And the Winners Are...

And so another Seattle International Film Festival has come to a close. The stars have flown back home, the movie houses are going back to their regularly scheduled summertime fluff and the staff over at Cinema Seattle breathes a sigh of relief that they've managed to get through another 25 days of movie-going hysteria and didn't collectively collapse from exhaustion.

Personally, I don't know how they do it. I love film, adore it to the point just the thought of not being a part of this community is enough to reduce me to pools of blubbering hysterics that's more than a bit childish, but even I have trouble making it through all three and a half week of the festival with my sanity intact. This event isn't a sprint, it's a marathon, and only those with the stamina to endure the good, the bad, the ugly and the downright miraculously bizarre day in and night out are the ones who keep coming each and every year ready - begging, even - for more.

With almost 300 feature-length films (not to mention nearly another 200 shorts, forums, events and parties), it is impossible to see everything. Usually I can make a pretty good go of it catching most of the festival's must-see items. All that said, I didn't make it to the Golden Space Needle Audience Award-winner for best film, German director Doris Dörrie's (Men) latest curiosity Cherry Blossoms - Hanami. I did make it to the runner up film, however, Courtney Hunt's sensational and moody Frozen River (which also won the Lena Sharpe audience award for best female director), and I can't fault ticket and pass holders in the least bit for becoming so completely enamored with that particular one in the least bit.

Other Golden Space Needle winners included Best Actor Alan Rickman's sly and beguiling turn as British wine impresario Steven Spurrier in the otherwise pleasing if slight closing night film Bottle Shock, newcomer Jessica Chastain's fiery and fiercely magnetic performance in Dan Ireland's disappointingly infuriating Jolene for Best Actress, and Jordanian filmmaker Amin Matalqa took home the trophy for Best Director for his wonderfully entertaining dramatic comedy Captain Abu Raed. Can't say I disagree, audiences going a long way to erasing last year's almost disgraceful mistake of giving Daniel Water's an award for his rather forgettable comedy Sex and Death 101.

For me, SIFF 2008 had much to adore. I saw what I believe to be hands-down the year's best film in Fatih Akin's (Head On) brilliantly moving drama The Edge of Heaven, the movie a poignant, multi-layered masterpiece worthy of repeat viewings. Also on the narrative side, Alan Ball's (HBO's "Six Feet Under") explosively compelling Towelhead refused to pull punches and offered up a coming of age satire sure to spark endless debate, Tarsem's (The Cell) visually resplendent The Fall took my breath away and then some, The Duplass Brother's (The Puffy Chair) quirky and imaginative Baghead was a suspense and laugh-filled surprise, I had a blast watching the Danish Harry Potter wannabe The Island of Lost Souls, absolutely adored Russell Brown's talkative The Bluetooth Virgin, thought both Colin Hanks and John Malkovich stole the show in the sometimes hysterical The Great Buck Howard, and the shatteringly emotional New Director Showcase Grand Jury Prize winner Everything is Fine immediately cemented Canadian filmmaker Yves-Christian Fournier's as a talented newcomer worth keeping an eye on.

On the non-fiction end of things, my two favorites were Nanette Burstein's American Teen and Yung Chan's Up the Yangtze. Audiences, however, disagreed slightly and awarded Denny Tedesco's solidly entertaining biography of the best back-up band you've never heard of The Wrecking Crew with the Golden Space Needle for Best Documentary, while the Grand Jury Prize in the same category went to Isaac Julien’s fascinating (if a bit too bland for my tastes) look at acclaimed the late iconoclastic British filmmaker Derek Jarman, Derek. Other doc highlights included recent Oscar winner Alex Gibney's (Taxi to the Dark Side) Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, Johnny Symons' excellent Don't Ask-Don't Tell piece Ask Not, the steriods epic Bigger, Stronger, Faster*, the absolutely absorbing multi-decade gay romance Chris and Don: A Love Story, the beguiling German treatise on the world's smallest particle Dust and the sometimes stunning Hurricane Katrina piece Trouble the Water.

There were some missteps, of course, but none of them rose to quite the level of infuriating ignominy as David Wain's brutally horrific The Ten did last year. Still, Dario Argento's latest The Mother of Tears was pretty darn bad, as was Roger Spottiswoode's turgidly well-meaning epic The Children of Huang Shi. Also not making the grade were the annoying French sci-fi mind-bender Chrysalis, C. Jay Cox'z anemically plotted gay marriage comedy Kiss the Bride and good have done without a good half hour of Jean-Paul Salomé's (Arsène Lupin) WWII epic Female Agents. Most surprising was the stunning collapse of Tom Kalin's (Swoon) fact-based Savage Grace even though it contained one of the great tour-de-force performances of acclaimed actress Julianne Moore's entire career.

Overall, howver, this was a good SIFF, sometimes even a magnificent one. There were highs, there were lows and, like always, there was everything stuffed to the gills right in-between. In short, I may be exhausted (too little sleep mixed with too much Diet Coke coupled with far too much stale popcorn over a 25-day period will end up doing that to you) but, now that all is said and done, I wouldn't have it any other way. Even better, I can't wait until 2009 to do it all over again.

The Final Friday

And so we come to the end.

Funny thing, as this last Friday of the festival dawns it doesn't really feel like the end. In fact, what with Seattle's fabled Cinerama Theater joining as one of the screening venues and a whole slew of talent in town to talk about their premiering motion pictures it almost feel a little bit like the beginning all over again.

Yet no matter how I wish it were otherwise, this really is it. Tomorrow the solid if unspectacular Bottle Shock has its closing night gala screening, the awards get announced at press conference Sunday morning and a bunch of long-awaited films finally get their screenings. Pictures from the likes of Dan Ireland, Rawson Marshall Thurber, Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam, Johnny To, Bernard Campan and Jean-Paul Salomé debut, while the Seattle Symphony breaks out the orchestra for a once-in-a-lifetime showing of Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky.



I'm excited for just about all of it. Movies that I finally get to see include Ireland's Jolene, Hark, Lam and To's Triangle, Salomé's Female Agents, the Katrina documentary Trouble the Water, the French sci-fi mindbender Chrysalis, Courtney Hunt's Frozen River, the Italian mystery The Girl by the Lake, the controversial U.K. erotic thriller Donkey Punch, Alex Rivera's ambitious U.S. debut Sleep Dealer and, if I can somehow fit it in, Aditya Assarat's Wonderful Town.

But there's plenty else to see. I'm interviewing Alan Ball about his fantastic (and highly unsettling) dramatic comedy Towelhead tomorrow (as well as Bottle Shock writer/director Randall Miller), and in just about a half an hour I'll be heading down to the W Hotel press offices to speak with Olivia Thirlby, Josh Peck and writer/director Jonathan Levine about their highly entertaining coming-of-age 1990's melodrama The Wackness. Other highlights include Garrison Keillor: The Man on the Radio in the Red Tennis Shoes, a special presentation of John Cassavetes' immortal classic Faces, the supposedly stirring German drama Love and Other Crimes, a second screening of The Island of Lost Souls at the Cinerama (which I might just have to break down and see a second time) and a repeat showing of Russell Brown's excellent The Bluetooth Virgin (which, coincidentally, I interviewed both Brown and legendary actress Karen Black for yesterday - more to come on that front hopefully tomorrow).

Personally, I can't wait. After enduring the decidedly underwhelming video game banalities of The Incredible Hulk and being hit with a flurry of okay, if not even remotely exciting, screening here at SIFF, it's fantastic to have so many richly deserving titles to get all worked up about. As last weekends go, this one is shaping up to be one for the record books.

I can't wait.

Visual (Effects) Musings

Yesterday I saw The Incredible Hulk. Unsurprisingly, it is filled to the brim with special effects. Lots of them. Just about every second of the film. In all honesty, I don't think there is a single frame that doesn't showase them.

What's funny is that one of the chief complaints of the Ang Lee's Hulk was that there were far too many special effects and that none of them looked any better than what you'd find in a high-end video game. Considering this Edward Norton version of the signature Marvel comic book character has the exact same problems (although, admittedly, they are still better than those in Lee's film), I still can't help but wonder if people are going to be any more excited about the movie then they were back in 2003.

This all relates back to SIFF far more clearly than you'd probably imagine. Tonight I saw the delightful (if a bit too thin) The Island of Lost Souls out of Denmark and it has visual effects up the whazoo. This fantasy/adventure about a couple of teenagers (Sarah Langebæk Gaarmann, Lasse Borg) forced into battling an evil necromancer (Lars Mikkelsen) after the girl's little brother (Lucas Munk Billing) is possessed by the soul of a long-dead warlock who helped defeat him a century earlier, the movie is a sprightly and spunky good-natured surprise virtually impossible to resist.

But that's not what got me thinking. There are CGI effects in this thing pretty much beginning to end and they are every bit as good as just about any Hollywood creation I've seen over the last couple of years with very few exceptions (Iron Man comes to mind, as do 2007's Zodiac, The Bourne Ultimatum and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix). Movies like this one, like Paul Verhoeven's Black Book and like Jean-Pierre Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement, can't help but make you wonder what the heck is going on. Studio movies cost hundreds of millions of dollars and they still look like video games. These ones are made for fractions of the cost and feature effects so good you almsot don't even notice they are there.



Lsiten, I'm not entirely sure what my point is here other than the Hollywood excuse for broken budgets has little to do with visual effects and everything to do with executives feeling the best way to fix a broken script is to throw money at the problem and hope it all works out. While I know this isn't exactly news (and while I'm just as unsure what I'm really trying to get at here by pointing it out) it is festivals like SIFF that really showcase just how glaring this idiotic reality really is. It's annoying, and for all The Incredible Hulk does tend to get right I'll take the unabashed thrills, chills and delightfully well-written spills of The Island of Lost Souls over that one again any day.

In the "Bag"

Filmmaking siblings Jay and Mark Duplass are the kind of guys you can't help but like. Direct, charming, self-effacing and absolutely as sharp as tacs, these two directors know what they're doing and aren't afraid to talk about it. No two ways about it, I like them, and after spending 30 minutes (give or take) with the pair earlier this afternoon I can't imagine anyone else feeling any different.

I was there to talk about the duo's follow-up to their acclaimed debut The Puffy Chair, the highly unusual and decidedly different four-character drama-slash-comedy-slash-thriller Baghead. A solidly effective low budget B-movie with an ingenious (and very well earned) third actor twist, this is one of the only pictures I can ever recall watching and having a fellow critic accidently slap me smack-dab right in the face because something on-screen startled her. Of all the pictures Sony Pictures Classics has sent to this year's SIFF (The Children of Huang Shi, The Wackness, Brick Lane, Frozen River and When Did You Last See Your Father?) this one just might be the very best. Granted, I still haven't seen two of those, but off the ones I have watched the Duplass' brothers opus is the one I definitely can't stop thinking about.

It's a simple enough premise. Four barely working actors; Chad (Steve Zissis), Matt (Ross Partridge), Michelle (Greta Gerwig) and Catherine (Elise Muller); head off for a weekend in the country at a secluded cottage to write the script for an independent feature which will launch all fo their careers and hopefully make them stars. Things begin to get odd when a mysterious stranger appears outside wearing a paper bag over his head. That mystery grows dangerous as the weekend comes to an end, the true motives of the disturbingly quiet masked figure putting all of them squarely atop the razor's edge.

"One of the crew members of our last feature The Puffy Chair, I don't remember who it was, had the idea that a bag on someone's head could be scary," said Mark during our mid-afternoon chat up in the SIFF hospitality suite in the downtown W Hotel. "[They] came up with the idea while we were trapsing around the woods shooting and we were all having this conversation about what is the scariest thing you could think of. His response was about sitting in your living room, reading a book, it's quiet and you look over at the window and there is a guy with a bag over his head staring back at you."

"We all started laughing and saying it was pretty funny, and then we all ended up having nightmares that night thinking about it," he laughs. "We were all talking about it the next morning at breakfast and were like, yeah, that's fucking terrifying. But, then, you know where you're out [in the woods] it's a real rural area and there are a lot of windows and there's no one else around and there's nothing you can do, and we suddenly got really excited about the idea that it could be both funny and scary at the same time. That's where the real inspiration came from, being scared but being annoyed at yourself at the same time because you're scared over something that on the [surface] seems just so stupid."

"The way that our collaboration works is that it's really hard to make a movie," adds Jay speaking about how the pair manages to work so closely together with such apparent ease. "It's kind of like the two of us equals one actual filmmaker, and I don't want to run down a road that Mark doesn't want to go down. It's painful enough, a struggle enough, trying to do it [make a movie] with it being just the two of us and we want to make sure that we're both connected on it, that we're both excited about it, because I think that's what keeps us going through the insanity of making Independent Films."

"There are those moments when we're behind the camera together and we're looking at each other and realizing that something amazing is happening. And we connect on that. Really, that's what [making movies] is all about."

The movie opens in limited release at the end of July, so look for my full review and the rest of the interview over on the main site at that time. Until then, keep an eye out for Baghead. It isn't going to change your life but it is going to make you laugh, get you to think, get connected to some wonderfuly flawed personalities and force you to jump up out of your chair in deliciously primitive tension. Just don't slap the person next to you when you jump in your seat due to all the simple, alomst old-school scares. Take it from me, getting whacked in the face at a movie theater hurts!

The Great Colin Hanks

After recieving raves at Sundance, the highly pleasing star-struck comedy The Great Buck Howard had a gala screening on Friday night. In attendance were both writer/director Sean McGinly and up-and-coming star Colin Hanks.

The movie is a hoot, and while I can't do a full review what I can say is that this tale of a former college kid (Hanks) looking for direction in his life who ends up becoming the assistant for a once-famous mentalist ("I've been on The Tonight Show 51 times!") Buck Howard (wonderfully played by John Malkovich) as the entertainer readies a massive trick which will hopefully catapult him back into the national limelight. Along the way he learns about life, makes friends with an acerbic publicist (Emily Blunt) and tries to not let his angry father's (real-life dad Tom Hanks) displeasure as to his dropping out of law school get the better of him.

It reminded me quite a bit of the slightly similar 1982 Richard Benjamin minor classic My Favorite Year. That film was also about an aging celebrity trying to re-ignite a stalled career, the picture earning a much-deserved Oscar nomination for star Peter O'Toole and gave Mark Linn-Baker (who would go on to star in the television sitcom Perfect Strangers) one of his few decent theatrical roles.

I got the opportunity to sit down with Hanks a couple of hours before the local premier of his film and I asked him about these similarities. "That was actually, ironically, one of my favorite movies growing up as a kid. I absoluely loved that film. I was actually kind of honored when people [mention] that. I actually get excited when somebody mentions that because, for me personally, that was a really important movie from my childhood that I watched like every day."

"And, yeah, I can sort of see it. Same sort of vibe. No disrespect to [Mark] Linn-Baker but I hope I don't end up on Perfect Strangers. But, in all seriousness, that's a movie that's endured. It was a really funny film. And I hope we can achieve some of the same success. These movies last forever and they always seem to find an audience somewhere. Hopefully people will really like it."

"I just think [Buck Howard] is a delightful little movie and I tend to like those kind fo films that are just so entertaining and where you can notice all these small little things all the people do to make [you] laugh. But then, it takes very little to make me laugh. Well, not very little, I just find myself laughing at the little tiny things here and there, and if there are enough of those little tiny things and enough big things that I just think are really hilarious."

"And I just think everyone's so damn good in it," he continues emphatically before adding with a trademark deadpan smirk and a slight chuckle familiar to a certain two-time Academy-Award winning actor Hanks has known his entire life since birth, "myself excluded."

I'd have to disagree with that last statement. This is the best the actor has been, and also the first role he's had since his debut in Orange County that's really allowed him to showcase his talents. I'll have more of this interview (along with a full review) on the main site when The Great Buck Howard opens in theaters later this year.

In other SIFF news, I had to endure one of the more annoying midnight movie experiences the festival has probably ever given me. The new Takashi Miike (Audition) creation, the weirdly disjointed East meet West and goes back East Western Sukiyaki Western Django, had its premier, and it was definitely one of those movies where I quickly foudn myself wanting to be anywhere other than in my theater seat.

Not so mcuh because of the film itself (although, it must be admitted, that even for the always unusual and more than a bit unhinged Miike, this one was pretty awful), but more because of the idiot fan boy sitting next to me. Packed in like sardines due to a virtual sell-out, the gentleman to my left was one of those bizarre rubes that litterally laughed or made comments and giggled madly at everything. Every. Little. Thing.

A Man walked across the screen - he laughed.

A Person gets a sideways glance from an adrongynous gunslinger packing a samurai sword - he laughed.

A twangy guitar starts playing on the soundtrack - he laughed.

A close-up shot of a red and white rose - he laughed.

A wooden sign saying, "Nevada" - he laughed.

A dorkily dressed Quentine Tarantino, in a cameo, starts resciting a nonsensical poem in fractured stereotypical broken Japanese-tinged English while also attempting to maks a ridiculous Southern Accent - he laughed.

Okay, that last one was actually kind of funny (Tarantino not being remotely a decent enough actor to pull off Miike's intended satire even remotely well), but I'm sure you get my point. It didn't matter what was going on up on the screen, this guy was going to laugh and chortle and snort over and over and over again for every single second the movie was playing. It annoyed the living hell out of me, and at a certain point in the film I was starting to wish I had a Colt Revolver of my own so I could put myself out of my misery.

As for the movie itself, it didn't really work at all, the director not achieving anywhere near the acidic balance and ingenuity needed to make his satirical Kurosawa meets Leone meets Hawks meet Ford meet Eastwood mash-up work. There are some fantastic images (especially some of the highly inventive gory ones) and a couple of the jokes are actually kind of funny, but overall this thing is just sad, and for a filmmaker as talented as this one is I'd really hoped for a little bit more than this blank-filled misfire.

What else? The elegantly layed sci-fi thriller from Spain Timecrimes was one heck of a lot of fun, while the Colin Firth-Jim Broadbent (unfortunately titled) drama When Did You Last See Your Father? was solid if not quite as emotionally moving as it probably should have been. I also finally got to see the Danish entry Fighter and was more than impressed, while the extremely dark black comedy Choke (based on the cult novel by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk) showcased another sensational performance by the always great Sam Rockwell (so amazing in David Gordon Green's Snow Angels) that's one of the best of I've seen this festival.

REVIEW - "The Bluetooth Virgin"

(Note: I don't normally do full reviews in the Blog but I'm making an exception this time out. The film has its World Premier next Thursday, June 12 at the Harvard Exit. I suggest intelligent viewers go to one of the SIFF ticket offices and buy themselves a seat right now.)

There have been lots of films about writers. We’ve been depicted as boozers, crazies, eccentrics, messiahs, heroes, villains, idiots, saviors, mystics, savants and just about everything else in-between. You name the character trait, and at some point in time we’ve been used to fit the bill.

The reasons for this are many, of course, but when you strip away all the layers and get through all the bull I think the basic truth is that, for better or for worse, those of us who write for a living (or, in most cases – unfortunately including my own – try to write for living) are more than a bit egotistical, maybe even narcissistic. We like to be the stars of our own story, the ones with all the insight and the smarts to overcome disability (many times created by ourselves) in order to achieve something close to magnificent.

The new movie The Bluetooth Virgin has its World Premier next Thursday evening during the closing days of this year’s Seattle International Film Festival and it, like so many other pictures during this last century of film, is about writers. Specifically, it is about a screenwriter, David (Bryce Johnson), and his magazine editor best friend, Sam (Austin Peck), and what happens when the former asks the latter to look at his latest piece of work.

What happens is that Sam doesn’t like it, but he doesn’t want to hurt his friend’s feelings by telling him so. But David, eager for affection and affirmation, isn’t a complete idiot, and after a few forced pleasantries on the golf course he soon realizes all of his friend’s fawning praise is being played far too close to the vest, the truth finally coming out in waves of bitter confusion with the potential to leave both men hurt.

There’s more, and to go into it all would really end up spoiling some of the fun, so in fairness to writer/director Russell Brown I think I’m just going to end the description there. What I will say is that the 80-minute feature is structured like a series of one act plays, each one taking ideas and concepts spoken about in the sequence prior and then twists and turns them in a way which will leave viewers curious to see what happens next.

But it isn’t this somewhat stage-bound structure that I want to talk about. After the first scene between David and Sam it is more than readily apparent the filmmaker has no intention of escaping the theatrical artifice he’s assembled for himself, and one I got used to the pit-pit-patter of everyone’s constant dialogue I was more than willing to forgive the somewhat tired My Dinner with Andre vibe the whole thing couldn’t help but keep giving off.

What did interest me is just how eagerly Russell attacked the notion of writer as narcissist. Rarely has a fellow artist of the pen and paper (okay, keyboard and mouse, but I’m sure you get my point) spoken with such naked honesty about his own profession. We change our personalities on a dime in order to deflect criticism, morphing over and over to suit the meanings and definitions others attach to our work.

And when the criticism becomes too much to bear? We deflect, push it aside and then try to find away to attack the very person we asked to give their opinion in the first place. If they’re going to kill our baby then we are sure as heck are going to do are damndest to at least try and wound theirs, and even with longstanding friendships in play all bets are off when a work near and dear to our hearts is given the evisceration by someone we profess to trust.

All of which probably sounds odd coming from the pen from a professional critic. My job is to do exactly what it is I hate to receive myself, my personal pen as pointed and as eviscerating as any I’m sure (just look what I did to poor Adam Sandler and his latest misfire You Don’t Mess with the Zohan for proof). Yet, we all exist on the same wavelength, the same vibe, and while the majority of us go out of our way to hide it criticism, even the constructive kind, can hurt and even if we put up a magnificent façade trying to signal otherwise the truth is still buried for all to see right there in the very center of our hearts.

The Bluetooth Virgin nails this mentality and hammers it right to the wall. The pain, the self-doubt, the insecurity, the anger, all of it resides deep within these two characters and watching them evolve as they deal with it was far more fascinating and enthralling than I had originally thought it would be. There were times here I was Sam, others where I knew I was David, and by the time it was over I couldn’t help but nod my head satisfaction over what it was I’d just witnessed.

Not that it would have probably worked out that way had Russell omitted the glorious final few minutes of his motion picture. Not to reveal too much, let’s just say that for all this angst and ego talked about above there is nothing like having someone have a deep, multifaceted and profound connection to your work. All the pain, all the heartache, all that and more becomes worth it with the glint of a heartfelt smile from a fan moved to admit how much what you’ve created has meant to them.

All artists feel this on some level, and no matter our medium there is a truth here that is absolutely inescapable. The fear of failure and revulsion can keep many of us from doing the work we could probably be capable of accomplishing otherwise. In all honesty, that very same dreadful uncertainty and lack of confidence is why I’m still slaving away for almost no money for an internet website and not trying to find other, better paying freelance gigs. Embarrassing, yes, but true, and watching the movie I almost couldn’t help but sadly realize it.

The flipside, though, is that I’ve also felt the euphoria. I’ve been to that place both Sam and David reach at varying points in the film and it is the one thing that keeps me going even when I get down that I’m not making more money or being read as widely as I would like. Like I said, The Bluetooth Virgin knows these thoughts, embraces these emotions and is unafraid to pull any of its punches while looking straight-on at them. In the end, while the film might be about writers, anyone who’s ever dared to do a single thing creative is going to find much grab on to here and I for one hope they’ll see this very fine movie and get the chance to do so.

"Panda" - monium

The new DreamWorks family film Kung Fu Panda had its local premier Sunday morning at SIFF, but I actually didn't get around to seeing it until last night and let me be one of the first to say (at least here in Seattle) that - move over great big lovably angry green ogre - but this tale about a karate-chopping overweight bear might just be the best animated feature the studio has ever produced.

Still held by review embargo until Thursday, what I can say now is that this action-comedy comes ever-so close to Pixar level creativity, energy and excitement. Heck, I'd go so far as to say it rivals both A Bug's Life and especially Cars in all three of those departments, the movie a bubbling burst of effervescent joy I pretty much loved beginning to end.

And that animation! The silly trailers and commercials don't even hint at how dexterous and remarkable it truly is. Every detail, every color, every shape, every movement is remarkably precise. This might be the most sensational looking cartoon epic since last year's instant classic Ratatouille, the film as much a feast for the eyes as it is for the funny bone. Again, I'll go into it all in more detail in this weekend's reviews but just know here and now Kung Fu Panda is a fun family winner worthy of hoots, hollers and long-lasting bursts and loudly chattering applause.

In other SIFF news, I watched two films from Asian wunderkid director Johnnie To (Exiled), one of which I loved while the other I found to be nothing more than an intriguing disappointment. The latter was Mad Detective, an odd bit of black comedy, buddy caper and film noir co-directed by Wai Ka-fai that offered up many curiously inviting possibilities onlyto ultimately do nothing of note with them. The central character, a neurotic - maybe schizophrenic - former detective named Bun (Lau Ching-wan) who can see a person's inner personality as if it were a fellow human being standing right alongside of them, is completely fascinating. He's like Monk and the girl from "Medium" combined, only the certifiably crazy version, and if someone decided to make a television show about him I'm almost completely positive I'd watch it in an instantaneous heartbeat.

But the film loses its footing during the final stretch, forgoing all the intriguing aspects of both the chracter and with his relationship with a younger detective (ably played by Andy On) in need of his help. While the final offers a couple of genuine surprises, and while the last shot is certainly a shiver-causing enigma that leaves the viewer with plenty to think about and mull over, the ultimate resolution is still so forced and, at times, distasteful I can't say I walked out of the theater with anything close to approaching a smile on my face.

On the flip side of the equation is To's much more straight forward (and yet ultimately much more satisfying) noir piece Sparrow with Simon Yam and Kelly Lin. A drama about a group of pickpockets seduced and manipulated by a beautiful femme fatale, this fast, furious and kinetically entertaining drama isn't much of a stretch for the director but it does show a delightfully playful side to the filmmaker's usual strum and drag. It reminded me a little bit of a oddly appealing combination of Stanley Donen's Charade and Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity, and while the film doesn't reach the timelessly classic status of either of those landmark entertainments that doesn't remotely change the fact it is still one of the more breezily entertaining SIFF entries I've see up to this point so far.

Today's slate is like a martial arts lalapalooza. First up is Paramount Vantage's The Foot Fist Way followed up by the Danish entry Fighter and finished up with Chilean action epic Mirageman. Hopefully, this rainy Seattle Tuesday will turn out as good as my (somewhat) magnificent Monday did. Yesterday was two for three, and I for one will take those king of numbers each and every day of the week.