A Short Synopsis of Film

In 1937, a British anthropologist named Tom Harrisson, along with poet Charles Madge and filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, collaborated to create the Mass Observation project. The project’s goal was to record everyday life in Britain using a group of approximately 500 volunteer observers who either maintained diaries or replied to open-ended questionnaires. These three men wanted to create an anthropology of their society, a study of the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain. “These diaries were then organized into books and articles with the intention of giving voice to people who weren’t part of the “elite” and to show the intricacy and strangeness of the seemingly mundane,” according to Life in a Day’s director Kevin Macdonald.

Although the original motivation for making this film was to mark the fifth anniversary of YouTube, Macdonald admits that his inspiration was Harrison’s project from the 1930’s. The film’s premise is simple. On July 24th, 2010, a date chosen “practically at random”, people from 192 countries around the world were asked to take out their digital video cameras and answer three questions: “What do you love? What do you fear? What’s in your pocket?” The videos were then uploaded to YouTube and edited together to produce a 95 minute documentary.

In terms of social relavence, producer Ridley Scott’s documentary is a soft sell of life on earth. The movie is a pleasantly distracting piece of entertainment, however it’s social sampling is not representative of our planet’s inhabitants. It’s a lopsided experiment in modern art, not a cinematic masterpiece. But what were you expecting? Afterall, instead of observing a population as a disinterested third party, Life in a Day is asking people to observe themselves and essentially report on what they think is important. The term ‘narcissistic’ comes up quite a bit in reviews and analyses of this film.

What’s interesting to me is not the finished product, but the logistics and process by which the film was produced. There was no script and, aside from the temporal progression of morning to night and the answering of three questions, there wasn’t much structure. In an interview prior to July 24th, Macdonald did sound like he already “knew” what kind of footage he’d be looking for, but would not comment for fear of prejudicing the camera operators.

Before watching this film, I was under the impression that all of the content was provided by YouTube users, but that is not the case. At least one set of footage (the Korean man riding his bicycle around the world) was donated by another filmmaker who happened to be in Nepal at the time. In order to obtain videos from the third world and places with no Internet access, producers spent £40,000 to purchase 400 HD cameras and mail them to 40 countries.

All told, the footage used in making Life in a Day ranges from extraordinary to ridiculous and mind numbing–I guess I don’t get into watching someone film their elevator trip to and from the parking garage as much as some people. Noticeably in low supply were scenes of meals, work, and cats.

The musical score was also somewhat of an experiment. Written by British composers Harry Gregson-Williams and Matthew Herbert, the movie’s soundtrack is fashioned from audio uploaded by users. People were asked to record four sounds: a single clap, a single note sung until running out of breathe, the taking and exhaling of a breathe, and (optionally) a favorite noise. I enjoyed William’s and Herbert’s compositions more than the photography.

The finished product premiered on January 27, 2011 at Sundance where it was streamed live over the Internet. This was also the closing night movie at SIFF 2011, but we skipped it in order to see a couple of other films (a good decision). But wait! the British are now making their own film called Britain in a Day. I like the BBC, maybe I will like their rendition of this experiment a little better.

Venue: Netflix streaming
Country: USA, UK
Language: too many to list
Genre: Documentary

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I rented this movie to watch on my latest cross country plane trip, mainly because it received the 2011 Palme d’Or at Cannes. I hadn’t read any reviews, was in a rush to get to the airport, so I threw it on my iPhone and called a cab. In retrospect, I probably should have taken 5 minutes to read a synopsis of why it won.

The cinematography is breathtaking (even on a 3.5″ screen). As the story goes, director Terrence Malick doesn’t like the look of CGI so he recruited special effects people Douglas Trumbull (2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner) and Dan Glass (Batman Begins, The Matrix Reloaded) to create a variety of stunning effect sequences for this film using chemicals, paint, fluorescent dyes, smoke, liquids, CO2, flares, spin dishes, fluid dynamics, lighting and high speed photography. The musical score is equally moving, featuring everything from classic guitar to choral groups to enormous pipe organ.

This is one of those stories that begins at the end, but quickly rewinds to the beginning. The movie opens with the arrival of a letter and a mother in tears. One of her sons is dead. The scene then switches to an airport tarmac where a troubled looking man holding a telephone receiver is trying to hear the voice on the other end. The news he receives isn’t good. However, when I say “rewind” to the beginning, I mean to the beginning of time.

During the first quarter of the film, we bear witness to the birth of the universe, take a tour of our solar system, and watch the volcanic cooling of planet earth. I felt as if I was sitting in a planetarium and the voice of Carl Sagan might, at any moment, comment on the “billions and billions” of stars above us. When single celled organisms and jellyfish came on screen, I began wondering if the monkeys and monolith weren’t far behind. Fortunately, we skip the whole evolution of man, which is probably a good choice given that god’s existence is already in question and Darwin’s buddies might be hard to explain. We are treated to hammerhead sharks, dinosaurs kicking one another, and what appears to be a worldwide tsunami after the impact of a rather large meteor. Oh, and don’t let me forget the Loch Ness Monster waddling out of the sea.

After about 30-40 minutes, the people story begins. The setting is 1950’s Texas and Mr. and Mr.s O’Brien (played by Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain) are raising a family of three boys. None of the film’s dialog seems for the benefit of the audience. What we glean about these people comes from the short snippets of their daily lives that we’re allowed to observe. The audience is occasionally privy to the characters’ thoughts, giving us more insight into mother, father and eldest son’s inner philosophies. The Tree of Life is more like a collection of memories and feelings than a conversation.

The father believes that you can’t be all-good and succeed in this world. Bad things happen to good people, life is not fair or just. Which brings up the question: “Where is god? Why does he let bad things happen? Why doesn’t he care?” The father teaches the boys to fight at a young age, and rules his household with an iron fist. Mr. O’Brien may have invented the phrase “children should be seen and not heard”. Mom is a bit more forgiving, telling her children to love everyone. Without love, your life will pass you by in the blink of an eye. And the kids, they’re probably just confused as hell.

But, I have some lingering questions:

• What’s up with that wavering light in the darkness that keeps popping up between scenes?
• Why does Jack (the eldest son) raid his mom’s lingerie drawer, then float one of her slips down the river?
• Why was Sean Penn cast for a tiny role as the grown-up version of Jack?
• Why didn’t I think to watch this movie on the laptop underneath my seat rather than my iPhone (D’oh!)

See this film on a big screen with a good sound system if at all possible.

Venue: iPhone
Country: USA
Language: English
Genre: Drama

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The summer of 2008 seems like a long time ago. The “new normal” of falling housing prices and 9% unemployment and a Republican congress hellbent on making the situation worse had not yet come to pass. As I recall, it was a time of hope and excitement about an electrifying young politician on his way to the White House. But in the span of a few days during that otherwise heady summer, the bottom fell out of the economy. Margin Call is an attempt to capture the kind of story that lies at the root of why the 99% are occupying Wall Street in cities around the country.

The basic plot is straightforward. A Wall Street firm goes through a brutal round of layoffs, and one of the victims (Stanley Tucci), hands over a program he’s been working on to a young analyst (Zachary Quinto) who has managed to survive the cuts. The analyst decides to take a look, finishes the work his former boss had started, and realizes that the firm is overleveraged to a disastrous degree. It’s late in the evening, but he alerts his boss, who in turn calls in his boss, who in turn calls in his boss … all the way up the chain to the company’s CEO (Jeremy Irons). Before work begins the following morning, they’ve established a plan to purge the problem from their books and save the firm at the expense of practically every other person in the country.

The characters struggle with the ethics of their decision and come to terms with the fallout of their plans, and while watching the movie, you’re drawn into the complexity of characters who could easily be black and white caricatures of the Wall Street set. And sure, they are: there’s the young associate obsessed with how much each of his betters at the firm makes in a year, and his boss with the $200K sports car who spends more a year on hookers than most American families make. But there is also a manager grieving for his dying dog and the earnest discussion about whether the plan they’ve hatched is the right thing to do.

This is what makes the movie really good. It’s not just that the characters have complexity, but that they have just enough humanity that you can empathize with them to the point where you have to keep reminding yourself that, human and frail as they are, in the final analysis these are not good people.

The opening scene is probably easy to dismiss, but it sets the tone for the whole of the story going forward. As each employee is laid off, he’s brought into a windowed conference room so that all of his colleagues can watch his humiliation at being fired, treated like a criminal, and given an offensively ungenerous severance package. The heartlessness with which the employees are treated by the firm is established as the driving force in each of the survivors, even as they come across a likeable and fully realized. Everyone realizes that what they are doing is terrible, but the money they are going to make from it eventually overcomes any moral pangs they might have. The speech Jeremy Irons gives Kevin Spacey about the necessity of their plan sounds reasonable, until you realize that it is essentially a more elegant version of Wall Street’s “greed is good” rant. The employees that have to execute on the margin call are made aware of the plan and its implications, but they’re complicity is bought with the promise of millions of dollars in bonuses for successfully toppling the economy.

The story is fast. Everything takes place within the span of 24 hours, and the intensity builds from the first moments to the very end. It’s gripping. But it’s also an excellent way of understanding why the occupiers are so mad, and why there needs to be an accounting of those who did this to the country.

(review by Paulette)

Venue: AMC Pacific Place 11, Seattle, WA
Country: USA
Language: English
Genre: Drama, Thriller

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The year is 1927 with the great depression looming on the horizon. George Valentin (played by Jean Dujardin) is a silent film star and his performances play to packed houses. However, he gives more curtain calls to his straightman terrier than his co-star wife. He is vane, a trait that may cause his eventual downfall. Talkies are the future of motion picture, at least that’s what his producer (played by John Goodman) tells him after the two watch a screen test of Valentin’s wife singing into a microphone on camera. But George is stubborn, he’s an artist. He knows what art is and it definitely doesn’t include the introduction of audible dialogue to cinema. George won’t talk and the studio he works for refuses to make any more silent films.

Director Michel Hazanavicius’s two previous films were OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies and OSS 117: Lost in Rio, both starring Jean Dujardin in comedic portrayals of a James Bond-like secret agent. Dujardin’s nack for flamboyant movement and expressive facial gestures work well in the silent context. I liked the OSS movies, they played as opening and closing night films at SIFF, but I couldn’t help feeling that his character (or the actor himself) was a little too flamboyant for that part. Dujardin won the 2011 best actor award at Cannes for his role in The Artist, an honor that was much deserved. He reminds me of Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean), only with a more manic depressive persona.

Hazanavicius borrows from several famous scenes in other movies. The man sitting in an armchair, watching one of his own films and reminiscing about glory days, out-drinking even Hunter S. Thompson in the process. The dog who fetches help when his master goes insane and lights the film on fire. And by the way, Jean’s co-star terrier (played by dog actor Uggy) is a scene stealer.

As for the evening’s venue, this was the grand reopening of one of Seattle’s oldest movie houses, the Uptown Theater. About 11 months ago, AMC decided that the 1920’s era Uptown could no longer compete in today’s marketplace so they closed its doors. SIFF spent the better part of last year trying to broker a deal to buy the venue and re-open it as an art house theater. Prices are reasonable, SIFF members pay as little as $5 for a ticket. Compared to the Regal Cinema at Northgate Mall (where adults pay $14 for The Three Musketeers in 3-D or $17.50 for Puss in Boots in 3-D IMAX) the Uptown is quite a bargain.

Venue: SIFF Cinema Uptown Theater
Country: France
Language: French
Genre: Silent, Black and White, Drama, Comedy

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“The world within the world” is a popular theme in fiction. People like to imagine that there’s more to their dreary lives than is visible (e.g. dark matter). Everyone’s familiar with Harry Potter and his make-believe universe of witches and wizards that runs parallel to the Muggle world. Night Watch is the first in a trilogy of movies (the second being Day Watch) about an alternate reality in which ancient forces of Light and Dark maintain a centuries old truce and police each others actions. It’s based on a series of novels by Russian author Sergei Lukyanenko.

Alongside normal people, live a society of “Others”. Others are human beings with supernatural abilities ranging from extremely long lifespan to shape shifting to psychic surgery. Some even have tendencies toward vampirism, but must obtain a license before feeding on the general public. The words “good” and “evil” are used interchangeably with “light” and “dark” in a few places. The substitution of evil for dark doesn’t sit well with some of the Others. The two forces are not disjoint, some are next door neighbors and even friends. Destiny is not predetermined. When one is found to be an Other, they must choose sides and decide between light or dark. Kind of sounds like somebody wants to serve you a slice of turkey, doesn’t it?

The story begins with our main character Anton Gorodetsky (played by Konstantin Khabenskiy) secretly visiting a witch to contract the dark-magic abortion of his girlfriend’s “unwanted” pregnancy. It’s here that we learn of the grey area between good and evil. Flash forward twelve years to present day Russia and an older Anton is now part of the Night Watch, an organization whose job it is to police the actions of Dark Others. Anton’s current field assignment has him working under cover, drinking blood and tracking vampires when something goes terribly wrong. Anton is forced to kill one of the Others that he’s been shadowing, an action that will have consequences far into the next sequel.

Despite the presence of vampires, there is no teenage romance (I’m looking at you Bella Swan). There are a few, well timed comedic moments which effectively diffuse the story’s gloomy mood, but Night Watch is primarily a horror drama. I liked filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov’s choice in cinematic special effects. Sudden shifts from fast-to-slow motion and quick zooms in-and-out give scenes a surreal quality and the characters a superhuman appearance. The soundtrack of alternative, hip-hop, and metal Russian rock complements the wardrobe department’s choice of rough and worn looks (field personnel typically wear coveralls and clanky tool belts).

Favorite moments:

• The yellow, utility truck that Anton and his buddies ride around in, rocketing up and down city streets with flames shooting from its tail pipe. It’s more like a terrifying amusement park ride than a taxi service. The members of Night Watch aren’t cowards, but this truck scares the crap out of them. Fearful passengers scream at regular intervals.
• Stuffed owls that come to life, turn into strange girls, and then worry about current clothing styles. Give her a break though, she’s been locked in a drawer and hasn’t read any fashion magazines for the past 60 years.
• Ancient battlefields, superimposed over the rooftops of apartment buildings, and surrounded by a vortex of circling crows, CAW, CAW, CAW! If crows scare you, avoid this movie.

But I don’t like the trailer, it’s not representative of the film. Watch it if you must.

Venue: Netflix streaming
Country: Russia
Language: Russian
Genre: Action, Horror, Drama

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