Seven Days Down - Seventeen to Go

The last few years I had always taken the first weekend - Memorial Day weekend - of the Seattle International Film Festival off. I'd go play softball, head home to Spokane to see the family or zip over to Portland for a quick weekend of rest and relaxation with friends before the three-plus week grind of SIFF took its hold upon me.

Not this year, and for the first time in what seems like ages I finally feel I can look back on the first week of the festival with a much clearer and cleaner eye than normal. I've seen a lot - last count, 33 films and documentaries (which admittedly includes a couple of Hollywood big-ticket items like Indiana Jones IV, Sex and the City and You Don't Mess with the Zohan) - and looking back surprisingly an awful lot this year has been really, really good.

(Believe it or not, my total doesn't even come close to some festival goers. Thanks to the three weeks of press screenings before SIFF even began there are some out there who have seen 50, 60 even 70 films so for at this point, and if their rate of viewing continues at that pace they might just see almost all of the 300 or so feature-length presentations the festival offers. Obviously, I love film - probably far more than the next girl - but that's just crazy talk. C-R-A-Z-Y T-A-L-K, I say!)

Looking back at what I've seen up to this point, much like last year the documentaries almost can't help but be a cut above just about everything else. Nanette Burstein's (whom I am having the pleasure of interviewing later today) American Teen and Yung Chan's Up the Yangtze are the two standouts, but they're followed quite closely by Christopher Bell's steriod piece Bigger, Stronger, Faster*, Hartmut Bitomsky's giddy look at the microscopic world of Dust, Tina Mascara and Guido Santi's beautiful Chris & Don: A Love Story and Johnny Symons' explosive (and highly entertaining) "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" military piece Ask Not.

On the narrative side, the clear standout is Fatih Akin's exquisite and absolutely mesmerizing Edge of Heaven. The more I think about it, this might just be the best film I've seen in 2008 so far, all of its multiple tangents and layers building to something so beautifully and explosively emotional I can't stop thinking about it. It is a movie of strength, power and heartbreaking originality with characters so rich and genuine I felt like I almost new them. For me, much like Ghost World, Once and American Splendor in Seattle festivals before it this feature is quickly turning into SIFF's most magical offering, and something tells me I'll be waxing poetically about it for some time to come.

But it hasn't been the only think I've loved up to this point. Other great highlights include Tarsem's visually speldiferous The Fall is a lyrical adult fairy tale full of fiery passion and heartfelt brio, while Baltasar Kormákur's Icelandic mystery Jar City left me coldly shattered with its story of frigidly emotional human isolation. Other highlights have included the visually stimulating anime enterprise Vexille, French-Canadian entry 3 Little Pigs, Yves-Christian Fournier's engrossng Everything is Fine, Stuart Gordon's odd man-in-a-windshield piece Stuck, the almost unbearably tense Columbian thriller PVC-1 and the rambunctious and engaging character study Garden Party.

The best thing about this first week is how few actual misses there have been. There hasn't been anything like last year's putrid stinker The Ten, only Dario Argento's The Mother of Tears failing to offer up anything of real value or interest. Granted, I have been disappointed, most notably by Savage Grace. Thankfully, even that unfocused muddle had Julianne Moore making somewhat worthwhile, her fiercely determined and ferociously carnal portrait of a woman looking for status and love easily one of the finest performances I've seen all year. If anything, the worst thing I've seen so far has to be the aforementioned Zohan, and while I can't say too much now what I can admit is that this supposedly "comedic" monstrosity might just be the worst film of Adam Sandler's entire career and I was in horrific pain trying to watch it.

The other news of the festival at this point is the passing of both comedian Harvey Korman (just last night!) and Oscar-winning director Sydney Pollack. I'm still kind of reeling a bit from this double-barrel shocker (especially as to it relates to the latter figure), both of them offering up entertainments during my childhood that helped me down the career path I now follow. No two ways about it, each of these fantastically talented men will definitely be missed.