Critic-in-Law does the SIFFBLOG!

Perhaps if I were drinking as much as it sounds like the rest of you are, I might be enjoying this boring festival a tad more. With a few exceptions, the films have been shit, not worth the time and energy it takes to pan. I loved 3-Iron, Heights, and Going Through Splat, and (to a lesser extent) the Argentine aviation drama Whisky Romeo Zulu. The worst film (outside of Me and You and Everyone We Know) may well be the appalling Gallic "comedy" Apres Vous, a movie more accurately titled Frenchmen Behaving Idiotically. Why Paramount thought this merde worth importing is anyone's guess. Mad Hot Ballroom, Saving Face, After the Day Before, and The Holy Girl were also dismal. The Chinese drama Two Great Sheep has spectacular photography, but not much else. The Chinese remake of Letter from an Unknown Woman was pure tripe, again lushly lit and composed--the characters had immense taste in interior decor.

And don't, whatever you do, get me wound up on Wong Kar Wai's interminable 2046, a film not only about androids, but apparently for them as well. Even Adam Hart, the discerning and perceptive critic (who doubles as publicist for Northwest Film Forum) admitted to wanting to slap around Tony Leung's equivocating protagonist. Then there is guest Joan Allen's agonizingly pretentious Yes, to which any discriminating filmgoer should just say No, God, No! I'll concede that her co-star Sam Neill gives an excellent performance; he makes the neglected husband's self-pity quite amusing. The dialogue, spoken entirely in verse, is dreadful. While Yes isn't as repulsive as Joan Allen's twin bombs from earlier this spring--Upside of Anger and Off the Map, two movies that will always be favorites of writers who can't write and editors who can't edit--it's worth dodging.

A few films that are deeply flawed yet still worthwhile: Earthling (already blogged about), The Beautiful Country, and Tell Them Who Them Are, Mark Wexler's film about his father, the magnificent cinematographer Haskell Wexler. I don't agree with my friend Sheila Benson that it's a good movie. For non-starters, there's Mark, a mealy-mouthed Bush-apologist Republican. I winced at his every flag-waving utterance, although he isn't nearly as much a nutcase as Nathaniel Kahn of the idiotic My Architect.

What does it say about our culture when the only people willing to speak the truth are in their 80s? Here is 80-something Haskell Wexler, two-time Oscar winner (for Bound for Glory and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf) in the opening scene of Tell Them..., responding to son Mark's request that he fill viewers in on their location: "If you don't know where the fuck we are right now, just look around. You're making a goddamn documentary, so you don't have to have me say in front of the camera where we are. You get a shot of some of the [camera] equipment."

Later, when Mark takes an infernally long time to set up, his father goads him: "You've been around three different camera angles now. Does that mean you're a perfectionist or you don't know what the hell you're doing?" (Regrettably, Tell Them... contains almost nothing about Haskell's long collaboration with the late Hal Ashby.)

The clips from Haskell's work are well chosen: the compositions from Medium Cool, Coming Home, Days of Heaven, The Loved One, America America, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and In the Heat of the Night (among others) are exquisite. They remind you of a time when filmmaking was about something besides self-promotion, hipster irony, and big money. The clips are painful reminders that film art was in greater abundance well before "indie film" entered our lingo.

Which brings me back to the revolting no-talent Miranda July. When I first heard that Miranda high-tailed it out of here the morning after her wretched film opened the festival, ostensibly due to an "emergency," I was overjoyed. Her Saturday morning forum was cancelled, and I thought she must have had an epiphany about what a shameless, godawful mess her film is, and decided the only dignified thing was to leave immediately. Alas, the reason for her departure, the latest press release tells us, is that she flew off to France to receive the Camera d'Or from Cannes, an "honor" that speaks volumes about how shitty the movies are right now, or about the lapses in judgment from culture's self-appointed guardians.

For anyone to "enjoy" Me and You and Everyone We Know, or to believe that the film raised "issues" of any sort, any one of or a combination of these conditions would have to be met.

1. A complete and utter lack of taste

2. Being coked to the gills

(Note that conditions 1 & 2 are far from uncommon among the Seattle press.)

3. You would have to be suffering from the effects of fetal alcohol syndrome, or be in some other semi-permanent drunken state.

4. Be rich.

Helen "Lovey" Loveridge keeps going on about how wonderful MAYAEWK is, and if I were making as much money as Lovey, I would probably think that Miranda's cinematic dog droppings were great art, too. Or at least I'd be willing to lie.

Kris, thank you for your honest report about what a bloody bore the opening night party proved to be. You mentioned that the Posies seemed at odds with the mood of Miranda's film, but really, what would have gone well with it? Some navel-gazing minimalism a la Steve Reich's Music for Six Lobotomized Musicians? Perhaps the powers that be, if a shit band was what they wanted, could've saved a few dollars by hiring Spletzer to wear a lampshade and lip-synch to Rod Stewart songs, which given its course is probably how the evening ended up anyway, somewhere, with all the back-slapping hayseeds self-congratulating one another on their "insider" status.

Speaking of which, Karla, if you all are really going to make a film called Sean Does Tablet, you might include some dramatic recreations of Herr Axmaker deigning to speak to me if and only if Robert Horton is sequestered several rows away while, if Horton is right there, refusing to acknowledge me with so much as a nod, kind of like what happened at the Lords of Dogtown screening the other night.

And while we're talking about filming the critics, why not include footage of Horton, Axmaker, and their comrade in exclusivity Andrew Wright (a man whose salt and pepper goatee arrives in a room a long time before he does), holding court (as they always do before a screening) in the lobby of the Seven Gables? Maybe you could CGI-in the toxic levels of Seattle insiderism that threaten to implode the walls of the 7G whenever these three pow-wow, usually holding one of the publicists captive to their egomania.

Finally, a few words about the "evening with Peter Sarsgaard," a low-wattage event if ever there was. Goofy and bald, which is exactly what curries favor in bland C-Addle, Sarsgaard accompanied his every remark with a baritone giggle. "I consider myself a non-actor," he repeated throughout the beginning of his interrogation by the New York Times' Sharon Waxman, and if you've seen his work in Kinsey and Garden State, you may be inclined to agree. Yes, Sarsgaard was brilliant in Shattered Glass. I praised his performance at the time; in retrospect, a strong director and good script are everything, aren't they?

Waxman, the Times' Hollywood correspondent, played it safe. With her cuffed denim pants, black jacket, fuchsia scarf of Isadora Duncan length, and coiffed blond mane, she could have been a realtor and might as well have. She asked nothing interesting; her questions hewed close to "the expected thing," and there was no audience Q&A. You could have pulled passers-by off Pike and Pine, or even among the demitasse-soaked demimondaines on the sidewalk outside Bauhaus, who would have come up with more stimulating queries than Ms. Waxman. Sarsgaard's responses were similarly uninspired; he kept rubbing his shaved head and marking time. He had a few memorable descriptions of working with Sean Penn on Dead Man Walking, and to the delight of lockstep Seattle liberals, Sarsgaard, a devout Catholic, poured forth with (and they applauded): "I don't understand how a country can be so Christian, yet be so selectively Christian."

Well, oh my, that's about as daring as 2005 is going to get. Where, oh where, is Haskell Wexler saying, "Fuck," when we need him most?