All SIFF All the Time

White Tank Top has the pleasure of covering the 36th (I think) Seattle International Film Festival. Updates from the stable of talented City Arts writers can be found at the CAB SIFF page.

So far the films I've seen are most notable for the chemistry between the principal actors. In Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman's The Extra Man, Kevin Kline and Paul Dano make a good comedic duo, but Dano and the temporarily-freed-by-Tom Katie Holmes produce negative sparks.


Results are much warmer between the exquisite Tilda Swinton in Luca Guadagnino's swooning I Am Love. She lights up the screen with Edoardo Gabbriellini, a man able to tempt a modern day Milanese princess with his exploits in the kitchen.


But the most exciting development might be the electricity between youngsters Jesse Eisenberg and Ari Graynor in Holy Rollers. They are powerful acting together, so much so that I wish director Robert Asch hadn't been resigned to make a small good film instead of a large great one.

Pranksy

This week I borrowed a Frank O'Hara poem as a response to the Banksy film Exit Through the Gift Shop. I find the whole Banksy phenomenon hard to swallow—do we really need to be upset that a single Banksy rat stencil was lost in a Melbourne street-cleaning?



When I worked at a Capitol Hill bookstore, two types of people picked up the Banksy book Wall and Piece we carried: young guys in hoodies browsing the pages and older folks dressed for a night out who would bring a copy to the register and ask “do you have a clean copy of this for me to buy?” This distinction between Banksy consumers is further defined by Exit Through the Gift Shop (it can’t be a coincidence that forged Princess Di banknotes are the best art he’s ever made).

Playing Squash

Over a year ago I saw the trailer for a film called Mancora, and it immediately appealed to my most intellectual film-watching tendencies (in a lot of the same ways Y Tu Mama Tambien did).


Somehow, this terribly written, acted and directed film did not reach theaters in my town. However, God gave us Netflix queues for a reason.

Despite its myriad faults, Mancora has the mile-wide cheekbones of Elsa Pataky, who I wouldn't say is bad looking in a white tank top:


It also has Phellipe Haagensen, whose name is incredibly hard to spell, playing the sort of mystical stoner he perfected in City of God.


And I kept watching our protagonist, Santiago (Jason Day), wondering where I'd seen him. Every time he rubbed a palm over his shaved head I had a pang of memory. It finally hit me. He's a dead ringer for Talan from MTV's Laguna Beach!


Unfortunately for Mr. Day, Talan is the better actor--but after figuring out their resemblance I was finally able to focus on each wave of banality as it crashed in.

Director Ricardo de Montreiul makes absolutely nothing happen for the 40 or so minutes it takes the characters to leave Lima and reach the titular beach town (he also has a fascinating inability to maintain continuity between day, evening and night shots--it takes somewhere between two and eight days to reach the coast). The film should really be reimagined as a feature-length advertisement for the real Mancora, Peru. Apparently, the populace is composed entirely of men who give you drugs and alcohol for free and incredibly tan young women who are dead-set on engaging you in threesomes. I, for one, found these plot elements completely plausible and in no way did scenes like the glass-polishing seen below exemplify the chauvinism of the director.


Poor Santiago is forced away from his true love by two locals who woo him into their bedroom with the only funny line in the film: "We're playing squash, wanna join us?" Yes. It turned out Santiago had a deep, untapped passion for the sport (though, confusingly, there were no visible racquets in the room).


See how pensive Santiago was before he learned how to play squash? Here's hoping this self-described "spiritual journey into paradise lost" takes up its rightful place as a late night fixture on Cinemax.