The Battle After SIFF
At the 10 o'clock press conference following the SIFF-opening Battle in Seattle, sitting next to his bored-yet-glamorous girlfriend, Charlize Theron, director Stuart Townsend told us exhausted reporters that he was self-distributing the film. Uh-oh, I thought to myself, that's usually the kiss of death—a short prelude before dusty DVD shelves. (Let's see, do we file under C for the Canadian financing and country of origin....?)
"We're self-distributing," Townsend had previously told the packed house at McCaw Hall, which greeted the film with an overeffusive standing ovation. (Politeness has its limits, people.) "We took our film back. It's now in our hands. We're about as indie as it gets."
More cheers followed. Oh we love "indie" in Seattle, ever that buzzword, just as we claim to hate globalization but line up at Starbucks while wearing our made-in-China trail running shoes from Nike and recycled fleece sweaters from Patagonia. (The same outfit we wore back in '99 for the WTO protests, come to think of it.)
Townsend couldn't have picked a more favorable audience for his film, which was shrewdly invited to begin the fest by SIFF artistic director Carl Spence. Give the people the self-congratulatory lefty pabulum they want, after all; McCaw Hall is pretty big, and we need to fill seats. Is that indie thinking or sound business thinking? I'm not sure which.
But back to Battle, its prospects in theaters this fall, and other final impressions from SIFF '08 after the jump...
Those of us at the press conference hadn't been able to see or review the film in advance of that evening's gala screening. This was something of a departure from tradition at SIFF, which created Battle awkwardness. Here's a film about Seattle, shot mostly in Vancouver, BC, and the capsule review I ran in our annual SIFF guide was thus from a contributor in Texas, where they probably love the WTO. Townsend's two main stars weren't even American: Theron hails from South Africa, and Martin Henderson from New Zealand. And the writer-director himself comes from Ireland. It all seemed a very fashionable, international cry against globalization, with us local indie critics being crushed beneath the tank treads of publicity.
Townsend cast the political melodrama in largely personal terms. He dismissed "eight years of my acting career [as] just eight years of barren wasteland." (Really? Was Queen of the Damned really that bad?) He described a year and a half of writing: "I didn't talk to anybody, no activists, anybody. I was just in a room writing." The project took six years to realize, he said.
Prior to his sudden immersion in politics, he'd told us, "I didn't read a newspaper or watch TV for 15 years." And though the WTO debacle took place under the Clinton watch (and the Paul Schell watch), Townsend declared, "I think George Bush actually politicized this world. He did great stuff for me."
That remark, delivered back at McCaw Hall, got a big guffaw. He played to the smug liberal audience, the movie played to the smug liberal audience, and that's precisely its limitation—why Battle won't have an audience outside Seattle or the shelves at Scarecrow. (File under N for nostalgia?) One week at the Varsity will be more than enough.
By the time Townsend moved to the U.S. (on 9-11-2001, he told us), there were already a couple good docs on the Battle in Seattle by local directors. Shaya Mercer's 2000 Trade Off won the Golden Space Needle Award at SIFF that year. (In fact, Seattle filmmaker Thomas Lee Wright, who produced Trade Off, had a hand in producing Battle, which borrows some footage from the prior doc.) And to that we can add This Is What Democracy Looks Like and 30 Frames a Second: The WTO in Seattle, both also made in 2000.
None were free of bumper-sticker polemics, but none had to bother with creating convincing characters or genuine dialogue, both of which trip up Battle in Seattle, which is strongest in its outdoor protest scenes. Townsend's professed admiration for Medium Cool and Bloody Sunday come through in the crowd-and-riot sequences. (Some portions of which, Townsend told us, were shot on a volunteer basis by Medium Cool director Haskell Wexler himself!) If everything had been filmed hand-held and outdoors, amid the jostling marchers, cops, and evil anarchists (boo! hiss!), matters would've been greatly improved. But any time the movie stops for a political discussion, usually indoors, it really stops with a clunk. (Why not just hand out pamphlets at the door?)
Henderson's protest leader must have a trauma haunting him from the past. Theron, playing some kind of pregnant Nordstrom shopgirl, is married to a cop (Woody Harrelson) who gets carried away with his job. Michelle Rodriguez, as a protester, mainly looks pissed off all the time (being Michelle Rodriguez and all), while fellow anti-WTO demonstrator André Benjamin is inexplicably cheerful and positive all the time (because this is what black folks named Django naturally do). In general, there are too many characters representing too many of the parties affected by globalization and its discontents. Ray Liotta as the mayor (i.e. Paul Schell) is okay. Less forgivable is the Chinese-American governor (i.e. Gary Locke) who speaks with a "No tickee, no shirtee" accent.
In a film written to push our easy buttons of liberal outrage, one of the bigger laughs came from a genuine snippet of TV footage—Battle could've used more of that—showing an irate Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz in a protest of his own. "We had to close our stores—it was a great injustice!" he complains. At this, all of McCaw Hall booed and jeered. And I'm sure, the following day, 90 percent of us lined up at the same corporate counter for our morning latte. No movie is going to change that. But isn't it flattering to imagine that it could?
And what about the rest of the fest? You can review the award winners and honorees here. If the popular ballot winner, Doris Dörrie's Cherry Blossoms - Hanami, is about a guy coming to terms with his own mortality, that's a theme with increasing resonance to the baby boomers who make up SIFF's core constituency. Filmgoing, like film festivals, is a taste cultivated early. For those who discovered foreign cinema and arthouse specialty films in the '70s, there were then few alternatives to Hollywood and the three channels on network TV. Things are very different in today's media environment.
Ticket sales for this year's SIFF haven't yet been announced, but 160,000 was the figure given for last year. To me, this year's crowds looked the same or better in size (gas prices and cool summer weather may've helped keep filmgoers in town and indoors.) Judging by the many screenings I attended, I'm going to hazard some totally wild and unscientific guesses about the fest's key demographics. Ages 18-34, that advertising sweet spot: maybe 20 percent of the audience. 18 and under: less than 10 percent (schools were in session for part of SIFF, but summer blockbusters and Xbox otherwise beckoned). 34 to 44 (nobody cares about Gen X): maybe 15 percent. And I'd apportion the rest, those boomers aged 44 and beyond as being 55 percent of the SIFF audience.
Again those are wild, unsupportable, guesstimates, and I could be totally wrong. (That's what blogging is all about—uninformed speculation, yes?) I'm not sure SIFF would even want to correct me or disclose its key marketing/subscription data. Nobody—like TV networks, like newspapers—wants to admit their key consumers are aging without new replacements coming along. Any film festival that emphasizes so much international cinema (with those dreaded subtitles), depressing, medicinal documentaries, and generally star-free content and premieres, isn't going to compete so well in the youth culture sweepstakes dominated by Grand Theft Auto and Kit Kittredge.
Programming a few family matinees and late-night cult-crime-sex movies can only move the SIFF demographic needle so far. Sundance has more youthful indie buzz each year; Cannes has stars; Toronto has clout (plus government subsidies); and Telluride has insider cachet. (We're also not a market, where films are bought and sold.) By contrast, SIFF only has its good taste and size to offer filmmakers and distributors in search of publicity, the promise of many discerning eyeballs. But that's not a guarantee, as they say, of future market performance. Doing well at SIFF, winning the Golden Space Needle Award, might get you a citation in a tiny newspaper display ad (along with a pull quote from an online movie critic you've never hear of). Last year's GSNA winner, the locally made Outsourced, enjoyed a nice fall run in Seattle, but only played a handful of other American cities. Studios, chiefly Sony Pictures Classics, use the fest to get a little more buzz for their summer arthouse titles. But anything with true breakout potential behind it, or a large financial investment in it, get launched elsewhere.
If it doesn't figure much in the national conversation, SIFF still matters very much to us locals. It shapes our tastes in the arthouse, at Scarecrow, and on Netflix and Amazon.
In return, the fest has tried to be more generous with local filmmakers, and this year admitted more titles with only tangential ties to the region (e.g., they were shot here, or featured some homegrown talent). But as with most years, 2007's Outsourced being the recent exception, the local features were disappointing. There was nothing close to The King of Kong or The Heart of the Game. Do-gooder documentaries mixed with inept dramas. The best potential documentary subject, the notorious 1994 Rafay family murder in Bellevue, essentially became the filmmaker's one-sided effort to spring her brother, convicted murderer Sebastian Burns, out of jail (see Nina Shapiro's excellent feature on Mr. Big). And while dealing with one of the most topical of local subjects, our city's chronic homeless population, Linas Phillips' documentary Great Speeches From a Dying World didn't advance beyond its central gimmick, never moved from the personal to provide context or cause. Again, Northwest Film Forum had a hand in several notable titles at SIFF, another sign of its importance to the local film scene. But it would be nice if NWFF could generate something that makes waves beyond SIFF, beyond Seattle, beyond the security of its own boutique cinema walls.
As for the fest in general, I thought it was the best, smoothest operation in years. Reducing the size of the schedule was a good idea. So was reducing the number of main venues. Without screens on the Eastside or in the U-District this year, SIFF hummed along with new, concentrated efficiency. I, for one, don't miss the shabby Neptune or too-distant Lincoln Square. Every neighborhood will have its partisans, of course, but Cap Hill and the LQA fared best with the smaller festival footprint. My advice: not only keep the Uptown, if possible, but try to take over all three screens of that generally under-booked, poorly programmed venue, and ditch Pacific Place. (Sure, the latter is nice and has discounted parking, but the larger mall and multiplex is a hassle.) And try to grab Paul Allen's excellent EMP hall, the JBL theater, for the duration of the fest. It's also downtown with a central location. (And if Allen again allows use of the Cinerama next year—make sure to book the films that benefit from a big screen, like Mongol.) And/or, what about grabbing the Big Picture for a few SIFF screenings; instead of getting drinks after the show, wouldn't it be civilized to have a martini with the movie?
In general terms, and this speaks to demographic issues cited above, SIFF was weak on comedy, action, and crime flicks this year. I could've used more titles from Hong Kong, Russia, and Eastern Europe. And though I wrote it partly in jest in our annual SIFF Guide, I really wouldn't mind seeing a tribute-slash-retrospective to a more popular or populist film icon, even perhaps Adam Sandler, than the obscure European with one or two films to his or her credit. SIFF needs to loosen up its arthouse reputation a bit, to add something like the Lebowski Fest that's so popular in other parts of the country. Lebowski Fest, Sandler Fest, Schwarzenegger Fest, Tarantino Fest, John Hughes Fest, Jackie Chan Fest, Luc Besson Fest, Pixar Fest...why not? Not every sidebar has to be to an "Emerging Master."
But those are mostly quibbles. Under Carl Spence, SIFF is decidedly less stodgy and sentimental, less reverent of European arthouse cinema than it was during the Darryl Macdonald years. But it needs to continue to push in that direction if gray hairs aren't going to completely dominate the audience. Those baby boomers won't be around forever.
On which subject, I unfortunately missed the festival's top vote getter, Cherry Blossoms - Hanami. The best documentary I saw was Stranded: I've Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains, which also speaks to baby boomers, suffering, and mortality (and, yes, cannibalism...let's not forget the cannibalism). And the best feature for me was the relentlessly slow, heavy, and thoroughly European Sonetà ula, an arthouse movie if ever there was one, which could equally well have been made in 1976—the year SIFF was founded, and the same year SW was founded, for that matter—as in 2008. I'm not sure if that's progress (on my part, or SIFF's), but some traditions are hard to break.
2 comment(s)
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Cover Story: Critical Mass
James Early says:
Hmmm... so the crowd "greeted the film with an overeffusive standing ovation"? The "smug liberal audience" just loved every minute? Sounds like 1980 when The Stunt Man was received as the second coming. I haven't been back to a SIFF show since.
Posted On: Tuesday, Jun. 24 2008 @ 9:19AM
Audrey says:
Why bother writing an in-depth review of SIFF's opening night film a month after the fact?
Posted On: Tuesday, Jun. 24 2008 @ 10:04AM