I couldn’t get into its gothic mood. Still, uniqueness and creativity goes a long way towards me cutting a film slack, and I did in this case. Lisa Hardmeyer’s The Bridge just didn’t hit me at all. The photography was flat, the main performance not thrilling, and the story didn’t grab me in any way whatsoever.

Regardless of the films on display, the Q&A was interesting and lively, with many of the filmmakers recounting their own individual problems and creative solutions. Mad props to SIFF for supporting local filmmaking with this program.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 9:09 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.