Jayne's 2007 SIFF Reviews & Power Rankings

The 2007 Seattle International Film Festival has come and gone. Here's a power ranking of the films I saw.

1. The Ten
Grade: A
The gaggle or guys who are all or at least in part behind “The State”, “Wet Hot American Summer” & “Reno 911” are out with a new film. This flick is 10 short stories, each about one of the Ten Commandments.
How was it?
More than once, I laughed so hard it hurt (I had no idea Liev Schrieber could be so funny). I don’t think I stopped laughing for the entire 90 minutes of the film. I’m not going to ruin it, because it’s so much better to see it without knowing what to expect. Fox Searchlight won a bidding war on this film at Sundance, so you can probably expect a limited release this fall.
I was really reluctant to give this film the number one slot, but at the end of the day, I really just enjoyed the hell out of it.

2. Paris Je Taime
Grade: A
Yep, another short film compilation. Crazy, isn't it?
I was completely charmed by this collection of 18 love stories set in Paris. Normally when you see short film collections it’s an uneven affair. Some shorts are awesome, some suck, and some lie in the middle. With Paris, I enjoyed every single short to some degree. I found myself appreciating the more complete stories more, but even the scene vignettes were really good. This is probably the first film compilation I’ve seen that I’d be really hard pressed to pick a favorite out of.

3. Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten
Grade: A
I loved Julien Temple’s other punk rock documentary “the Filth & the Fury” and this film is even better. I only had one worry about this movie going in. Temple & Strummer were very close friends and I was a little worried that this movie would just feel like a puff piece. I was happy to be wrong. This is truly a warts and all story about one of the all time great rock and roll pioneers. This film doesn’t over glorify Joe or degrade him. It’s just an honest look at a man who happened to do really great things.
Any fan of the Clash, Punk Rock, or just music in general owes it to themselves to see this movie.

4. Severance
Grade: A-
Britain is really starting to corner the market on the Horror/Comedy genre. While this film may not be as good as ‘Shaun of the Dead’ (And really, how many movies are?) it’s up there. More horror tinged than ‘Shaun’, the over the top violence reminded me a little of ‘Slither’ in tone. A great cross between 'The Office’ and ‘Deliverance’.

5. Sakuran
Grade: A-
This was described as ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ done right. I actually saw ‘Memoirs’ after this film just to see what they meant. Boy...they weren’t kidding.
I actually added this film as a last minute addition, and I’m really glad I did. It was a very pleasant surprise. I really hope this movie finds a way to get a theatrical release in the states, because it really benefits from being seen on the big screen. I really dug the way this movie was put together. The cinematography was beautiful, and had a unique feel to it; the editing was really fresh and didn’t feel like a period piece. And then there was the music. Instead of doing period music or a traditional symphonic score, they actually used a lot of modern styles to tell the story. There was some big band, jazz and even rock spread throughout. I’ve read some reviews that really bashed the songs used in this film, and I get what their saying, I just don’t agree. I found it to be a really effective story telling device.

6. Son Of Rambow
Grade: B+
If you remember what it was like being a little kid in your backyard playing war with your friends then you should be able to at least appreciate this film. I hate to use the term family friendly, but this really is a sweet film that has enough adult humor and nostalgia that most age groups can take something away from it.

7. Interview
Grade: B+
Steve Buscemi directed, co-wrote and stars in this remake of a Theo Van Goh film, co-starring Sienna Miller. Primarily taking place in one location, this film does a great job keeping things visually interesting as we progress through 90 minutes of a journalist and an actress verbally sparring. Great performances from Buscemi & Miller really keep the energy up, which you really need in this kind of two actor/one setting type movies.

8. Eagle vs. Shark
Grade: B+
This movie is going to draw a lot of comparisons to ‘Napoleon Dynamite’, which is understandable, but not necessarily fair. While both films share the really oddball casts that could be distant relatives of each other, ‘Eagle vs. Shark’ is a much more adult story and I found that more appealing. I also found the humor in ‘Eagle’ to be much funnier than ‘Napoleon’. “Gimmie your tots” is only funny the first couple of times.

9. Death at a Funeral
Grade: B
As much as I want to rag on Frank Oz for being a douche bag in person, I’ll restrain myself and admit that this is a really enjoyable black comedy that is a nice return to form for Mr. Oz. This is the Frank Oz that made ‘Dirty Rotten Scoundrels’ instead of ‘The Stepford Wives’. And I have to give a shout out to Alan Tudyk who nearly steals the show with a character that could have easily been the most annoying in the wrong hands.

10. Red Road
Grade: B
I was ready to hate this film. As soon as I read comparisons between this film and the works of Michael Haneke I went to Def-Con 2. But truth be told, I found it to be a very un-Haneke like engaging character drama. It’s very well acted and the story unfolds beautifully. I have one gripe though. Why oh why did this movie have subtitles? Everyone is speaking English the whole time, and it’s so bloody distracting to have subtitles up when you don’t need them.

11. Fido
Grade: B
Take an episode of Lassie. Swap out the dog for a Zombie. Add dark humor and a body count. Blend.
This is a pretty enjoyable movie that only suffers from having a fairly uneven script that causes the movie to drag in a few points. It's still worth checking out, especially for any zombie lovers.

12. Blood on the Flat Track
Grade: B-
I really struggled with ranking this documentary & giving it a grade. On the one hand I really enjoyed this documentary about the Rat City Roller Girls. I found it very enjoyable and under different circumstances this would have made it higher on my rankings. But technically speaking this film is car wreck. Honestly it looked like a rough cut of the film. The editing was off in places (i.e. Weird moments of black screen that last too long), the audio didn’t sound like it had been properly mixed and the lighting during interviews was completely non existent at times. You’d have somebody taking lit really darkly while the background behind them is lit up. Because of these kinds of basics seemingly getting ignored, I had to knock it down a few notches. Again, the actual material is really interesting; it’s just the execution that really suffered.

13. The Ferryman
Grade: B-
A solid flick, but make no mistakes about it. This is a pure B-movie fare. It’s got it all, slightly cheesy premise, sex (one scene in particular was had me practically falling out of my seat laughing, over the top violence and ultra dark humor. The film takes a while to really get going, but once you get to the scene between the serial killer & a dog, it’s an over the top good time.

14. Black Sheep
Grade: B-
A really funny outrageous B-horror flick. You can’t say “Killer Sheep” without cracking a smile. The only real problem with this flick was that it really drags in the middle. Of course that could partially just have to do with my perception. I believe the term is ‘three sheets to the wind’.

15. Alien Autopsy
Grade: B-
A quirky British comedy about the fictional story of footage released in 1995 showing scientists performing an autopsy on an alien. You may remember that cheesy Fox special hosted by William Riker. I loved seeing the supporting cast filled with people famous for being in Alien movies, including Bill Pullman (ID4), Harry Dean Stanton (Alien) and Jonathan Frakes (Star Trek).

16. Paprika
Grade: B-
I’d be doing a disservice if I didn’t first point out that this movie is absolutely visually stunning. Still beyond that, my interest seemed to fade in and out throughout the course of the movie. It would start to get really interesting, and then it would drag for a bit, before getting interesting again. After reading so many other great reviews of this movie, I think it’s just safe to say that this just isn’t my kind of movie. I can’t really fault it for much besides just not keeping me interested, and I can’t even really pinpoint why.

17. The Banquet
Grade: C+
A movie that is very much in the tradition or ‘House of Flying Daggers’, ‘Hero’, and ‘The Curse of the Golden Flower’. All films I really liked. This particular tale is a loose adaptation of ‘Hamlet’. It’s absolutely gorgeous looking and has some great martial arts sequences. So why is it so far down on the list? Well...it’s kind of boring. Even some of the action felt a little on the boring side. I dig martial arts flicks, but this just didn’t do anything for me.

18. Waiter
Grade: C
Similar in concept to the film ‘Stranger than Fiction’, this film follow a character who is constantly bickering with the author of the screen play he’s in over the direction his life is going. It’s hard not to make comparisons to ‘Stranger’, although they are different enough that they don’t feel like copies of each other. While probably the film buff thing to do would be to choose the independent foreign film as the superior tale, ‘Waiter’ just didn’t do much for me. It was amusing at times (particularly when the Japanese gangster enters the picture), but I just didn’t give a damn about any of the characters.

19. The Aerial
Grade: C-
In retrospect, I liked this movie a lot more than I thought I did. I actually have a lot of respect for most of the film, and I dug a lot of its silent storytelling techniques. Now having said that, the last 1/3 of the movie completely ruins everything. It’s that bad. You have two thirds of a movie constantly playing with metaphors; in fact the entire premise is 100% metaphor. But suddenly at the climax of the film they throw all that out the window and decide to spell it all out so explicitly, a blind man watching this silent movie could probably figure it out.

20. The Perverts Guide to Cinema
Grade: C-
While it was interesting getting a new point of view as to how to look at certain films, this movie was just too damn long and there was just too much repetition in the points being made. There was no reason for this to be as long as a ‘Lord of the Rings’ film.

21. Expired
Grade: D+
I will give this movie props for having great performances from Jason Patric & Samantha Morton and for being kind of funny at first. Beyond that, I totally disliked it, and found it to be completely un-enjoyable. It’s a love story where Patric plays a purebred asshole. You’d think the guy would have at least a couple of redeeming features so you could understand why Samantha Morton’s character is even giving him the time of day, but no. At first his demeanor is so over the top that it’s actually funny, but by the halfway point I just wanted them to hurry up and break up so the movie would be over.

22. Yella
Grade: D+
When the end credits rolled I blurted out the very first thing to come into my mind: “Well, that was retarded.” The movie may have been well shot and had fine acting. But this is just a stupid movie with a ‘twist ending’ you see coming from miles and miles away. I’m annoyed just thinking about this movie. Banking?!? Seriously?!?

23. Glue
Grade: D
There’s nothing like watching a movie where nothing happens! There’s no real story here. It’s just a kid bumming around. Let me sum up:
Went swimming. Got athletes foot. Went to a girls house and drank milk. Huffed some glue. Made out with my best friend. Played in a band. Made out with a girl. Went camping. Listened to the Violent Femmes.
Fin.

24. The Last Winter
Grade: D-
This movie starts out kind of promising. It looks like it’ll be cheesy, but there should be some fun horror/gore elements ala John Carpenter’s “The Thing”. Sadly, there is absolutely no pay off. There’s something scary out there killing people and it’s...drum roll please...a giant ghost antelope! I want to start polluting the earth just to spite this movie.

25. Strange Culture
Grade: D-
If you are going to do a documentary about an interesting subject don’t ruin it by doing really crappy ‘re-enactments’ for half of the bloody film. There were many different things they could have covered that would have been really interesting to learn about. Instead we have a bad episode of ‘Unsolved Mysteries’. At least that had Robert Stack.

26. Aachi & Ssipak
Grade: F
I am now stupider for having watched this film.

27. One Day Like Rain
Grade: F
I was so ready to like this movie. I was down right excited. Two weeks later I’m still pissed that I wasted 90 minutes of my life watching this thing. This is what happens when you do drugs and watch Donnie Darko. You start to get really stupid ideas for movies. I really hated this stupid, stupid film.