The Imaginary Zine is a 60-page old school printed zine recounting our first 10 years with some of our favorite blog posts and stories from our imaginary friends. It is extemely limited with only 333 handcrafted zines made.
It also includes a cd chock full of rare, live, or exclusive songs by some of our favorite local artists, including The Long Winters, BOAT, Tullycraft, Exohxo, Tennis Pro, Math & Physics Club and many more!
{Beautiful Darling screens at the Seattle International Film Festival at 6:15 at SIFF Cinema.}
"People who I interviewed said she was the most genuine person they had ever met" director James Rasin told me in an interview about Candy Darling, the transgendered actress who died in 1974 and is the subject of his engrossing documentary Beautiful Darling: The Life and Times of Candy Darling, Andy Warhol Superstar. He added he "I thought was weird because she's a person who is a complete construct, everything is intentionally, layer upon layer, an artifice but becomes someone so completely genuine."
That is one of the central themes and ironies that runs through Rasin's fascinating film, which played at the Seattle International Film Festival this year. Candy Darling was one of the Warhol superstars featured in the Lou Reed song "Walk on the Wild Side" (Reed's band, The Velvet Underground, also had a song about her called "Candy Says") where Reed sings in the second verse "Candy came from out on the Island, in the backroom she was everybody's darling; she never lost a head, even when she was giving head". While not exactly the most positive description one could hope for, Rasin's documentary is far more kind and thorough.
"Basically, I told her I want to blow Samantha Jones into tiny little pieces" Keith Bearden, the writer and director of the often very funny new film Meet Monica Velour told me in an interview. By "her", he was, of course, referring to Kim Catrall, who plays Samantha Jones in the now much-maligned "Sex and the City" franchise and who plays the title character in his debut film that recently played at the Seattle International Film Festival.
Monica Velour is a has-been porn star, who may have been remembered for Saturday Night Beaver or Hooked on Hookers, although chances are, she's not remembered at all. She's living in a trailer park in Indiana somewhere and her life is a mess. Sadly, there are few skills that porn stars can take that will help them re-enter the job field and Monica wants to escape the live she has while regaining her former fame. It's like Sunset Boulevard, if, instead of Norma Desmond saying "I'm still big, it's the pictures that got small," she starred in a gangbang.
Every Spring in China more than 130 million workers jam train stations in desperate attempts to travel home for the New Year holiday -- a mass exodus from industrial cities that constitutes the world's largest human migration. For many travelers the journeys are extremely difficult ones (grueling distances, crammed-beyond-capacity trains) but represent their one opportunity to reunite with family all year.
In the beautifully stark, jaw-droppingly honest, and very moving documentary Last Train Home, director Lixin Fan focuses on one couple, Changhua and Sugin Zhang, beginning as they embark upon a two-day journey to their poverty-stricken rural birthplace to see their children. And it's not a happy holiday for everyone: The Zhangs' dearest wish is to earn enough money to provide their kids a good education, but teenage daughter Qin, resentful of their extended absences (and, in her mind, abandonment), eventually decides to drop out of school to work in a factory herself -- a crushing blow to her parents which leads to a deeply painful confrontation with her dad.
The extraordinarily intimate collaboration with the Zhangs reminded me a lot of the Yung Chang-directed, Lixin Fan-produced Up the Yangtze, which exquisitely observed one of many families displaced by the mammoth Three Gorges Dam project. Last Train Home similarly places a human face on China's rise as a world economic power, illustrating the true cost of progress in a country stuck between its industrial future and rural past.
{Screens Saturday 6/12, 6p and Sunday 6/13, 1:30p, Pacific Place.}
The immensely entertaining Taiwanese gem Au Revoir Taipei, director Arvin Chen's debut feature (with exec-producer credit to none other than Wim Winders), won my affection in ways I never would've predicted, and I'm happy to see that SIFF has added a late-breaking fourth (!) screening to the schedule. When I attended (on a Sunday night at Pacific Place) the house was packed, with the longest rush ticket line I've seen yet this festival year, and those of us fortunate enough to snag a seat were in for a true charmer. I'm seriously tempted to see it again after the Closing Night film this Sunday.
Chen's film tells a rather complicated story with a feather-light touch. It centers on Kai (Jack Yao), who works at his family's busy Taipei noodle stand by day and hangs out with his always-hungry but very lovable lunkhead of a buddy Gao (Paul Chiang) by night. Hung up on an unseen ex-girlfriend who's recently relocated to Paris, Kai regularly parks himself at his local bookshop to study French textbooks; he's of course oblivious to the subtle longing glances of cute shop assistant Susie (Amber Kuo).
Latest comment by: shoney: "really good movie, a high point of the festival"
One of my favorite films at SIFF this year was the beautiful, intuitive drama Cairo Time, written and directed by the equally beautiful and intuitive Ruba Nadda.
In person, Nadda exudes an open friendliness that instantly made me comfortable. We sat down for a few minutes and discussed everything from Patricia Clarkson’s eyebrows to the fiasco of Sex and the City 2. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that I was captivated by everything she said, and that I’d love to be able to sit down with her and do it again.
Latest comment by: filmfan: "What a great interview, thank you for posting this. I watched Cairo Time recently and loved it. Nadda is so inspiring, I really admire her work. "
I'm a little ashamed to admit that prior to this documentary, the only thing I knew about William S. Burroughs was that he had written "Naked Lunch".
Taking you through a brief history of the Beat Generation, Director Yony Leyser paints an unwavering and fascinating portrait in William S Burroughs: A Man Within through film footage of the author (some with Allen Ginsberg and Andy Warhol), recordings, readings, and interviews with friends.
Celebs and musicians, including Peter Weller (who also narrates), David Cronenberg, John Waters, Gus Van Sant, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, Thurston Moore, Jello Biafra and more cover what Burroughs meant to them – from his importance to the gay liberation movement to his later credit as "The Godfather of Punk".
After the film, I felt I had a more complete picture of a man whose legendary status as a writer and icon had made him seem almost untouchable. Burroughs was seemingly unaware of why he was famous, lived his life according to his own rules, and by all accounts, was someone who touched the lives of many personally, as well as with his writing.
If you’re curious about him at all, I’d recommend this. It’s good stuff, you guys.
{William S. Burroughs: A Man Within screens at SIFF June 10, 4pm at The Neptune and again June 12, 6:30pm at The Harvard Exit}
Each year the giddy joy of perusing the new SIFF roster gives way inevitably to a sense of fatigue at trying to differentiate, by 25-word blurbles, the hundreds of movies that begin to blend together into genres and tropes and overlapping plots. There are the family dramas where A Secret Is Revealed that Changes Everything, the coming-of-age tales, the coming-out tales, the ones where a lovely lady gets her groove back by sleeping with a strapping native fellow, tales of foreign oppression, heists gone bad, things with ninjas, and of course the family comedies where A Secret Is Revealed that Changes Everything.
The Wedding Cake is a lovely example of a how it really all comes down to execution. Weddings are so laden with symbolism and ripe for drama that it’s no wonder filmmakers are drawn to them, nor that so many of them ride right off the rails (Rachel Getting Married comes to mind). But here’s a movie with a fairly formulaic premise (it’s a family comedy, see, and a secret is revealed that changes everything) and even somewhat clichéd execution that’s sweet and charming and very satisfying.
{Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist, Rebel screens at the Seattle International Film Festival tonight, Wednesday, June 9 at 9:30pm at the Egyptian Theater.}
In the fascinating and thorough new documentary Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist, Rebel, you don't learn much about the larger-than-life, octogenarian character who spends most of his time in his pajamas and dates women who are at least half a century younger than he is. What you do learn about is a very smart and thoughtful man who has an unmistakable moral compass and has always ended up on the correct side of history.
The film was directed by Canadian filmmaker Brigitte Berman, who is best known for documentaries on jazz musicians Bix Beiderbecke and Artie Shaw. The latter (Artie Shaw: Time is All You Got) won the Academy Award in 1987 for Best Documentary and the former (Bix: "Ain't None of Them Play Like Him Yet") was responsible for Berman and Hefner meeting. When I interviewed Brigitte Berman after her documentary screened at the Seattle International Film Festival, she explained, "it just happened that Bix was Hef's favorite musician. When I won the Oscar for the Artie Shaw film, Hef tracked me down through Mary O'Connor, his right-hand woman, and she called me and said Hef wanted to get a copy of it, so I sent it down. He's been showing it and whenever I was in LA, I was invited to the mansion for movie night. Our friendship grew over music and movies." She further explained "I knew there was so much more behind him because I'd hear him talk after movies and I saw the intelligent and complex side. I decided that I wanted to make a film about him. I wrote up a treatment because I knew that he would never agree to it if someone came up to him and said 'Hef, can I do a movie about you?' The next day, he sent me a fax that said 'I love it and anything you need, I'll give you.'"
If the Hallmark Channel ever goes multilingual they should secure the rights to this sweet, slow, unassuming (and rarely surprising) indie. It begins with a quick social studies lesson about Chubut Province, which is situated in the Argentina portion of the Patagonia mountain range and is where a community of descendants of late-19th-century Welsh immigrants can be found. Patagonia the film contains two analogous stories, each set in a different nation.
The first is about a Welsh couple named Gwen and Rhys; he's been sent to Patagonia for a photo project, she's discovered she's infertile just ahead of their trip. He's a bit of a tightass, she prefers to party, and the situation leads to (spoiler alert) her having a lil' fling with their guide (Brothers & Sisters's Matthew Rhys, who by the way is super hot in this).
The second narrative takes place in and around Cardiff, Wales, were an elderly Argentinian is taking a secret pilgrimage to find the childhood home of her mom; accompanying her is a dorky-cute neighbor kid named Alejandro (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, who you may have seen in the fine film The Aura); he (spoiler alert) ends up hooking up with an underdeveloped character played by pop singer Duffy.
So it's all about quests for meaning, investigations into cultural identity and searches for truth, see? And while both stories go pretty much exactly the way you expect, director Marc Evans (Snow Cake) makes sure to get in as many breathtaking shots of both countries' panoramic landscapes as possible. It's undeniably a lovely movie to behold.
But, yeah, very Hallmark. Which is not necessarily a criticism! If your mom is in town and into this sort of thing maybe you can take her on a SIFF date.
{World Premiere. Screens Thursday 6/10, 7p and Saturday 6/12, 3:45p at Uptown Cinemas.}
Latest comment by: Amie Simon: "This is unsurprising to me, as Snow Cake was about as Hallmark-y as you can get. But I'd see a movie about hot people hooking up. I mean. uh. This sounds like a good watch! :) "
If you've been to TIG any time over the past twenty days or so, you've noticed that the Seattle International Film Festival is one of our favorite events. Some 400+ short and feature films will have been screened by the time the whole thing wraps up on Sunday by giving out the Golden Space Needle Awards that morning and closing it out with a screening of the Bill Murray/Robert Duvall film Get Low and a party.
To get some more insight into the festival, we posed some questions via e-mail to SIFF's wonderful and extremely knowledgable Programming Director, Beth Barrett. Here's what she had to say.
Recent comments
Photo Essay: SIFF Opening Night! Whedonverse meets SIFFverse
Recommended SIFF + Ticket Giveaway: Mistaken for Strangers
Recommended SIFF + Ticket Giveaway: Mistaken for Strangers
Recommended SIFF + Ticket Giveaway: Mistaken for Strangers
Recommended event {and sweet things!}: Bake It In A Cake Cookbook book release party on Thursday {10/4}
Imaginary. You could call it that.
Imaginary. You could call it that.
A chat about our favorite songs this week on KUOW's Weekday show
A chat about our favorite songs this week on KUOW's Weekday show
A chat about our favorite songs this week on KUOW's Weekday show