BioWrap – It Keeps the Mind Active

So we missed the wrap party after an exhausting Father’s Day (and the allure of the 2nd season of Deadwood on DVD). I’m glad to hear that craziness was present and wish that I had seen Gondry showing the joie de vivre, as Steven reported earlier.

Anyhoo, my deepest excursion into SIFF is over and I feel (like I do at most endings – even good movies) a black seed of sadness in my gut. It was here, now it’s gone. Really, I hardly scratched the surface of SIFF, standing in the shallow end of the pool. By my count I saw 14 movies (of course I’m only counting silent movies as a half). I enjoyed some, hated others - enjoyed hating those too.

I’m usually a very lazy movie lover, watching movies like most use TV. I watch bad movies, good movies, challenging movies, vacuous movies – just to disengage from my own life at the end of the day. I think I’ve sat through more credit sequences during these few weeks than I have my whole life. David was there for most, though, and I was afraid if I left early I’d get hogtied in the aisle.

In the past few years, I’ve been taking baby steps to become a filmmaker myself: making a few short movies, writing a few scripts. In pursuing film myself and trying to master the grammar of film making, I’ve changed the way I watch movies. When you start breaking down a movie shot by shot, some of the magic - the illusion – disappears, but it doesn’t make the movie less enjoyable. Just the opposite. It’s like playing co-rec soccer then watching the World Cup – watching masters cobble together something beautiful from the same elements you use. (Most of the movies I saw would not have qualified for the World Cup)

I quite enjoyed the opportunity to critically comment on movies for the first time. Old hat to all the other bylines around me, but it added another dimension to my appreciation of movies when I really thought about them with the intent to say something (anything). If understanding and deconstructing the grammar of a film takes away a level of the magic of film, reconstructing the film critically strips a layer of magic away from the filmmaker. I believed the old saw about how those who can’t do, teach, and those who can’t teach, criticize. But the fact is that once a movie is out there, it’s public and by commenting on it, we build it.

For me, the encouragement to think about films critically was the reward. Maybe someone went to see a movie or decided not to based on some gibberish I wrote, but the real value in writing a review is just in the writing of it. And we’re all press, now, in this blogosphere I’ve been vacationing in. It’s refreshing and encouraging to see more and more people weigh in on something – thinking critically about anything.

How many critics does a city need? Some movies need a respected critic to push it, some don’t. At the Seattle Summit on Saturday, a distributor was talking about how some movies (Hostel was his example) don’t need a review at all and how it costs $100,000 to have press screenings across the country. So there are fewer and fewer screenings. And the more reviews we have, the less impact each will have. Roger Ebert syndicated in your local paper will have more impact on the movie’s performance than most local reviewers. But there are more and more people reviewing and discussing films on the web (especially the latest geekstravaganza) and I think this is where the future of film analysis lies. In people thinking for themselves and creating a dialogue that stretches across this tiny world.