Sydney Pollack--and more SIFF

5/29/08

Sydney Pollack died earlier this week. He directed a lot of movies that became part of our shared popular culture over the past few decades, films like They Shoot Horses, Don't They, The Way We Were, Three Days of the Condor, Tootsie, and Out of Africa. He's made many more, but these are a few good ones to start with.

And meanwhile, in Seattle, it's seven days down, eighteen days to go at SIFF. TVOR has had a good time in the theater recently, with many more hits than misses. Here are some thoughts:

Still Life tells the stories of some of the people whose lives are affected by the Three Gorges project. It's a very well-done narrative film that is a nice accompaniment to the documentary Up the Yangtze.

For pure pleasure, you can't beat Sita Sings the Blues, an animated musical version of the Indian epic, the Ramayana--using the music of 1920's blues vocalist Annette Hanshaw. Oh, and there's a contemporary story too. Plus some unscripted discussion. It's hard to describe this movie, but take it from TVOR--you should see it. It'll get released, so watch for it.

TVOR also liked A Man's Job, a Norwegian film about an unemployed family man who posts an ad to provide handyman work and ends up providing other "services" to women.

Breakfast With Scot was a lightweight but pleasant comedy--a closeted gay couple take in very fey pre-teen. No surprises here, except that the film got the cooperation of the National Hockey League. (Half of the gay couple is an ex-professional hockey player.) Only in Canada.

Mongol was a very enjoyable big Russian-made epic about Ghengis Khan. Apparently he wasn't such a bad guy.

TVOR liked the Norwegian film The Art of Negative Thinking. She probably would have liked it even more if the reels had been screened in the proper order. It's about a support group for the disabled that is hijacked by an angry accident victim who is not in the mood to think about the bright side of things.

Good Food is a documentary about organic food, sustainable farming, eating locally--all that sort of thing. Not bad, but sort of like a PBS documentary.

California Dreamin' (Endless) is one of the best things TVOR has seen at SIFF this year. It's a Romanian film made by Cristian Nemescu, who died in an automobile accident at age 27, before the film was finished. In it, an American-led NATO group transporting some equipment by train is held up in a tiny town in Romania during the war in Kosovo. We'll never know how Nemescu would have finished the film, or what other work he would have produced. Too bad.

Katyn is a very well-done Polish film about the murder of Polish army officers by the Russian army in 1940, which was denied (and blamed on the Nazis) for decades.

You can skip Summer Heat, a Dutch erotic thriller which is neither very erotic nor very thrilling. The people are very pretty, but unfortunately, not very bright.