I knew he had cancer but didn't realize it was bad enough to take his life 72. Pollack was in Seattle back in 2006 for his masterful documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry and I had the glorious opportunity to speak with him for a couple of blissful seconds after a screening. He was so warm and accommodating with a fierce intelligent burning behind his eyes. Standing there with him you knew you were in the presence of a man who seriously knew his stuff and I can only wish I would have taken the time to press the film's publicist a bit harder for an interview.
I'm not going to go into it too much (the most eloquent article I've seen on Pollack can be found at Hollywood Elsewhere written by Jeffrey Wells) but what I will say is that, for me at least, my favorite works from the director were his raucous 1982 comedy Tootsie and the 1975 Robert Redford thriller 3 Days of the Condor. The former, in particular, gets me every time I watch it, the film building so beautifully and with such expert precision and passion it would take my breath if I weren't already laughing so hard. I also loved Pollack as an actor, his performances in Michael Clayton, Changing Lanes, Tootsie and especially Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut as rich and as satisfying as anyone else's in each of those magnificent motion pictures.
Back in the world of the Seattle International Film Festival, I saw a great one last night and I'm hoping general audiences are going to get the same opportunity. On the surface, Columbian director Spiros Stathoulopoulos' thriller PVC-1 sounds like nothing more than an intriguing trick and little else. A group of criminals burst into a peaceful family home turning the mother into a human time bomb after placing a piece of pvc piping around her neck, the whole thing shot in one continuous 85-minute take. No cuts. No edits. No stops. One single gosh darn take.The thing is, Stathoulopoulos' picture goes beyond this simple premise and with the cute idea and becomes something chillingly disturbing. The tension produced is almost unbearable, the film building and building until it unleashes a climax such of raw, unadulterated power it left me shocked senseless. While the shooting style does give everything a bit of a theatrical staginess at times, overall this is a picture you absolutely cannot take your eyes off it. It is a movie I doubt I am going to forget, this journey into darkness and terror unlike anything else I've experienced this year.
Other than that right now there isn't too much else to report. I had a great interview with Children of Huang Shi, a movie I didn't particularly care for (although I did admire a couple of the performances and a few of the individual scenes), director Roger Spottiswoode I hope to have live over on the main site in a day or two. I also watched the engrossing German documentary Dust and was alternately amused and totally grossed out (and also suddenly felt the glaring need to clean my apartment) by its saga of that small pesky particle which makes the feather duster such an important invention.
Today might be interesting. I'm interviewing Alex Gibney later this afternoon about his engaging doc Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, and I'm hoping to make it to a 9:30 showing of Alexi Tan's supposedly quite solid 1930's gangster movie Blood Brothers. The question mark is the pesky press screening of Sex and the City I have to attend at 7:00. The film is a whopping 140 minutes, the distance between the theater showing it and the one screening Tan's thriller a good ten to twelve blocks away so I'll definitely be hoofing it after Sarah Jessica Parker and company get finished guzzling their Cosmos.
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