4 p.m., SIFF Cinema
PICK: Gotta Dance
Age doesn't matter unless you're a cheese, this documentary tells us (quoting Florenz Ziegfeld). But age does matter: The featured group of 60-and-older performers has to overcome a number of age-related obstacles—from self-consciousness to utter unfamiliarity with hip-hop to decades of muscle memory of performing the wrong types of dances—to become the NETsationals, the NBA's first senior dance team, which supports the New Jersey Nets. They're a diverse bunch. For example, there's a kindergarten teacher, a former bombshell who lost her husband to a Playboy bunny; another woman spent World War II in hiding in the Philippines. But they're all old, and they all decide they want to go in front of tens of thousands of basketball fans and perform dances usually reserved for lithe, spandex-clad 20-somethings. There's underdog drama aplenty—first-night jitters and, later, the harsh realities of the business of show. But Gotta Dance goes beyond that, delving into the lives of some impressive individuals who refuse to stop growing, even in their golden years. (NR) DAMON AGNOS Also: Kirkland Performance Center, 4:30 p.m. Wed., June 3.
Courtesy of SIFF
Nurse.Fighter.Boy.
Details
Follow all our coverage of SIFF, including daily updates with news, reviews, and gossip on our special
SIFF page.
Related Content
More About
7 p.m., Northwest Film Forum
It Came From Kuchar
The sincere, outer-borough, downmarket alternative to Warhol in the '60s, the Kuchar brothers have a reputation that's today rather hard to maintain—or explain. Once championed by the Village Voice, and here praised by John Waters, Atom Egoyan, Guy Maddin, and others, the gay identical twins took a literal approach to the movies they devoured and copied. The results were not cool, not detached, not campy, not sophisticated...just, well, adoring. Shot on Super-8 and later 16mm film, their shorts are amateurish cross-genre tributes to Westerns, melodramas, and sci-fi pictures all at the same time. The acting and production values are terrible. Yet the titles are genius: The Devil's Cleavage, Hold Me While I'm Naked, Lust for Ecstasy, Corruption of the Damned...Wait, if you're already damned, how can you be corrupted? You get the idea. But the appeal today will mainly be to fans and film students, and documentary director Jennifer Kroot appears to be both. She loves these peculiar old men, who today tend to work separately on the East and West Coasts. And they seem too absorbed in their prodigious ongoing output to pay any attention to her or to their place in film history. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Also: Northwest Film Forum, 9:30 p.m. Wed., May 27.
Tuesday, May 26
4 p.m., Egyptian
Daytime Drinking
An enjoyable ramble through slacker South Korea, but not much else, Daytime Drinking's plot—not that there's much of one—hinges mainly on hangovers, text messages, broken hearts, ex-girlfriends, binge drinking, and lost cell phones. It's kind of a MySpace generation mish-mash—all the problems in life for a guy just out of college, or the army, and none of life's solutions. Hyuk-jin (Song Sam-dong) gets stranded in a coastal resort town when his buddies fail to meet him for the weekend. He loses his wallet, phone, and pants in roughly that order. Some take pity on him, some take advantage, but Hyuk-jin seems incapable of self-rescue. "You're like a leaf, floating on the ocean," he's told. (Great career advice, that.) If there's a lesson to his aimless, sad-sack misadventures in the sticks, it's this: Never leave Seoul ever again. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Also: SIFF Cinema, 9:45 p.m. Mon., June 1.
9:15 p.m., Harvard Exit
PICK: Zift
Two decades of Communist-era hard time prove the truth to parolee Moth (Zahary Baharov) of Dante's injunction "Abandon all hope," repurposed here as an injunction to prisoners upon their release. Bulgarian filmmaker Javor Gardev tracks his camera around like a helpful Virgil as the freed Moth is immediately seized by an old comrade in crime, out to locate some still-missing loot. Chases, escapes, and double-and-triple-crosses follow in a film noir pastiche equal parts Old Hollywood (Gilda, D.O.A.) and hipsterish. The overall frenetic energy is that of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels or Trainspotting, while the femme fatale's musical number is pure David Lynch. Gardev's satire of state propaganda slaps on another layer of ironic varnish. Out of this welter of influences, he forges a moving tale of emotional dislocation and loss, adding up perhaps to an allegory of nostalgic regret for the lost prison state of Iron Curtain–era Bulgaria, which may indeed look good to its former inmates compared to the hideous world of modern capitalism. (NR) GREGG RICKMAN Also: SIFF Cinema, 4 p.m. Mon., June 1.
