Review: Hawaii, Oslo (SIFF 2005)

There's plenty of movies that involve a range of unrelated characters that are tied together with a singular place or event (like Amores Perros, or Kilometer Zero). They're tricky to make in such a way that they don't seem forced. Hawaii, Oslo falls into this camp of movie, and it fortunately does a great job of not only avoiding this trap, but being inventive on top of it.

Hawaii, Oslo is primarily a movie about love; brotherly love, romantic love, friendship love, parental love, and love (or maybe it's compassion) between strangers are all presented as part of the storyline's intertwining of characters and plots.

These are the threads, or character sets, in Hawaii, Oslo:

• A couple who is having their first baby, and who then discovers that it has a debilitating disease that only an expensive American clinic can cure
• A suicidal pop star who is saved by a papergirl on her morning route
• A couple of orphaned boys, angry at the loss of their father and risking separation into separate foster homes
• An institutionalized kleptomaniac and his long lost love, who both agreed to meet at the age of 25 if they were both single, and an institution nurse who watches over them.
• The kleptomaniac's brother, who receives an escort from prison only to rob a bank and try to flee the city.

Reading the above list, one would think this movie is about the most depressing of the genre. Quite the contrary; Erik Poppe manages to squeeze quite a bit of situational humor and humanism out of the characters and their interactions. He also slowly uncovers the mysteries of each character for you, without explicit lines or cues shown all at once. The result is an engaging movie that leaves you feeling love for the characters, adding to the movie's core theme.

Overall rating: 9.0/10.0

Details:
Runtime: 125m
Countries: Denmark / Sweden / Norway
Language: Norwegian

Review: Izo (SIFF 2005)

Having spent 2 hours with this movie, I'm not going to spend more time than is necessary with this review. Izo is quite simply a movie about a crucified samurai who transcends time and space to return to the world of the living and wreak havoc. Like most of Takashi Miike's films, this movie has plenty of gore and blood. However, unlike some of his other films, this one is also chock full of pointless philosophical drivel, badly-choreographed fight scenes, an irritating folk guitar soundtrack, and bad CGI. It's a disappointing product from an otherwise unique and talented director.

If you're really curious, rent it. If you're not, simply avoid it.

Overall rating: 1.0/10.0

Details
Runtime: 128m
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese

Review: The Art and Crimes of Ron English (SIFF 2005)

Pedro Carvajal's documentary about Ron English, the artist known for his illegal billboard art, was a great foray into this talent's career. The documentary depicts two segments of Ron's art: the first, focused more on political and anti-corporate messages formed as art, and plastered onto billboards, and the second, where this art is moved into the medium of canvas and oil paint and gains accreditation through gallery showings.

The first portion was certainly the more amusing; anyone who's been irritated at a large, blaring billboard shouting an unagreeable message will take to Ron's "liberation" of this medium. The billboards he creates are certainly of a liberal bent (anti-Bush, anti-war, anti-tobacco), but are more than just scrawled words on a sheet of paper; this is real art that Ron spent time creating and displaying. Ron's reasoning was that he wanted his art to be public; sure, the politics behind it are motivating too, but he claimed having his work locked up in a gallery or in someone's home is not what he wanted.

Interesting, then, to note the latter half of the film, which is Ron's foray into oil paint. His paintings are photographic and realistic, but depict unusual circumstances (kids smoking with KISS-style face paint, Homer Simpson urinating on a campfire while others look on). But his style is unique, and his skill is great, evidenced by the popularity of the gallery showings that are displayed in the film.

Has Ron given up billboards? The film leaves you with a sense that the answer is "no". Sure, Ron's art has matured beyond the public and illegal to more traditional forms, but one can see from the documentary that Ron seems happiest when he's creating, or installing, his billboard art for the masses.

Overall rating: 7.0/10.0

Details
Runtime: 78m
Country: USA
Language: English

Review: North Korea: A Day in the Life / Seoul Train (SIFF 2005)

Our first documentary of SIFF 2005 was actually a pair: two documentaries about life in North Korea and life for those who try to escape it.

North Korea: A Day in the Life is a snapshot of events for one family on a typical day in North Korea. The family awakens and has breakfast. The mother takes her daughter to kindergarten, and then goes to work in a textile mill. A son goes to attend an English class. They return home, and over dinner the grandfather recounts stories from the war. The power of the film comes from what's presented. Director Pieter Fleury received permission from the Ministry of Culture of the Democratic Republic of North Korea to film inside the country. This means they reviewed the film's contents. This also means that not a trace of poverty, disease, prisons, or anything else related to the current regime of North Korea was shown.

What was shown is the Orwellian presence and control that the North Korean regime currently imposes on its people. Pictures and statues of Kim Jong Il are everywhere. Kids are taught how he was benevolent and a man of the people, even when he was a young boy. Patriotic music is piped into production factory floors. Anti-American sentiments run rampant, with the West blamed for most evils, past and present, including the frequent power outages. Workers perform organized work-outs at specified times of the day.

A sense of confinement and enclosure are felt while you're watching this movie. Not only is everything artificially clean, happy, and orderly, but there's no way out of, and no way into, this system. To many in the movie going about their daily lives, North Korea is practically the entire world.

Coming off of this documentary, the perfectly-paired Seoul Train shows a more realistic view of North Korea, and also follows refugees who are trying to escape the country. An underground railroad exists to shuttle refugees from North Korea to safer areas, like South Korea and Mongolia. China, however, is not a safe area: China considers nearly all North Korean refugees as illegal immigrants, and returns them to North Korea. Furthermore, escaping North Korea is punishable by imprisonment, forced labor, and death.

The film shows three things: true life of rural border towns in North Korea with a hidden camera, interviews with government officials and humanitarians, and the stories of a set of refugees and their attempt to arrive in a country that will accept them for what they are.

The images of North Korean rural life are in sharp contrast to the first film; here, you see clear evidence of the famine that is plaguing North Korea (the movie explains that international aid is routed to party loyalists, and denies from others). The interviews with officials and humanitarians shows both great intents and bound hands, as everyone complains that no one can do anything. Finally, the underground railroad depicts people taking life and law into their own hands, with heroic people risking their freedom in an attempt to provide it for other people.

Overall rating: 8.0/10.0 , 8.5/10.0

Details
Runtime: 48m / 54m
Countries: Netherlands / USA
Languages: Korean / English, Korean, Mandarin, Polish

Turning Off The Tap

Victrola Coffee, a local coffee shop in my neighborhood, is trying out something relatively new: no Wi-Fi on the weekends.

Blasphemy, you say? Interestingly, they've found their weekend audience has morphed from a sea of people with laptops who don't interact with each other, to one that's more welcoming and less solitary.

Now to install those cell phone blockers...

Review: Three...Extremes (SIFF 2005)

This was our first movie for the 2005 film festival, and a midnight movie at the Egyptian theater at that.

This movie is a collection of three shorter films by three directors:
- Dumplings, by Fruit Chan (Hong Kong)
- Cut, by Park Chan-Wook (South Korea)
- Box, by Takeshi Miike (Japan)

The three movies differ quite a bit from each other, both in theme and in style, so it's worth discussing each one separately.

Dumplings is an exploration of the idea of unattainable, perpetual youth. A former actress is aging, and is seeking some modern Fountain of Youth. She visits a woman in her home, who prepares some special dumplings for her. After about 3 minutes into the movie, you understand the ingredients of these dumplings are not normal. After about 5 more minutes, you realize that this dumpling chef is a purveyor of cannibalism.

The actress returns to the woman for ever-increasing dosages of dumplings. When the actress asks for the most potent dumpling the cook has, things get out of hand.

The interesting thing about Dumplings is that it creates shock and surprise out of relatively normal themes: the fear of aging and the length people run to subvert it. If you remove the tension created by the music, the camera work, and the actors, the topic at hand is not completely out of this world. Sure, you don't find many people eating their own kind in urban areas across the world, but they do some pretty wacky things to make themselves look younger, not all of which are any less strange than this.

Cut is pure, rising tension, on the lines of an movie with an overreaching premise that the main characters need to do or avoid. Cut involves a director of a horror film who, after returning to his home from shooting a scene involving a vampire, is knocked unconscious by an intruder. When he awakes, he finds he's in a movie set with his wife, a child, and a distraught film extra who's been in several of the director's films. The director is harnessed with an elastic band that limits how far he can move. His wife is tied up with piano wire stretching from an unseen ceiling, and her fingers are glued to a piano. The child is bound and gagged to a sofa. The film extra wishes to punish the director as a way of punishing his projected failures in life. He challenges the director to commit an act of evil to save his wife.

Most of the movie therefore hinges on the director's internal plight, his wife's physical plight, and the child's innocent involvement in this constructed game of the disturbed extra. Things end less predictably than you might think (with only a bit of foreshadowing), but the visual imagery of the torture, both physical and psychological, is fairly intense and carry throughout the film.

After these two somewhat gory films, I was expecting a similarly bloody offering from Miike, director of the very violent Audition. Not so; Box is an exploration into a personal, painful past. A recluse of a woman, who is an author, has perpetual nightmares about her death involving plastic, a man, snow, and a box. Between this line, you see unfold a personal history of this woman and her sister as carnival performers. The two performed a dance/acrobatic show involving contorting themselves into two boxes. They were mentored by a man who appeared to take preference in the sister over the main character. Then, an accident occurs.

Box is the most visually interesting and slow-to-reveal movies of the three. It's much more cerebral than the other two. Rather than trying to scare you, it tries to put you into the mind and body of the main author character. And it succeeds; at the end of the movie, you're not frightened. Rather, as the last scene fades to black and the closing credits appear, you realize you feel quite sad.

Overall rating: 7.5/10.0

Details
Runtime: 118m
Countries: Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea
Languages: Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin

Volunteer Farming

We spent Saturday morning (10am-2pm) at Marra Farm through a Microsoft-sponsored Seattle Works project. Marra Farm is organic, and almost totally volunteer, so they always need lots of help to do basic farm work. It was great fun - we got to weed out large poison hemlock plants (some were almost 10 feet tall), turn beds of soil to get them ready for planting, and help existing plants beat the weeds by carefully removing small weedlings from the ground. And the weather was nice to boot - it wasn't sunny, it wasn't cold, it wasn't rainy. That's perfect for working out of doors, in my opinion.

Weird connection #215: One of the Marra Farm projects, Lettuce Link (donates farmed food to food banks), is led by Sue McGann. Her husband is Greek, and is from the town of Brisa on the island of Lesvos in Greece. Well, it just so happens that my maternal grandfather is from that very same town, on that very same island! Sue's husband's grandfather used to own this shop in the village, and some of my extended family actually remembers going to the shop when they were young.

Small world indeed.

SIFF 2005

The Seattle International Film Festival is almost here. In less than a week, thousands of Seattle-ites will respond to the longer, warmer, sunnier days by rushing into darkened theaters and watching movies all day. Admittedly, it's better to wait in line to get in the theater when it's nice and sunny versus when it's raining, but it's still a bit odd that we choose to have this festival just as the weather is starting to improve.

This year's festival features 182 films, 55 documentaries, and 111 shorts from around the world. We had to contain ourselves to just over a dozen films over the course of the three or so weeks. Trust me, we could have easily done twice as many.

I'll try to post some movie reviews of what we see after the fact, as well as general takes on how the festival's going, how the crowd's reacting, and any director/actor/movie mogul sightings.

A Tartan Fit For A Greek

Being in the Scottish piping and drumming scene, and being part in some upcoming performances with a small group of pipers and drummers, it was time to order a kilt of my very own.

But what does a Greek guy choose for his tartan? Luckily, Scotland's flag, the St. Andrew's cross, is blue and white, just like Greece's flag. So I went with the St. Andrew's tartan:



What do people think?

Once I get my full outfit going, I'll post some pictures.

Fankick vs. Streetbeat

Seattle's a quirky town. Case in point: the fact that a dance battle between two groups, Fankick and Streetbeat, was demanded by the public as a way to settle who's best.

Fankick: A "dynamic 80s duo" comprised of two women dressing up 80s style and dancing some 80s dances.

Streetbeat: An 80s duo comprised of two men dressing up 80s style and dancing some 80s dances.

When word got out that there were two competing 80s dance duos in the city, the people would not have it. Case in point: a letter to the editor on April 7 under "The Original '80s". One of our local weeklies, The Stranger, decided to serve up a challenge to both groups: a dance-off! A week later, both groups had contacted The Stranger and were working out terms.

A week after that, the terms were settled: on Wednesday, April 27, 2005 at 7:30 PM at the Westlake Park downtown, the two groups would compete in a head-to-head dance competition.

The results? Well, you can watch them yourself in this 5-minute video, courtesy of Joe Wiscomb. Or, you can interpret the results from the latest cover of The Stranger:



I find it funny that our city can get good-naturedly worked up over this kind of stuff. I think it's great, though. It points to the fact we can enjoy ourselves and be silly. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

If you want a more complete backstory with more letters to the editor, check out this forum post.

Smart Car Tipping

You knew it had to arrive. Smart Cars are now getting tipped over, like cows. Ergh - this will be a tough one to explain to the insurance company for the unlucky owner of this car.

Interestingly, a Smart Car weighs 1588 lbs, while an average cow weighs 1150 lbs. Still, I'd give the cow a higher degree of difficulty, since it can proceed to trample you if it awakens mid-attempt*.

*ZtG does not condone tipping either Smart Cars or cows. Tip your local waitperson a good amount, however. They deserve it.

Happy May Day

Yes, it's that time of year again. A time to celebrate the coming of summer. A time to prepare for the arrival of a film festival. And a time to pretend to be a fairy. It's May Day!

Here in Seattle, our Folklore organization is putting together a traditional May Day signing & dancing event at Gas Works Park. At 6am. Sorry, way too early for me. They claimed they'd be dancing around May Poles in different parts of the city throughout the day today, however.

Last night, we went to a concert given by Slighe nan Gaidheal. Great music, most all in Gaelic. Afterwards, there was a ceilidh at someone's house, complete with food, Scotch, and more music. Nice to spend the coming of summer listening to centuries-old music and songs.