Timecrimes (Los Cronocrimenes)

Maria Pecot for GR Film Buffs:
Timecrimes is director Nacho Vigalondo’s first feature, but you can’t tell by watching the film. Without relying on special effects or a big budget, the science fiction thriller uses psychological games and a layered plot to deliver an edge-of-your-seat experience. Well written, and flawlessly acted, the film is an unofficial warning about traveling to the past to correct your mistakes. The film's central character Hector is a mild mannered homebody, who through a set of bizarre events finds himself transported a few hours back into time. His efforts to restore normalcy, set the pace for an unforeseeable sequence of disastrous consequences. Enter the world of a scissor wielding man wrapped up in bloody bandages, a mad scientist, and an all too helpful passer-by. With a cast of just four characters, Timecrimes is undeniably hilarious one moment, and darkly chilling the next. The film theorizes about the physiological limitations of time travel, and gives a glimpse into the colorful corners of human nature.

And the Winners are…

Serena Bartlett for GR Film Buffs:
The 51st San Fran International Film Fest draws to a close today with a chance encounter with everybody’s favorite cult lit hero: Hunter S. Thompson. But even if you didn’t score the pricey tickets to tonight’s event, at least you can ogle at the festival’s winner list and plan your adventure to their next screenings at theaters and festivals to come. Here’s a sampling of the winners, some of whom represent the GrassRoutes Buff’s favorites!

New Directors Award: Mushon Saloma for Vasermil, Israel 2007 (we didn’t get to see this one! Maybe I’ll track it down, and I promise to report back if I find anything out!)

FIPRESCI Prize: Lance Hammer for Ballast, USA 2007 (complete review to come)

FIPRESCI Special Jury Mention: Glasses, Japan 2007 (complete review to come)

Chris Holter Humor in Film Award: Dorata Kedzierzawska for Time to Die, Poland, 2007 (complete review to come)

And more, check out the complete list here. They haven't all been announced yet on the main site, but look for them soon!

Secrecy

Maria Pecot for GR Film Buffs:
“A great nation’s character is what makes it great. When you are afraid it’s hard to have character. When you get down to it, courage is the ability to follow ones principles, even when you are scared to death.”

Neal Kaytal
Plaintiff Attorney
Hamden v Rumsfield


This crucial documentary chronicles the history of secrecy in government, starting from its WWII era beginnings through today’s post 9/11 society. With the advent of the internet and electronic data, we have never had more information at our fingertips. Ironically, the amount of secrecy within the executive branch of government has never been so great. Secrecy begins by posing the question: what amount of confidentiality is beneficial to national security? Proponents on both sides of the issue make compelling claims. The film reports instances when the media leaked classified information, and terrorists networks benefited. On the flip side, the film suggests secrecy played a role in the successful execution of the 9/11 terror attacks and the atrocities of Abu Ghraib. As the film matures, the panel of attorneys, ex-government officials, and journalists suggests that in post 9/11 America, rampant unchecked executive power extends beyond issues of public safety, and threatens the essence of democracy.

The final SFIFF screening of Secrecy is Thursday May 8 at the Kabuki Theatre in Japantown.
Secrecy is competing for a Golden Gate Award

Touching Home Touches the Heart

Maria Pecot for GR Film Buffs:

When baseball fell through for Noah and Logan Miller, the identical twin brothers found themselves back home, in the backwoods of West Marin, living in their great grandmothers house, and reconciling a relationship with a father who battled homelessness and alcoholism. This year their debut film, Touching Home, was one of only four movies chosen to headline the San Francisco International Film Festival. I had the opportunity to sit down with the gregarious duo, who wrote, directed, produced and star in this largely autobiographical film...


Touching Home captures the timelessness of West Marin, but it could have easily taken place in any other small town in America. Equally universal is the deeply personal story, in which the Millers play fictionalized versions of themselves. In the film, the brothers struggle for their own piece of the American dream, while simultaneously coming to terms with their fathers debilitating alcohol addiction. “Our father was one of the hardest working men I know,” recounts Noah, but due to gambling and addiction he lived in his van for the last 15 years of his life. “This was a very personal movie, and it was something that we were compelled to make” say the Millers, “We felt that re-experiencing these scenes and this situation with our father would be very cathartic and it would help us move beyond all this pain.” On the decision to play themselves the Millers say, “We didn’t get a chance to say goodbye", "and we weren’t gonna find two guys who could play baseball as good as us.”

For the unlikely filmmakers a career in movies was both novel and daunting. “None of our buddies went to college”, says Logan. In West Marin no one makes movies and there are no silver screen connections. Despite these obstacles, the Millers say that everyone in their community was very supportive of the project.

“Once baseball came to an end, we knew we could do something involving manual labor”, says Noah, who along with his brother worked construction jobs before pursuing film, but says Noah, “we wanted to do something that could make us get out of the bed in the morning and movies was our second love.” The brothers say their background in baseball proved to be useful for filmmaking. “Baseball is very much a team sport’, says Noah, “and filmmaking is a team art.”

As the story goes, they bought a screenwriting manual and never looked back. However, as their project began to make headway, the brothers suffered a tragic blow; the death of their father, who lost his battle to alcoholism and died penniless in jail. “We wanted to turn the tragedy into an achievement” says Logan, “With death or any traumatic event, for some people it’s a bump and they keep going, for others it might change the course of their lives.” As fate and hard-work would have it, after the loss of their father, the Millers received the prestigious Panavision grant, which gave them access to the same state of the art equipment used by industry bigwigs like Steven Spielberg.

The Millers recount, that when writing, Touching Home, they always envisioned Ed Harris to play the role of their father. In 2006 they cornered the actor, in an alley outside of an SFIFF fundraiser, at which Harris was being honored, and pitched him their story. Harris, impressed by the young men’s energy and charm signed onto the film a week later.

With star power behind them, and a tenacious energy, the Millers have proved themselves to be unstoppable. Last week, audiences welcomed Touching Home with critical acclaim. The Millers have eleven other films on the shelf, and a book about making the film on the way. For future projects however, the brothers plan to stay behind the camera.

Don’t leave Not By Chance to chance

Serena for GR Film Buffs:
I have to admit, as I may have already admitted on other occasions, I am a bit like Jamie Lee in A Fish Called Wanda for Portuguese. My cousin just returned from a five-week trip there, full of je je je and perfectly pronounced formalities of speech. Good thing she’s in town from Manhattan and I can send her and all of you to see Nao Por Acaso for its final SFIFF screening tomorrow, Wednesday the 7th. Get mesmerized watching the tug of war, articulated beautifully, between two control-obsessed types, attempting to relive only the sweet moments and getting lost in the process. Dig in to the question: Are we every fully aware of all the possibilities around us? Plan for ample deconstruction time après-viewing so you can converse on your own history’s ghosts and make sure they’re not haunting too much. The quick-tempo, sensual tones of the voices make it that much easier to connect with this tale of love, loss, letting go and really truly looking around you.

See it at 9:45 at Kabuki Tomorrow!

Back to the Beginning

Ilsa for GR Film Buffs:

Oft times a brilliant woman with interesting ideas about how to craft her life is seen as controversial. She has to state the obvious: that woman is a powerhouse of songs and stories. This seems to be the time-honored way to get her ideas out into the market place. Did the viewers among us certainly read how George Sands got all suited up in name and dress? (Any reminder of the pant-wearing, self-empowered woman who mystified classical composer Chopin through his musical rollercoasters makes me that much more proud to be a woman.) The Last Mistress is a wonderful walk into the mind and soul of such a woman overflowing with a zest for life bubbling up from deep within, tingling from every hair follicle as she toys with morays as a stage from which she performs. She lives at a time of external constraints where lineage and money allow a lifestyle abhorred by the bourgeoisie.

Period pieces draw us in as the layers of lace and brocade frames the skin forming a soft boundary for the hot aspects of thought and feeling few of us dare to display.

The times are changing yet this is a classic sorrier of duty and passion, of virginal and wanton, of control and natural emotional weather. This is a beautiful film, find it and see it with your mate, lover or friends. If only one more woman unleashed her natural Mother Nature and followed her powerful estrogen, the universe would reach stasis and balance. What a dance life would be in the summer of our hormonal lives.

In the question and answer session after the screening Opening Night of this magic San Francisco Film Festival, the brilliant Catherine Breillat toyed with our American audience, that this story can be seen playing out in the context of our very own Bill and Hillary Clinton!

note: sorry guys, you'll have to track this one down on www.thefilmconnection.org, or at another international fest coming your way, it was only screened once on opening night, see Ilsa's coverage the Opening Party scene here.

Think Positive Tonight!

GR Film Buff Kiyoko Shiosaki:
I came away from first time director Bard Breien’s film “The Art of Negative Thinking” musing the theme of impotence behind shades of a staged black comedy about a therapy group for the disabled. The omnipresent point of view of Breien’s character Geirr, wheelchair dependent after a car accident, is fleshed out by the surrounding cast of miserable wretches. It felt like a night out at your first adolescent party of misfits rallying “fuck the successful popular people, fuck parents, fuck the authorities” and proceeding merrily on your way to self-pity and destruction. They bond over shared anger and bitter vulnerability, the frustrating impotence of not being able to express yourself, and the utter dependence on ignorant liaisons to translate for you. The romanticism and loneliness of idolized American rebels is apparent in the self-conscious Johnny Cash music scenes and what looks like shots from Vietnam war movies. Geirr’s brilliant cynicism inevitably outsmarts the smarmy therapist and raises a mutiny within the group against the ‘normal’ ones, their partners caught between love and pity. The pairings are almost too perfect—Geirr’s own painful relationship is mirrored by a grotesquely cheerful woman in a wheelchair, and her tanned, guilt-ridden husband. There are gendered contrasts as Geirr’s impotence has different repercussions on his wife. She sleeps in a separate bed, opposite the ethereal grinning vegetable and her oversexed insipid husband. There is also a set up in the works between an incoherent and horny stroke victim and a lonely jilted society wife.

The scenes move like acts in a play and there are cringingly contrived moments, but even after a 20-hour day, I stayed engrossed throughout, straining my dry and burning eyes to keep up with the subtitles of this Norwegian film. The core fury that rises from the pervading impotence and continual humiliation keeps each character precipitously poised to act with both raw and honest contempt and compassion. Seeing this movie is an unsurprising yet exquisitely satisfying celebration to the rebellion against false healing and the hidden malice behind blind hope. Throw on Johnny Cash’s “Cry, cry, cry” and whisper “my love,” in the ear of your sweetheart as you settle in for a feel-good rebuttal to the cult of positive thinking.

See it tonight at 9:30pm at the Sundance Kabuki Cinema, or on the 8th at the Clay Theater. Tickets and info here.

Zen in Cold Places

GR Film Buff Ilsa Bartlett:
Zen! The Zen quality of this grand new independent film, Ice People is magnificent in its simplicity! We search to see the speck of human movement as explorers quest for dating the age of our earth. The process is slow as molasses. It must be the freezing atmospheric conditions, which frame the slow work, going on in the unimaginable cold of 20, 50, to 70 degrees below zero. Like lines in the sand, around the Zen Gompa, they are simply perfect.

People and crystals moved by the howling wind, the solid rains of times gone by, slide around the rocks. Presenting a picture of what the hold of cold can have on a universe in one grain of ice. The inner silent scientific process mirrors the outer icy quiet. Crunch, crunch, crunch in syncopation with the lub, lub, lub, pulse. Passion pounds in the hearts of the four scientists when the helicopter touches the ice, hovering lightly, never do the blades stop turning. If the engines did turn off, the chances of resuming flight would be minimal. Metal and machines function differently in deep sub zero temperatures. It is the summer chill with a comparatively warm and sunny 20 below when the helicopter scene is filmed. The exhaust creates the unusual breathing vapor that keeps the scientists out of the tents longer than is healthy. There is no moist vapor in any of the other scenes so we, sitting in our comfortable cinema chairs, forget the crisis lurking within every event in such cold country. The movie crew is extremely lucky to have no tents blow away or other traumas inherent in Antarctica expositions.
Winds on the flimsy tents draw us, as viewers, into the universal adventure, which springs forth from these particular courageous and noted geologists Allan Ashworth and Adam Lewis , and two undergrad scientists-in-the-making. The specificity of it lends this story power of both poise and purpose, since nothing prepares you for the grand scale as you try to find the spec of movement in the expansive vista.

This is a film story you and your friends should not miss. For me this film is following a long read of a story seen in print, was it the New Yorker? The print version is told from the point of view of the helicopter pilot. He spends half a year as a doctor somewhere in Middle America and trains hard for the grueling work of maintaining and flying in this area of the Antarctic. His wife understands his lust for this adventure, as I feel sure the spouses of our scientists understand the mania for their husband and wives work. The importance of the pilot in supporting the work of the several groups of scientists sheds a sliver of understanding on the very volatile picture of life on ice. Three cheers for the San Francisco Independent Film Festival for bringing me comfortably close to the cold, without myself getting frost bite!

For more info on this frigid film, go here.

Flow: For the Love of Water

GR Film Buff Maria Pecot:
Growing up in urban America, water seemed as free flowing as sunlight. It was only after venturing into Central American communities, where not even the locals would dare to drink from the tap, where sometimes water failed to flow from the pipes for days at a time, did I realize, that for much of the world, water is a precious commodity. In the documentary, Flow: For the Love of Water, filmmaker Irena Salina details in great length, the global water crisis, and the steps we can take to mitigate it.

The film visits South African shantytowns and Bolivian villages, where multinational corporations, backed by the World Bank, monopolize clean water at the cost of human suffering. Equally alarming are revelations of pollutants and chemicals creeping into our water sources, disrupting the balance of the eco-system and spawning sickness. Flow presents a frightening snapshot of fish on Prozac, rocket-fuel-tainted drinking water, and what happens when the world allows corporations to control a life sustaining resource.

Beyond grim statistics and heartbreaking personal accounts, Flow offers hope in new technologies and a heightened awareness. This critical documentary brings together the brightest scientists, water experts, and human rights workers in an eloquent plea to save the world’s water. Flow is more then a critique; it’s a call to action.