Wednesday, June 3
Courtesy of SIFF
Against the Current
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4:30 p.m., Egyptian
PICK: The Dark Harbor
Dark is right. Friendless, luckless fisherman Manzo lives in a small Japanese village, not really content with his life but too lazy to do much about it. When the town arranges a social for the fishermen to meet some city girls, a clerk takes one look at lumpy, sad-sack Manzo and observes, "A bit past it, aren't you?" Indeed, Manzo (Shinya Kote) looks painfully uncomfortable in anything but his work overalls or favorite blue sweatpants. His idea of a good time is listening to rockabilly music and microwaving corn dogs. (Or in Japan, squid dogs?) Eventually, however, the comic melancholy is interrupted by a home invasion—a cute young kid and his mother take residence in Manzo's house while he's out fishing, then hide in the cupboards at night. And of course Manzo is going to fall in love with Mitsuko, and of course she's not quite what she seems. But since there's so little plot to The Dark Harbor, it's best not to mention any other particulars. The slow-moving deadpan tone recalls Aki Kaurismäki, and Kote's performance suggests a slightly more voluble Buster Keaton. In a rare burst of speech, he confesses, "I'm suffocating here alone." If the interlopers are taking advantage of him, he reasons, it's better than corn dogs for one. SIFFgoers will agree. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Also: 9:30 p.m. Tues., June 9.
6:45 p.m., SIFF Cinema
PICK: Kabei—Our Mother
This unpretentious and old-fashioned (that is, crisply legible) domestic drama shows how Rising Sun Japan's sense of national destiny affects one family. Aside from a miscalculated coda, it's set in the years leading up to and immediately after the Emperor's Army declares war on Britain and the U.S. Father "Tobei" (Mitsugoro Bando) is locked up for writing against the ongoing "crusade" in China. In his absence, Mama "Kabei" (Sayuri Yoshinaga) raises their two daughters, the youngest playing the part of Teruyo Nogami, a longtime Kurosawa collaborator, whose memoir was the basis of Kabei—the text periodically interrupts for guided-tour voiceover. Family support comes from an aunt, a sluggard uncle, and a former student, played by Tadanobu Asano, transitioning from comic-relief fop to doomed gravitas. The axis of Kabei is the dining table in the cramped Nogami home; the drama dilutes when perspective shifts to missing loved ones—in prison cells and a torpedoed troop transport—and away from Yoshinaga's emotive eloquence. About the age his young protagonists were during World War II, director Yôji Yamada does get the period's texture on film. Best known for his Tora-san melodrama franchise (40-odd films, 1969–96), old workhorse Yamada delivers the solar-plexus emotional hit of a tragic telegram with precision that shows a lifetime's practice, turning Hallmarkisms sublime. (NR) NICK PINKERTON Also: Kirkland Performance Center, 7 p.m. Thurs., June 4.
7:15 p.m., Pacific Place
Art & Copy
Since his 1996 grunge rock documentary Hype!, Doug Pray has become an ever more adept assembler of polished images. (See his trucker doc Big Rig, from SIFF '07.) And where else would that tendency lead but the world of advertising? Most filmmakers moonlight in the field, but here Pray trains his camera on the guys behind the ads—the '60s boomer revolutionaries who advanced the field out of the Mad Men era. Hence the famous VW ads from Doyle Dane Bernbach, the groundbreaking art design for Esquire magazine by George Lois, and the use of pop songs (like the Carpenters' "We've Only Just Begun") by Hal Riney, later the voice of Reagan's "Morning in America" campaign. These guys, their work—it's genius, at least to anyone not offended by art (the image) and copy (the words) designed to sell. Yet however stirring these vintage campaigns and their graying creators may be for ad junkies like me, Pray fails at analysis. His film is simply a tribute. Random statistics—kids see 20,000 TV ads per year; 30 seconds on American Idol costs $750,000—mean nothing without context. And linking the ad biz to cave art (?!?)—well, that's just idiotic. Everyone quoted here, and perhaps Pray himself, wants to be seen as an artist. I wish I had that talent, too. But in this economy, those of us who pay for ordinary dumb stuff may not want to spend extra for that halo. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Also: 1: 15 p.m. Fri., June 5.
9:30 p.m., Uptown
Final Arrangements
Gérard Depardieu? Sign me up! I knew this would be another lame, formulaic French comedy going in, and Final Arrangements proceeds according to expectation. Depardieu is a bohemian metal sculptor of no evident talent, living with his too-sexual wife on a leaky barge on the Seine. His grown son, a 20-something would-be composer (Marc-André Grondin), apparently went to business college. As a result, when the son's film-scoring job goes belly-up, he takes a sales position with an American-run mortuary conglomerate. The shame! In France, capitalism is worse than the whiff of death! The son dare not tell his attorney girlfriend (Bérénice Bejo, from SIFF '06 favorite OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies). And his parents would be even more disapproving if they learned the truth. Depardieu doesn't have much to do with his few scenes here. The picture belongs to the son's mortuary-business rival (Didier Bourdon), an overlooked, provincial mensch who binds the living with the dead. I'll spare you the rest, which isn't worth enduring. For the American remake: Robin Williams as the artist father, Patricia Clarkson as his lusty wife, Justin Long as the embarrassed son (opposite girlfriend Anne Hathaway), and Oliver Platt as Long's coffin-hawking rival. Toss a rose on the grave and you're done. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Also: 11 a.m. Sat., June 6; Admiral, 7 p.m. Thurs., June 11.
