Play

These are probably the only ones I'll have time to see.

Robot & Frank

Set in the near future, an aging, demented cat burglar gets a helper robot and reappropriates it for one last heist.

Target

Again with the near future - Russian sci-fi about what if the corporatist/socialist elite get the ability to stay young? And what if it goes horribly awry? Ha ha, of course it goes horribly awry. Trailer

Wu Xia

Martial arts + noir. Set in 1917, breaking the near-future streak. Well, I guess it was in the near-future in 1910.

This year the "awesome" category is small (3) and the "maybe" category is much larger. I think I need to make the script smarter.

Compliance

Disturbing thriller involving police abuse of power, set in a ChickWich.

The Day He Arrives

The description promises looping, loopiness, darkness, and surrealism. Teaser here

Don't Stop Believin' - Everyman's Journey

A doc about the Filipino guy who replaced Steve Perry in Journey. The trailer alone makes me want to go listen to Journey. Note that the trailer has the manager's address at the end. Cover those bases!

The Exchange

A guy breaks routine and then starts questioning his whole life.

Neighboring Sounds

OK this is a "portrait" of the people on one street in Brazil, and the trailer is crappy, but I'm hoping it's a portrait in the "Do the Right Thing" or "Delicatessen" sense.

People Mountain People Sea


That a thriller set in industrializing modern-day China has chickens is a given. But the music and (at least the trailer's) pacing look pretty good.

Policeman

This promises a big-ass plot twist that's awesome. So this is a pretty risky one. I can't totally recommend it. But according to the trailer it contains both gunplay and gun-flirting! Trailer here

Someone Up There Likes Me

So, this is a remake, which is bad, but it has Ron Swanson and the director's from Austin, which is good. This will almost certainly get distribution, so maybe OK to skip at the fest. Trailer here.

We move into more subjective territory here. These are movies with premises I find in no way interesting. Reproduced here is the part where the description launched into negative-land:

Bonsái - "Julio enters into the one big love of his life lying about having read Proust and oblivious that his lover Emilia (Natalia Galgani) is fibbing, too."

Choked - "every discussion between debtors, creditors, cops and relatives."

Darling Companion - "Placing a shaky marriage and the nervous dynamics between new family members against a Rocky Mountain backdrop"

The Fourth Dimension - "Created under a "manifesto" whose directives would make Lars von Trier shudder, this three-part film might look on paper like an exercise in forced hipness. Fortunately, its directors—Harmony Korine [Harmony Korine? Forced hipness? *pause* NAAAAAAHHHHH...]

Gimme the Loot - "Young New York graffiti artists Sofia and Malcolm [...] resolve to one-up a rival gang by tagging the iconic Home Run Apple"

Life Without Principle - "riveting entertainment, much of it turning on the banal exchange of banking palaver"

The Loneliest Planet - "The film's concentration on coordinated hiking and moving for its own sake"

Patience (After Sebald) - "Gee relies on static long takes, virtually unpeopled"

17 Girls - "airborne outbreak of teen reproduction"

Trishna - "filmmaker Michael Winterbottom returns enthusiastically once more to Thomas Hardy"

Your Sister's Sister - "Lynn Shelton's last film, Humpday, took what sounded like the premise of a raunchy joke  - two straight pals dare each other to star in their own gay porn movie" Wait, full stop, this does not happen. Except of course in gay porn. This movie is guilty just by association.

This is the first year I actually searched all the descriptions for stasis-indicating adjectives. I'm really surprised at how many there are. As you read through this list, keep in mind that there are at least another half-dozen "portraits" that I'm not listing because they're documentaries.

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry - "persuasive firsthand portrait"
The Eye of the Storm - "A magisterial and wide-ranging portrait"
Found Memories - "A disarming meditation"
Golden Slumbers - "poetic examinations of ruined theaters and studios"
Informant - "meticulously constructs a portrait of his life"
The Intouchables - "portrait of friendship across the racial and economic divide" [novelty!]
Meanwhile in Mamelodi - "beautifully crafted portrait"
Old Dog - "portrait of rural anomie amid astonishing scenery" [it's a bad sign when the scenery gets even second billing]
Oslo, August 31 - "portrait of addiction"
Polisse - "Heart-stopping interviews with the children and interrogations of suspects come interspersed with depictions" [Waitasec - there are interviews and depictions??]
Summer Games - "portrait of adolescent angst"
Tokyo Waka - portrait
Where Do We Go Now? - "comical, transcendent portrait of contemporary society"
Wuthering Heights - "depiction of Heathcliff and Catherine's world"
Back to Stay - "portrays three young sisters adjusting to the absence of their recently deceased grandmother."
Farewell, My Queen - "portrayal of court life at Versailles during four crucial days in July 1789" [Crucial, I say!]
Palaces of Pity - "languid exploration"

The first resort of film producer scoundrels is to tout the quirky/exotic protagonist. This is almost always a failure: if the character is the selling point, why not just make the movie about a monkey? Zombies, ninjas, pirates, urchins in war-torn Africa - not as interesting as monkeys.

But instead, filmmakers think moviegoers will want to identify with these:
Bernie - "A former evangelist who arrives in Carthage, Texas, to take a job as an assistant funeral director"
By the Fire - "a working class couple in their late 30s"
Cherry - "high school student Angelica, whose choices lead her from a depressing home life and dead-end job in Los Angeles to the fetish-filled Bay Area adult film world."
A Cube of Sugar - "young bride-to-be"
Dreileben - Don’t Follow Me Around - "Self-possessed police psychiatrist"
Dreileben - One Minute of Darkness - "hunted man"
The Giants - "in their family’s rural Belgian home, brothers Seth, 15, and Zak, 13" [Good! If it was a 16- and 12-year-old, TOTALLY DIFFERENT MOVIE]
Goodbye - "A young woman's anxious attempt to emigrate from Iran"
Headhunters - "Roger Brown tries to place qualified candidates in high-powered jobs."
I Wish - "Two young brothers dream of a family reunion" [It's more ambitious than dreaming of a new Doritos flavor, but only just]
Land of Oblivion - "emotionally damaged"
Last Screening - "devoted (but psychopathic) projectionist"
Last Winter - "A young misfit, Johann is a man of few words"
Leave Me Like You Found Me - "A couple of young Los Angelinos[sic]"
LUV - "a boy who struggles to find his identity without his mother"
Nobody Walks - "New York artist"
The Orator - "Saili, physically disadvantaged as a little person"
A Secret World - "a young loner who sets off from Mexico City"
Smugglers' Songs - "the poor but proud purveyor of subversive literature."
The Snows of Kilimanjaro - "Fifty-year-old Michel is a man of principle."
Terraferma - "Finding himself on the cusp of adulthood, bright-eyed Filippo drifts without clear purpose"
Twixt - "hard-drinking schlock novelist"
Unfair World - "a police investigator in Athens who lives by a strict moral code"
Will - Like many young English lads, 11-year-old Will Brennan is a fan of football - and perhaps the biggest fan of Liverpool football around.
Winter Nomads - "veteran shepherd Pascal Eguisier and his affable apprentice"

Once again I'm trying to prune the SFIFF's schedule down to a handful of movies that I can go to. Despite being a man of leisure, I seem to have less free time than ever. So this year I wrote a little script to look for category keywords. Here's the relevant struct:

filmtypes = {'nothing':['portrait', 'depiction', 'describes', 'chronicle', 'meditation', 'poetic', 'evocative', 'portrayal', 'portrays', 'exploration'],
             'shorts' : ['shorts', 'short', 'collection'],
             'documentary' : ['doc', 'documentary'],
             'awesome' : ['zombie', 'zombies', 'ninja', 'ninjas', 'pirate', 'pirates', 'robot', 'robots', 'martial arts', 'sci fi', 'science fiction', 'dystopia', 'dystopian'],
             'other' : []}

This worked ok, but I need to change up the filtering order next year. A lot of documentaries turn out to be "portraits", so I had to do some manual shuffling. Also, I just noticed that 'awesome' doesn't contain 'monkey', 'ape', 'orangutan', etc.

One other note: I grabbed the long descriptions, so there may be more false positives this year (where "positive" means "identified as skippable").

This is one post I liked especially (possible interpretation - hwrnmnbsol's monkey army tears the lid off the sham - there's no way any human can type as much as he does).

Originally posted by hwrnmnbsol at The Millionth Monkey

But if he _does_ die, it's getting posted on G+, which I have decided is less prone to obsolescence than LJ and easily less evil than FB. So friend me there or whatever the appropriate word is. If you want.

Dead!

Dead!