SFIFF57 – Way Too Indie http://waytooindie.com Independent film and music reviews Fri, 02 Dec 2016 17:34:42 +0000 en-US hourly 1 Way Too Indiecast is the official podcast of WayTooIndie.com. Our film critics grip and gush about the latest indie movies and sometimes even mainstream ones. Find all of our reviews, podcasts, news, at www.waytooindie.com SFIFF57 – Way Too Indie yes SFIFF57 – Way Too Indie dustin@waytooindie.com dustin@waytooindie.com (SFIFF57 – Way Too Indie) The Official Podcast of Way Too Indie SFIFF57 – Way Too Indie http://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/waytooindie/podcast-album-art.jpg http://waytooindie.com SFIFF57: Alex of Venice Red Carpet Interviews http://waytooindie.com/interview/sfiff57-alex-of-venice-red-carpet-interviews/ http://waytooindie.com/interview/sfiff57-alex-of-venice-red-carpet-interviews/#comments Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000 http://waytooindie.com/?p=20947 This past Thursday we chatted with the stars of Alex of Venice, which closed out this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival at the Castro Theatre. Director Chris Messina, stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Don Johnson, and SFIFF57 Director of Programming Rachel Rosen spoke with us about Messina’s directorial debut, the festival buzz, and why Winstead will […]]]>

This past Thursday we chatted with the stars of Alex of Venice, which closed out this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival at the Castro Theatre. Director Chris Messina, stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Don Johnson, and SFIFF57 Director of Programming Rachel Rosen spoke with us about Messina’s directorial debut, the festival buzz, and why Winstead will never call Don Johnson “Daddy”.

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SFIFF57: Closing Night, Alex of Venice, Night Moves, I Origins http://waytooindie.com/news/film-festival/sfiff57-closing-night-alex-of-venice-night-moves-i-origins/ http://waytooindie.com/news/film-festival/sfiff57-closing-night-alex-of-venice-night-moves-i-origins/#respond Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000 http://waytooindie.com/?p=20885 Noah Cowan has only been San Francisco Film Society Executive Director for about ten weeks, but in that short stay his presence has lit a fire under an already lively film community. Last night, at the Closing Night screening of Alex of Venice at the Castro Theatre, Cowan addressed the crowd from the same podium he […]]]>

Noah Cowan has only been San Francisco Film Society Executive Director for about ten weeks, but in that short stay his presence has lit a fire under an already lively film community. Last night, at the Closing Night screening of Alex of Venice at the Castro Theatre, Cowan addressed the crowd from the same podium he did when festival began two weeks ago, thanking Programming Director Rachel Rosen and her team for putting together a fantastic lineup of films, thanking the festival staff and volunteers for their hard work, and thanking the audience for partaking in the festivities. His enthusiasm for the future of the festival and SFFS–community building, educational programs, the fall Cinema By The Bay series–was echoed by the buzzing crowd. The future looks bright for the longest running film festival in the Americas.

Rosen then took the stage to introduce the night’s guest of honor, actor Chris Messina (The Mindy Project), whose directorial debut Alex of Venice would close out the festival. Also in attendance were stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Don Johnson, and Katie Nehra (who also co-wrote the screenplay), and producer Jamie Patricof. A soul-searcher family drama, the film follows Winstead’s Alex, an environmentalist attorney so preoccupied with work that her husband (Messina), feeling neglected and trapped as a stay-at-home dad, takes a sabbatical from the family, leaving Alex to take care of her aging actor dad (Johnson) and ten-year-old son (Skylar Gaertner).

Winstead is given a lot to work with in the role of Alex, as the material requires her to explore myriad colors of emotion as a mother overwhelmed by a sense of abandonment, isolation, a scattered home life, and a hefty workload. She rises to the occasion and emerges as the film’s greatest asset. Johnson, who’s been enjoying a second wind career-wise as of late, is on the money as usual, but it would have been nice to have seen a few more layers of texture added to his character in the unpolished script, which gets hung up on family drama tropes every time it starts to build a bit of momentum. Messina shows major promise as a director, and with a couple more films under his belt could be great.

Night Moves

Also screening on the last night of the festival across town at Sundance Kabuki Cinemas was Kelly Reichardt’s latest, Night MovesJesse Eisenberg (in his second festival appearance, the first being The Double) and Dakota Fanning play Josh and Dena, a pair of environmental activists who, with the help of an ex-Marine accomplice named Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard), blow up a dam in Oregon, and then wade through the dark world of paranoia, guilt, and suspicion that descends upon them following their extreme, costly actions.

Reichardt, lauded for minimalist, meditative pictures like Meek’s Cutoff and Wendy and Lucy, has fashioned a dark psychological thriller in Night Moves, her most accessible film to date. She still gives her actors a football field’s worth of emotional ground to cover with understated, revealing long takes and deceptively deep dialogue, but compared to how hushed her previous efforts were, this film seems to move along briskly. Some of the night time photography is bone-chillingly gorgeous, and this may be Reichardt’s most visually refined film to date, but the script slips off the edge in its third act, providing little food for thought. Still, we’re still left with the thick, atmospheric imagery and fine performances to chew on, which is more than enough to warrant a watch.

I Origins the latest effort from Another Earth director Mike Cahill, takes an excellent, heady sci-fi premise and mucks up the execution, resulting in a disappointingly half-hearted picture. We follow Dr. Ian Gray (Michael Pitt), a young scientist with an obsessive  fascination with eyes and their origins. His life’s work is to end the debate between scientists and religion by proving that eyes are a product of evolutionary development, not Intelligent Design. He takes close-up photos of people’s eyes regularly, and meets the love of his life (Astrid Berges-Frisbey) at a party while using the eye-photo line as an icebreaker. She’s a spiritual soul, though, and isn’t on the same page when it comes to his work in the lab, unlike his lab assistant (Brit Marling), who with Ian unlocks a mystery that could change the world.

I Origins

Far-fetched isn’t always a bad thing, especially when it comes to sci-fi; unbelievable plots can work as long as the drama is convincing and the filmmaker convinces us to invest in the characters’ plight. Cahill falls short in this regard, beating the spirituality vs. pragmatism drum too loudly stretching the one-dimensional characters so thin you begin to wonder where the story is going with all the scientific jibber-jabber and rudimentary existential debates. After the film’s predictable, overwrought, dud of an ending, it’s unclear what exactly the film is trying to say. What’s the big idea? There’s some poignant statement or metaphor buried underneath the piles of pseudoscience jargon and fleeting moments of serendipity, but Cahill fails to mine it.

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SFIFF57: Sara Dosa Talks Mushroom Hunting, ‘The Last Season’ http://waytooindie.com/interview/sfiff57-sara-dosa-talks-mushroom-hunting-the-last-season/ http://waytooindie.com/interview/sfiff57-sara-dosa-talks-mushroom-hunting-the-last-season/#respond Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000 http://waytooindie.com/?p=20688 Sara Dosa’s debut feature, The Last Season, which screens today at Sundance Kabuki Cinemas as part of SFIFF57, is a multi-layered story about Kouy Loch, a Cambodian immigrant who resisted the Khmer Rouge, and Roger Higgins, a Vietnam vet. The former soldiers, traumatized by memories of war, find in each other the kinship they’d been searching for for […]]]>

Sara Dosa’s debut feature, The Last Season, which screens today at Sundance Kabuki Cinemas as part of SFIFF57, is a multi-layered story about Kouy Loch, a Cambodian immigrant who resisted the Khmer Rouge, and Roger Higgins, a Vietnam vet. The former soldiers, traumatized by memories of war, find in each other the kinship they’d been searching for for years, healing one another through the power of empathy, companionship, and love. They quite literally forged a father-son relationship–Kouy was adopted in spirit by the hard-ass old-timer and his wife Theresa as their own son–forming a wholly unique, unbreakable family bond.

What brought them together you ask? The rare mushrooms, of course! Every fall, Southeast Asian immigrants convene in Chemult, Oregon to hunt for matsutake mushrooms, considered a fine delicacy in Japan. (They pay ridiculously high prices for them, making matsutake hunting quite the lucrative endeavor.) Each season, the seasonal workers erect a tent community they call “Mushroom City”, which is where Kouy and Higgins met. Dosa’s film is as complex, strange, and unique as it sounds, a film as rare and precious as the fist-sized fungi the hunters pluck from the soil.

During SFIFF57, we spoke with Dosa about the beauty of mushroom hunting, stumbling upon Kouy and Roger’s story, being frightened by Roger during their first interview, screening the film in front of her hometown, and more.

The Last Season screens today, May 5th, at 3:30pm at Sundance Kabuki Cinemas.

The Last Season

You’re a mushroom hunter yourself, correct?
Sara: I am! I’d say I’m very much an amateur, nowhere close to the mushroom hunters who were featured in my film. I go out every once in a while to hunt mushrooms, and it’s very enjoyable and addicting as well.

What’s special about mushroom hunting? What made you fall in love with it?
Sara: I think it’s twofold. For the people in my film, there’s definitely a love and enjoyment, but it’s also a love of labor. It’s how they make a living. For me, it’s all about discerning the relationship of the forest. You have to understand how the sky relates to the ground, or how the trees and soil interact. There are all these little pieces that have to come together, and it’s only at the right moment of interaction between all of these elements that a mushroom can be produced. I think there’s something so lovely about it from a metaphoric standpoint, but it also creates a treasure hunt feel. I think it’s really fun! It attunes your brain to the little details of the world around you.

How much fun was it to shoot these experienced hunters working in their element?
Sara: It was amazing! First of all, it was so generous of people to invite us into their worlds. For example, Kouy, my protagonist…he moves fast in the woods. We definitely slowed him down. (laughs) We embedded ourselves as much as possible. We really lived in the mushroom camp for the entire season. I can easily say it was the most meaningful experience of my life. I really loved it.

The film is about mushroom hunting, but it’s more about your protagonists and this remarkable family dynamic they’ve forged together. How did you come across them and their story?
Sara: When I met Kouy and Roger, this idea of unexpected interconnections made everything really click. You have all of these disparate elements: You have the the demand from Japan for this commodity, war in Southeast Asia, the ecology of mushrooms, family. Through the lens of unexpected interconnections, all of those things can become woven together. That’s what excited me most. Their story was about them and their relationship and could also be extrapolated to be much more.

When you set out to make the film, I imagine you weren’t expecting to find such a layered family story. Was it a surprise?
Sara: Yeah, it definitely was. We went in knowing that there would be stories everywhere, because it’s such a rich world. It’s so rare that you find Vietnam vets, immigrants from Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand living together, all with a shared history of war in Southeast Asia. We knew that there would be something interesting there. When I met Kouy, I was struck by the way he spoke about his family. He was calling Roger dad, and he made this joke. He was describing one of Roger’s war injuries and one of his own war injuries, and he said, “We’re both made of metal. We’re like father like son!” He started chuckling. I thought…that’s profound. They’re not biologically related, but there’s this bond there. The language that he uses to fuse their family relationship is a language of war. We were still in the process of filming many, many different story lines, but theirs always stood out as so powerful. Through the editing process, it kind of rose to the forefront of what we wanted to focus on.

Kouy and Theresa’s relationship is beautiful as well. You can tell that he relishes the fact that he can call her mom–he does it constantly. What was it like being around them in their home, sharing such a unique familial bond?
Sara: I loved it. I feel so grateful that I come from such an incredibly close family, so when I see families that are close, whether by blood or through a newly created kinship, I can’t help but feel a connection. Theresa is one of the strongest, most hilarious, kindest, and most surprising people I’ve ever met in my life. They were so inviting! It’s not every day that four twenty-thirty-somethings knock on your door and want to make a movie in your living room. They were gracious. It was very touching to see the love between Kouy and Theresa. And Roger as well, in his own stoic, cowboy way.

There are some interesting twists and turns in the movie, reveals about Kouy and Roger’s life that change the way we view them. What was it like structuring the movie, choosing when to reveal these bits of information about their lives?
Sara: From the very beginning, we wanted to focus on one season and have it contain the arc. Secondarily, we wanted it to be what we termed a “reveal structure”–you learn the most surprising things later on in the film. I think it’s really common to front-load films with all you need to know about the characters, and then the story follows. For us, the story is the reveal. You slowly unravel the layers, as if you’re digging into the soil, looking for a mushroom. It’s kind of a content-meets-form thing we were going for. Our film is about a search first and foremost, so we wanted our structure to really reflect that.

You capture the atmosphere of Oregon and the misty, forested surroundings very well. How important was it for you to bottle the aura of that place?
Sara: That was one of the things going into the film that was first and foremost. I love films where you feel immersed in a sense of place. Also, once you get to Oregon, you can’t help but be struck by the landscape. And it’s not just a gorgeous backdrop: for our characters, the woods is the site of war. It’s where they survived the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnam war, but now it’s turned into the site of their new life and their livelihood. it was very important to have the landscape featured prominently in the storytelling itself.

The making of documentaries are often about happy accidents, these unexpected moments that you’re fortunate enough to be there to film it. Can you remember an instance where you felt lucky to have gotten such a surprising, golden moment captured on film?
Sara: Sure! The first one that comes to mind is our very first interview with Roger and Theresa. We didn’t want to get into the war stuff yet, so we were asking them about the mushrooms. Basic questions. All of a sudden, Roger gets up and grabs a gun behind him! We were like, “Oh my god…he’s grabbing a gun!” We hardly knew this guy, and we knew he was traumatized from the war. It turns out he was trying to shoot this pine squirrel that was bothering him in the distance. He missed the pine squirrel, and he said, “I guess he gets to live another day.” That is so Roger. We were just relieved that he wasn’t going to shoot us! It was such a great way to introduce him in the film, because it shows his cantankerous character, but “I guess he gets to live another day” is Roger’s story. This was a season where every day mattered for Roger.

So…what is it about these freaking mushrooms? Have you eaten one?
Sara: Oh yeah. I’ve eaten so many! They’re delicious. They have a unique taste that a lot of Americans have ever tried. But in Japan, they’re a symbol of cultural identity. There are stories about how Japanese people came from the matsutake and how they’r essential for fertility. I’m Italian, and I always liken the Japanese matsutake love to the way Italians love garlic, if that makes sense. Some people don’t necessarily know the lineage of the matsutake, but they know that they love it and it’s a big part of their cuisine. There’s a complex relationship with the matsutake in Japan, but it’s deeply meaningful. It goes for super high prices and has created this entire economy that has fueled the livelihoods of the people in my film and so many more.

How was your first screening at the San Francisco International Film Festival?
Sara: It was amazing! It was a dream come true. I grew up here and I used to work at the San Francisco Film Society and at the film festival, so I couldn’t ask for a better place to launch my film into the world. The reception was incredibly warm, Kouy was there, and almost all my crew was there. I love them with a fiery passion! They’re the most amazing, talented people I’ve ever come across. Couldn’t have asked for more.

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SFIFF57: Hellion, The Sacrament, Kumiko, Ping Pong Summer http://waytooindie.com/news/sfiff57-hellion-the-sacrament-kumiko-ping-pong-summer/ http://waytooindie.com/news/sfiff57-hellion-the-sacrament-kumiko-ping-pong-summer/#respond Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000 http://waytooindie.com/?p=20509 The 57th annual San Francisco International film festival has been taking over Japantown in the Sundance Kabuki Cinema and New People Cinema, and the lineup of films so far hasn’t disappointed, with domestic and international gems from all genres. We’re only a few days into the festival, and there have already been plenty of highlights that […]]]>

The 57th annual San Francisco International film festival has been taking over Japantown in the Sundance Kabuki Cinema and New People Cinema, and the lineup of films so far hasn’t disappointed, with domestic and international gems from all genres. We’re only a few days into the festival, and there have already been plenty of highlights that you should keep your eye on in the near future (most of these selections have secured domestic distribution), plus one major disappointment.

Let’s start off with the bad news. Part of the festival’s Late Show program, Ti West’s found footage horror flick The Sacrament gathers the usual suspects West pals around with on indie film sets (Joe Swanberg, Amy Seimetz, Kate Lyn Sheil, AJ Bowen) and throws them into a secluded encampment called Eden Parish, constructed and inhabited by people who have a creepily cultish way about them. The film is presented via two cameras our protagonists (Vice journalists) bring to the jungled community to film a profile piece.

Though brimming with talent as is per usual for the merry bunch of indie darlings, their gifts are wasted, as the film can’t avoid the pitfalls of the found footage format, breaking the docu-style illusion when it begins to look too much like a narrative feature in its overblown third act. West, ever the inventive filmmaker, does some interesting things with the limitations the camera, building a decent amount of suspense as the journalists sneak around the open grounds of Eden Parish, but The Sacrament is a disappointment coming off the heels of modern horror powerhouses The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers.

Hellion

It’s clean sailing from here. Hellion (above), a gritty family drama by Kat Candler set in dusty Southeast Texas, flaunts an excellent cast of screen vets and new blood alike, all of whom deliver the goods in a big way. The film stars Aaron Paul as a widower trying desperately to get his act together as his oldest son (impressive newcomer Josh Wiggins), the titular hellion who’s obsessed with metal, motocross, and vandalizing their tiny town with his punk friends, begins to drag his younger brother (Deke Garner) into his world of dangerous hijinks. The town catches wind of the family’s chaotic home situation, calling child services and threatening to tear them apart forever.

The film is subtle and tasteful, and also has a killer metal soundtrack that jibes well with the dirt-road, tin can setting. Wiggins, who Candler discovered in a Youtube video, is as talented a child actor as I’ve seen in quite some time, especially for a first-timer. His potential is scary. Paul fits into the fatherly role quite well considering he’s coming off of the most definitive role of his career as a hellion himself in Breaking Bad. Juliette Lewis is surprisingly cast in a subdued role as the aunt of the troubled boys, and it’s a bit of a delight to see her excel in such an un-cartoonish role.

A funny and surprisingly dark odyssey movie, David Zellner’s Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter has an incredibly unique premise that never loses its novelty or charm. Rinko Kikuchi plays Kumiko, a Japanese office worker who finds a VHS copy of Fargo and sets out on a journey to the American city in search of the briefcase full of cash Steve Buscemi buries in the snow in the Coen’s classic, which Kumiko for some reason believes to be a documentary of some sort. Rinko is charming as Kumiko, the certifiable sociopathic, unstoppable treasure hunter, and the film, while comedic, also explores mental instability in a meditative, eerie fashion.

Ping Pong Summer

On a much, much lighter note, Ping Pong Summer (above) by Michael Tully  is an entertaining time warp for anyone raised in the taste-deficient 80s-90s era of Nickelodeon, B-boys, ICEEs, and arcades. Set in 1985, the film follows young Rad Miracle (Marcello Conte) who, while on a family vacation at a beachside resort town, meets his best friend, the girl of his dreams, the biggest bully in the neighborhood, and a former ping pong legend (Susan Sarandon). Wave after wave of ’90s nostalgia washed over me throughout the film, and I found myself mouthing “wow” constantly at how authentically cheesy the props, costumes, and sets are. Perfect watching conditions: afternoon on a school day, eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch, wearing neon shorts and L.A. Gears.

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