Between 2005 and 2007, I contributed reviews, interviews, and other features to Resonance, a Seattle-based magazine dedicated to music, movies, literature, and other arts. In 2008, it ceased publication after 14 years. Here are four of my video reviews, plus a couple of movie-related reviews.
THE AURA
(Fabián Bielinsky, Argentina, 2005, 129 minutes)
The final feature film from Argentina's Fabián Bielinsky, who was felled by a heart attack in 2006 at the age of 46, starts out much like his 2000 debut, Nine Queens, but soon segues into something altogether stranger.
It's also more of a character study, and Bielinsky has conjured up one heck of a character, an unnamed epileptic taxidermist (Nine Queens' Ricardo Darín) with a photographic memory. After his wife splits the scene, his colleague Sontag (Alejandro Awada) convinces him to go on a hunting trip.
During their foray into the woods, the men argue, Sontag leaves, and the taxidermist suffers a seizure. As he convulses, he experiences "the aura," a moment of intense clarity before the plunge into darkness.
When he returns to consciousness, he's disoriented and startled by a sound. Is it Sontag, a deer...or something else? In his confused state, he pulls the trigger. Near the body of the deceased, he finds an eerie dog and plans for a robbery. He absorbs every detail.
Like the hunt, the ensuing heist doesn't go as planned, but The Aura isn't a mere morality tale; it's weirder and thornier than that. That there will never be another keenly-observed movie from its visionary maker is an undeniable tragedy. (IFC)
Wooden acting, clunky dialogue, and gaseous humor (a crank caller and big imaginary beagle bring the noise). So it goes with this grainy 16mm film from indie auteur Jon Moritsugu (Mod Fuck Explosion, Terminal USA).
The 1997 satire's titular whores include surly tennis champion Jody (the obnoxious Peter Friedrich from Moritsugu's 2002 Scumrock), trust fund dilettante Sophie (the robotic Amy Davis, Moritsugu's wife) and kindly, yet creepy canine placement officer George (Victor of Aquitaine doing his best Crispin Glover imitation).
Their desperate need to succeed has all the narrative drive and technical expertise of a glorified home movie--one featuring a soundtrack by indie-rock royalty Dub Narcotic Soundsystem, Emily's Sassy Lime, and Barbara Manning--but a home movie, nonetheless. Some people find this kind of thing charming. They should get out more. (Modulus Studio Arts)
RADIO ON
(Christopher Petit, UK, 1979, 104 minutes)
As the Modern Lovers once exclaimed, "I'm in love with the radio on / it helps me from being alone late at night." In "Roadrunner," front man Jonathan Richman had 1950s America on his mind; in Radio On, critic-turned-filmmaker Christopher Petit transfers that phenomenon to 1980s England, exchanging exultation for something more enigmatic.
The result is Get Carter gone post-punk: TV actor David Beames plays a London DJ trying to unravel the mystery of his brother's demise.
Instead, he meets a succession of travelers who share his feelings of loneliness and loss. Shot by frequent Wim Wenders cinematographer Martin Schäfer (Kings of the Road), Petit's first feature is a monochromatic road movie that captures a time of Bowie in Berlin, Kraftwerk on cassette, Wreckless Eric on the jukebox, and Police-era Sting (above) as an Eddie Cochrane-obsessed gas station attendant.
Radio On would make for the ideal double bill with Border Radio, the restless debut, also in black and white, from fellow Wenders acolyte Alison Anders.
Like the 1987 Anders film, which was co-directed by Kurt Voss and Dean Lent, the journey trumps the destination--Bristol in the case of the former, Mexico in the case of the latter. Petit's cinematic project may be chillier, but the patina of time only makes it seem cooler than ever. (Plexifilm)
CINEMA 16: EUROPEAN SHORT FILMS (Various directors, 10 countries, 2007, 218 minutes)
Democracy rules in Cinema 16 as up-and-comers rub shoulders with established filmmakers. Previous UK-only installments of the series focused exclusively on British and American work. Now Warp Films widens their scope to encompass an entire continent. Spread over two discs, this portable film festival offers 16 short films plus commentary tracks.
The earliest selections include Ridley Scott's 1958 ode to truancy "Boy and Bicycle," starring his younger brother Tony Scott (left), and Jan Švankmajer's 1971 Lewis Carroll-inspired "Jabberwocky." The rest are more recent, like Andrea Arnold's 2003 Oscar-winning "Wasp," which packs all the emotional complexity of a feature film into an economical 23 minutes.
Cinema 16's combination of big names and promising neophytes, like playwright-turned-director Martin McDonagh (2004's profane "Six Shooter”), serves as an ideal introduction to today's art house--with nary a tightly-corseted literary adaptation to spoil the fun. (Warp Films)
CATCHING THE BIG FISH: MEDITATION, CONSCIOUSNESS, AND CREATIVITY
(David Lynch, USA, 2007, 192 pages)
David Lynch explains the title metaphor of his short, punchy book, Catching the Big Fish, as follows: "Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper." The famed director proceeds to describe his creative process through the prism of Transcendental Meditation.
Catching the Big Fish consists of 83 koan-like chapters, most less than a page in length. Lynch makes a point and then moves on.
Those readers looking for explanations may leave disappointed, but Lynch has always insisted that all interpretations of his work are valid, and he isn't about to start spilling their secrets now--hence no director's commentaries on any of his Criterion Collection releases.
Granted, the director dubs his nightmarish debut, Eraserhead, "my most spiritual movie," but doesn't say why. Mostly, he reveals how he keeps the ideas coming, while staving off the "Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit of Negativity." And really, who wants that in their life? (Tarcher/Penguin)
YOU'RE GONNA MISS ME (Original Soundtrack)
(Roky Erickson solo, with the 13th Floor Elevators, and with the Aliens, 2007, 12 tracks, 38:05 minutes)
Though he found fame 30 years ago, 2007 will go down as the year of Roky Erickson--the year of this one-of-a-kind musician's resurrection, that is.
After decades lost in a schizophrenic haze (exacerbated by electroshock therapy), Roky's brother, Sumner Erickson, established a trust and secured his sibling with the help he needed. Now Roky's playing out again, there's a new book about his wild and wiggy Elevators, and Keven McCalester has unleashed the six-years-in-the-making documentary You're Gonna Miss Me.
Though the soundtrack covers ground similar to essential Roky anthology I Have Always Been Here Before, collectors should note the inclusion of two previously unreleased tracks: stripped-down versions of "For You (I'd Do Anything)" and "Goodbye Sweet Dreams"--both of which provide the blueprint for Austin neighbor Daniel Johnston's entire career. (Palm Pictures)
Images from Mubi (Ricardo Darín in The Aura and Tony Scott in Boy and Bicycle), American Genre Film Archive (Victor Fischbarg and giant beagle in Fame Whore), Cineform (David Beames in Radio On), and Kinship Goods (Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity cover art).
NO OTHER CHOICE / Eojjeolsugaeopda / 어쩔수가없다 (Park Chan-wook, Korea, 2025, 139 minutes)
"I subscribe basically to the theory that a movie is not the book it came from, and in almost every case it shouldn't be the book it came from...
The responsibility for a movie is not as easy to define as the responsibility for a novel."--Donald Westlake to bank robber Albert Nussbaum in 1974
For nearly as long as I've been watching them, I've associated movies with books, and not just in a general sense, since every year offers hundreds, if not thousands, of literary adaptations, but in a more personal one, i.e. if I'm sufficiently interested in an author or filmmaker–ideally both–I'll read the book before seeing the film. It's especially helpful if I plan to write about it.
Reading the book beforehand helps me to understand the author's intent, which may or may not align with the filmmaker's, but it comes with drawbacks, too. The most obvious is that the film may not live up to the book, which happens more often than the film that surpasses the book, though it's unrealistic to expect every detail to make it onto the screen.
On the other hand, it's why we have so many limited series. You want the entire book spelled out for you? There are directors and streamers more than happy to comply. Length aside, another drawback is that the film may not hold any surprises, no matter how artfully executed, though if it's sufficiently engaging, knowing the outcome shouldn't spoil the show.
All of this is to say that I read Donald Westlake's 1997 suspense novel The Ax before seeing Park Chan-wook's loose adaptation, No Other Choice, and now I kind of wish I hadn't.
Before explaining why, I have to admit that this is the first book I've read by the author, though I've long been familiar with his birth name, in addition to his best known pen name–Richard Stark–and some of the films adapted from the Westlake/Stark bibliography, especially Point Blank, The Hot Rock, The Actor, Made in U.S.A. (though Jean-Luc Godard neglected to clear the rights), as well as The Grifters, the first-rate Stephen Frears neo-noir for which he adapted Jim Thompson's 1963 novel.
Putting his stamp on a work of literature, such as The Ax, is nothing new for Park, a former film critic who previously adapted a Japanese manga (Oldboy), a 19th-century French shocker (Thirst), a 21st-century potboiler set in Victorian England (The Handmaiden), and a spy story from the 1980s (John Le Carré’s Little Drummer Girl, his first English-language series).
The deeply-saturated look of the new film rhymes with his previous work, especially the high-contrast lighting and inky blacks that make the vibrant colors pop, but though he preserves the darkly comic tone, he loses the subtlety of Westlake's matter-of-fact prose by amping everything up to 11.
Granted, Lee Byung-hun (Park's Joint Security Area, Netflix's Squid Game) goes all in as Yoo Man-su, an upper middle-class paper mill manager who turns to desperate measures after his employer downsizes him out of his position and into a labor market with little need for his specialized services.
Man-su's solution is just as fiendishly clever as it is in the book–eliminate his competitors one by one–but Park has added lashings of sadism and gore that make for an exciting time at the cinema, while also giving the impression that this suburban father was always a murderer at heart; too much time on the unemployment line has brought his killer instinct to the surface.
That's fine as far as it goes, but there's nothing sadistic about Burke Devore in the original novel, and that's the point. None of this comes naturally to him, and it troubles his conscience, but not enough to make him stop. In fact, killing becomes his 9-to-5 business. Not a hobby, not a pastime, but a j-o-b, and his body count is even higher than that of his on-screen counterpart.
Park is such a strong visual stylist that it comes as little surprise that he ditches the first-person narration of Westlake's novel such that Lee does more showing than telling, so it's fortunate that he's such a magnetic performer. Son Ye-jin as Man-su's wife, Mi-ri, also makes a vivid impression as a woman who starts to put two and two together, whereas Burke's wife, the family's sole breadwinner, never figures out what's going on (she isn't stupid, just busy). She cheats on her husband, too, unlike Mi-ri, who also takes a job as a part-time dental assistant–but doesn't sleep with the boss.
I won't list every way the film differs from the book, though many of the changes don't register as improvements, not least the disturbing scene in which Man-su buries a victim up to his neck and force-feeds him to death.
All that said, No Other Choice always feels like a Park film. Something similar could be said about Stanley Kubrick's many literary adaptations, which revolved around–and even depended on–the creative liberties he took with the source material. And I do mean that as a compliment to the younger filmmaker, even if I didn't enjoy this particular take as much as, say, the lush and devious Handmaiden.
This brings me to Costa-Gavras's 2005 adaptation, Le Couperet, aka The Ax, which hews closely to Westlake's novel in all the ways Park's doesn't, right down to the narration. The look also differs from the latter, which has heightened touches, like the inventively-staged scenes of domestic surveillance. Costa-Gavras keeps everything grounded in reality, though he possibly loses too much of Westlake's drily comic tone through a combination of the writing and César-nominated actor Jose Garcia’s more noirish performance, akin to François Cluzet in 2006 thriller Tell No One.
Though I disagree with this categorization, The Ax has been classified as a horror story in some quarters. If Costa-Gavras's adaptation plays like a black comedy-noir hybrid, with Garcia's Bruno Davert (below) as the regular guy in over his head, Park's film really does plunge into horror territory.
Costa-Gavras's more literal approach does not, however, make for a dull time at the cinema. In fact, it's considered one of the Greek-French director's finest films, though it didn't make as much of an impact in the States as it did in Europe, or as much as earlier films, like 1969Oscar winner Z with Jean-Louis Trintignant. (Costa-Gavras's son, Romain, who found fame through his provocative videos for M.I.A., has become a talented director in his own right.)
The affection between the couple in the earlier film (with Karin Viard as Marlène) is never in doubt, but there's more tension in their marriage and their children are older, whereas Park made the daughter a non-verbal, grade school prodigy, mostly I guess to emphasize the expense of cellos and lessons. With Man-su out of a job, everyone suffers–they even have to give up their Netflix subscription (how will they be able to keep up with Squid Game?!). Park also gives them two dogs, precious companions from which they have to part once Man-su's severance payment dwindles to nothing.
These added details may have made the made the film more appealing for some, but I believe the book got it right the first time, because Westlake trusts his audience more. My point isn't that directors shouldn't adapt books as they choose. They absolutely should. I just wish Park had put more faith in the author's text, and made fewer or better alterations. The narration, for instance, is no small thing, and was possibly intended to invoke or even subvert Jim Thompson's reliance on slippery, first-person narrators, not least since Westlake had adapted the author only seven years before.
Like most Park productions, No Other Choice has its pleasures, and it's possible my anticipation was too great due to the union of author and director, but it feels like a disappointment, especially compared to 2022's dazzling Decision to Leave. Not a major one, but a disappointment, nonetheless. Fortunately, Park brings it home in fine style, and that's hardly a minor matter, because it's as key to the narrative as the audacious premise.
Both films also boast excellent ensembles, particularly the actors who play the competitor-victims, like the two Ax standouts: German actor Ulrich Tukur (The White Ribbon) as a kindly, if despondent suit salesman with a bad combover and bespectacled Dardenne brothers regular Olivier Gourmet (The Promise, The Son) who makes the fatal mistake of commiserating with the oddly sympathetic fellow who trespasses on his property, presumably to pick up job-hunting tips.
I can't imagine that either filmmaker believes that unemployed middle managers should start bumping off their competitors. Not that I've seen either make a statement to that effect, but I wouldn't say it's needed.
In the book, it's more obvious that Burke Devore's cruel, if practical solution is intended as satire, and that was bound to get buried in these live-action interpretations.
Then again, it isn't a dream in Donald Westlake's novel. Burke never wakes up to find his slain competitors alive and well, and regardless as to which version of the story you prefer: Burke/Man-su/Bruno's solution, as horrible as it is, is also just a little…relatable.
After a one-day screening at the Pacific Science Center's IMAX Theater on Dec 8, No Other Choice opens for a regular run at SIFF Cinema Uptown on Thurs, Jan 1 (all screenings through Jan 4 will be in 35mm). Images from the IMDb (Lee Byung-hun, Cha Seung-won, Lee Sung-min, and José Garcia), Amazon (The Ax cover art), and World of Reel (Lee and Son Ye-jin).
For those with a minimal tolerance for holiday fare, Drink and Be Merry just might be your new favorite Christmas movie.
Though it's hardly as dreamy or surrealistic, Adam Volerich's low-budget debut is a worthy successor to Tyler Taormina's 2024 Christmas Eve in Miller's Point in terms of its strikingly original approach to a holiday that presents emotional, financial, and other challenges for some of us.
Not to be a total Grinch, but my patience for Christmas songs, movies, and tropes that I've seen and heard over and over again for decades on end grows thinner every year, so I get pretty excited when a film deviates so clearly from the usual cutesy, materialistic, or soap operatic playbook.
The $80,000 film also looks and sounds fantastic, thanks to top-flight cinematography from Volerich and Jack Mannion and production design from Christina Coleman. The glowing Christmas lights help, but all of the spaces are inviting, and the filmmaker, a podcaster and Rutgers professor, makes inventive choices involving black and white stock and practical effects.
The use of chapters and minimal sets lends Drink and Be Merry the feel of a filmed play, somewhat comparable to Richard Linklater's recent Sardi's-set Blue Moon–which was filmed entirely on a sound stage in Richard Rodgers actor Andrew Scott's native Ireland–though considerably more down-scale and rooted-in-real locations.
I won't say too much about the plot, since this is mostly a dialogue-driven piece, though compared to Peter Hujar's Day, which revolves around two people in one apartment, Drink and Be Merry is practically maximalist–no shade whatsoever to Ira Sachs' two-hander, which I greatly enjoyed.
Volerich, whose name may be unfamiliar, has filled his feature with familiar faces from numerous films and television shows, and the entire cast is very good, especially Yellowstone actor Jefferson White, who co-produced.
Basically, we spend a few days around Christmas 2019 with White's down-on-his-luck actor Chet, mostly at the New York dive bar he owns and operates, but also at the second-story apartment he shares with his "Ma" (a warm and delightful Siobhan Fallon Hogan).
Along with White and Hogan, I was particularly struck by the way the film doubles as a character actor showcase, and every performer, in all their idiosyncrasies, gets the chance to shine. These mostly post-middle-aged actors deserve bigger parts than what they usually get, and they earn Volerich's faith, especially The Wire veterans Delaney Williams, who played Jay Landsman, and Brian Anthony Wilson, who played Det. Vernon Holley. Between the two, they–mostly Wilson–have 284 credits at the IMDb.
Really, though, they're all impressive. Actor and stuntman Billy Smith (pictured above left) has appeared in two Martin Scorsese and two Clint Eastwood films, whereas actress and writer Sophie Zucker (Dickinson, The Chair Company) adds some prickly, youthful energy to the proceedings.
To be clear, Chet, who strung up the lights, loves Christmas, though he doesn't love his life, which hasn't turned out quite like he hoped, but it's the older regulars who supply most of the film's hard-bitten, low-key comedy.
Though they tease Chet about his Christmas cheer and his one lousy bit part, they see him as someone who still has time to get himself out of the ruts in which they feel stuck. If you can't tell, this is also a film about the way men talk to each other about sensitive issues, mostly by talking around them or by making jokes that aren't really jokes, because it's easier than being open and vulnerable.
Granted, romance even blooms for one of these sadsacks before sputtering out. Still, it's better to have a moment of happiness than none at all.
Nonetheless, this isn't a depressing film, even if it isn't as jolly as your average Christmas outing--not least because most everyone has a problem with the bottle, though that's a given with a barfly film. If anything, the bartender and his customers have each other, which is also better than having no one at all. One even turns out to have a pretty great partner, and a mishap near the end suggests he might stop taking her for granted.
If the characters are throwbacks in terms of language and belief systems, Volerich shows them learning to become more open-minded. Though I wouldn't describe the film as a noir or as an homage to independent filmmaking in 1970s New York, it may appeal to fans of those forms.
The closest analogue that comes to mind isn't a Christmas movie at all, but rather the Ross brothers' hybrid documentary Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, which takes place entirely in a set-bound dive bar.
To quote the director's statement: "You know this bar. Maybe you were a regular. Maybe you were just passing through. But you sat, and you sipped all the same. The Bartender treated you well. The Barflies bantered with each other. And the Jukebox was already playing someone else's song. Wood paneling. Dirty bathrooms. Cheap drinks. No food. Cash Only."
If you spark to that description of the many dive bars across the country that have stumbled, struggled, and shuttered due to the pandemic, gentrification, and other obstacles, I recommend seeking this one out.
Drink and Be Merry is currently making its way across the US. No Seattle dates, but it's available on VOD (Prime and Fandango at Home), Blu-ray, and DVD through X4 Pictures. Images: Adam Volerich/Bearly There Media.
Another piece I wrote for Reel News, SIFF's now-defunct publication for members, in 2002 (it was never online, because that was a different time). I've lightly revised it from the
original text and added new images.
Long live melodrama, and let us stress the quality of Douglas Sirk.
--David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film
Although his directorial career lasted for over 40 years, including the German films he made in the 1930s and 1970s, Douglas Sirk (1900-1987) is best known for the melodramas he made for Universal between 1954 and 1959, including such enduring classics as Magnificent Obsession (below right), All That Heaven Allows (above), Written on the Wind, The Tarnished Angels, and Imitation of Life. (All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind are now available on DVD from The Criterion Collection.)
That isn't to suggest there aren't other entries in his filmography that are worth a look, like 1947's Lured with an excellent Lucille Ball or 1949's Shockproof with a screenplay fromSamuel Fuller, but few are as well known or as widely appreciated.
If it could be said that any one person did everything they could to give melodrama a good name, it was Douglas Sirk.
As Todd Haynes (Poison, Velvet Goldmine) explains in the production notes for his unapologetically Sirkian new film, Far From Heaven, "While the look and style of those '50s melodramas are anything but realistic, there's something almost spookily accurate about the emotional truths of those films. They are hyperreal, that's why we call them melodramas. Because they are about the kinds of things that are close to our private, personal lives, like falling out of love with somebody.”
Since Sirk's heyday, unfortunately, melodrama has, for the most part, fallen into disfavor. Nowadays, to describe a film as "melodramatic" implies that it's over-done: the acting too "big," the music too loud, the story line ridiculous, if not completely implausible. In the 1979 BBC documentary, Behind the Mirror: A Profile of Douglas Sirk, portions of which appear on the All That Heaven Allows DVD, the director agrees when host Mark Shivas suggests that Sirk meant the term literally: as a marriage between music and drama, as opposed to drama that is, like the title of Nicholas Ray's scathing 1956 attack on middle-American complacency: Bigger Than Life.
The All Movie Guide describes melodrama as a genre that focuses on "human emotion, illness and physical hardship." Further, it is often "critical of social and political climates and mores but can include domestic portrayals which are romanticized." D.W. Griffith's 1914 Birth of a Nation and Lewis Milestone's 1944 The Purple Heart are cited as examples. It's also noted that, "Lucid distinctions exist between good and evil, hero and villain, right and wrong, and rule oriented society." Fortunately, such distinctions aren't always so clear in the films of Sirk and those he has inspired.
Born in Hamburg in 1900 (or 1897 according to some reports) to Danish parents, Claus Detlev Sierck moved to Munich to study law after the First World War, then later to Hamburg to study philosophy. His life as a director began in Germany; first in theater, but then in film once the Nazis began to exert their censorious ways. His theatrical background should come as little surprise; Sirk's work has always been very "theatrical" in the best sense of the word. Along the way he changed his name to the more Teutonic-sounding Detlef Sierk.
In 1934, he was hired by legendary movie studio Universum Film AG (UFA), and they released his first feature film, April, April!, the following year.
But then, in 1937, the left-leaning Sirk and his Jewish wife, Hilde Jary, fled Germany altogether for short sojourns in France, Holland, Spain, South Africa, and Australia, eventually settling in the United States, some time between 1939 and 1943. His directorial reputation preceded him.
That Sirk would go on to make some of the most quintessentially American motion pictures of the 1950s isn't what makes him unique. That, once ensconced in the States, he would change his name to something less Germanic isn't either. The same could easily be said of his German-born UFA compatriots Billy Wilder and, to a lesser extent, Fritz Lang--not that Lang was a lesser director, just that "quintessentially American" are two words that don't fit the monocle-sporting Lang or his Expressionistic work quite so comfortably. But Sirk wasn't an auteur in the same way as Wilder and Lang, which may go some way towards explaining why his significance and influence have taken so much longer to grow and to take root in the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder in the 1970s and Todd Haynes in the 2000s.
Right: Douglas Sirk and his wife, actress Hilde Jary
In that sense, Sirk would almost seem to have more in common with French-born B-movie maestro, Jacques Tourneur (Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie). Like Sirk, Tourneur wasn't known as much for his taste in material as for the stylistic miracles he worked with the screenplays he was given such that he could, time and time again, make one cinematic miracle after another out of the studio-generated material that came his way.
That said, Sirk would, like Billy Wilder in Double Indemnity, go on to work with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in 1956's There’s Always Tomorrow,one of non-fiction filmmaker Errol Morris's favorite films.
As with Tourneur, Sirk wasn't known for casting the biggest stars, or at least the most critically acclaimed--Tourneur's stellar noir Out of the Past with Kirk Douglas and Robert Mitchum, is a rather notable exception to the rule.
Not to take anything away from the handsome Rock Hudson (Magnificent Obsession) or glamorous Lana Turner (Imitation of Life), but Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman they were not. Then again, it's hard to imagine those Hitchcock stars fitting as neatly into the artificiality of a Sirk production.
On the other hand, although Turner's Lora is on screen more than anyone else in Imitation of Life, which was remade, like Magnificent Obsession, from John M. Stahl’s 1930s version, and gives one of her finest performances--it's the lesser-known Susan Kohner as the light-skinned daughter of Lora's Black maid (Juanita Moore) who steals the show. Consequently, she and Moore would garner the film's only Oscar nominations. (Surprisingly, Kohner would not capitalize on that early success. Her subsequent filmography may be sparse, but her writer/director sons, Paul and Chris Weitz of American Pie and About a Boy fame, seem fully prepared to make up for that).
Prolific and openly gay producer Ross Hunter was behind these films and others that Sirk, the closeted Hudson, and Turner made, whether together or separately, including 1959's Pillow Talk with Hudson and Doris Day and 1966's sub-Sirkian Madame X, which gave Turner one of her last juicy roles. Sirk and Hunter made a total of 10 films together, many shot by Sirk's "secret weapon," Russell Metty, including Imitation of Life, his last American film and biggest commercial success.
Meanwhile, Sirk's films with Hudson total an impressive eight. While he can't lay claim to having discovered the former Roy Harold Scherer Jr., many have credited Sirk for Hudson's matriculation from contract player to leading man.
Sirk was preparing to direct another film with Turner and Kohner when he was beset by health problems and the production was shelved. Instead of whiling away his days by the pool, he returned to Germany where his health improved, leading to speculation that the refined intellectual--who hasn't just been described as "Brechtian," but who actually worked with the progressive playwright early in his career--had literally grown sick of Hollywood. And he never looked back, though he would eventually exchange Germany for Switzerland, where he spent the last several years of his life.
Right: Doris Day, Rock Hudson, and Ross Hunter on the set of Michael Gordon's Pillow Talk
The late-1950s, though, was an odd time for Sirk to leave the States, just as his work was starting to find favor with the influential critics-turned-filmmakers of the French New Wave, like François Truffaut. Although they wouldn't burnish his reputation to the same degree as that of other commercially-successful directors, like Howard Hawks or Alfred Hitchcock, the seeds were planted for a full-blown critical reassessment.
As Truffaut wrote about the Technicolor extravaganza Written on the Wind, as featured in the 1994 essay collection The Films in My Life, "This is movie-making unashamed of what it is, with no complexes, no hesitations, simply good workmanship." Like American film critics David Thomson and Andrew Sarris, he was also fond of Sirk's 1940s potboilers with George Sanders, but feels he really blossomed in the 1950s--much like that lilac bush in 1944's Summer Storm--and was impressed by his bold use of color. "They are," he theorized, "the colors of the Twentieth Century, the colors of America, the colors of the luxury civilization, the industrial colors that remind us that we live in the age of plastics." And with that, he would also predict the affluent end of 1960s America as depicted in Mike Nichols' The Graduate.
In the pages of the same journal, Cahiers du Cinéma, Jean-Luc Godard would commend 1958's A Time to Love and a Time to Die,as excerpted in Barbara Klinger's Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk, for his "delirious mixture of medieval and modern, sentimentality and subtlety, tame compositions and frenzied CinemaScope."
In Jonathan Rosenbaum's 1995 essay collection Placing Movies, the Chicago Reader critic claims that Sirk's Erich Maria Remarque adaptation (left) would, in turn, become "an important source for Les Carabiniers (1963), particularly the shooting of a partisan woman who denounces her assassins (a Russian peasant in Sirk's film, a French girl quoting Mayakovsky in Godard's)."
The UK caught on in the 1970s and sang Sirk's praises in the pages of Screen, by way of a retrospective at the 1972 Edinburgh Film Festival, and in the publication in 1971 of Jon Halliday's interview collection Sirk on Sirk.
Around this time, more significantly, his American work made a deep impact on young German actor and filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. As Thomas Elsaesser elucidates in his essay, "A Cinema of Vicious Circles" from the Museum of Modern Art's 1997 Fassbinder compendium, "Fassbinder's discovery--documented in an essay he wrote in 1971 on six Sirk films he had just seen--proved momentous; it rehabilitated a then almost-forgotten director and renewed interest in a genre that was to gain considerable critical prominence in subsequent years: the Hollywood family melodrama."
Regarding Written on the Wind, his favorite of the six, Fassbinder (pictured with Sirk to the right) sums up his attraction: "The good, the 'normal,' the 'beautiful' are always utterly revolting; the evil, the weak, the dissolute arouse one's compassion." (Gosh, it almost sounds as if he's describing his own work.) About Dorothy Malone's Marylee, a "bad girl" with heart, a searing performance for which she would receive an Oscar, he wrote, "I love her as I rarely love anyone in the cinema."
Robert Stack, who found a new kind of fame in the 1990s as the ghoulishly stone-faced host of Unsolved Mysteries, would also receive a nomination.
About The Tarnished Angels (below left), an adaptation of William Faulkner's Pylon, which featured many of the same actors and was shot in B&W CinemaScope, he wrote, "Sirk looks at these corpses with such tenderness and radiance that we start to think that something must be at fault if these people are so screwed up and, nevertheless, so nice. The fault lies with fear and loneliness. I have rarely felt fear and loneliness so much as in this film."
Fassbinder's The Merchant of Four Seasons, released the same year as this essay, was his first to fall directly under Sirk's sway. He would even go on to work with him after his return to Germany to teach. Elsaesser goes so far as to describe Sirk as "the perfect elective father for the fatherless Fassbinder."
With 1973's Ali, Fear Eats The Soul, the acolyte would up the ante by taking on All That Heaven Allows. In the original, Jane Wyman's upper class widow falls for Rock Hudson's younger man, who happens to be a gardener and a bohemian.
Her college-aged kids and country club associates do all they can to put a kibosh on the relationship. What is her (individual) happiness worth compared to their (collective) reputation? Very little, apparently. In Ali, Fassbinder complicates the situation further by adding race to the mix, since the younger man is an Arab (Fassbinder's lover El Hedi ben Salem).
Fassbinder by way of Sirk cleared the way for Pedro Almodóvar, François Ozon, and Todd Haynes, who, unlike Hudson, have made little effort to hide their sexual orientation, but then, they grew up in very different times, let alone countries. In Elvis Mitchell's New York Times review of the Spanish filmmaker's latest, Talk To Her (Hable con Ella), he notes, "Mr. Almodóvar's purview started out as a lewd, slapstick version of the heightened melodrama of the 50's director Douglas Sirk: if Magnificent Obsession had starred a sexual Lucille Ball. But the director has moved past candy-colored Fassbinder with a sense of humor." (And Ball really did work with Sirk.)
Mitchell seems to feel that Almodóvar has only really come into his own by moving away from the frenetic Sirk-isms of his early work and, since I'm also more enamored of his more recent films, like 1995's The Flower of My Secret (La Flor de mi Secreto), 1997's Live Flesh (Carne Trémula), and 1999's Oscar-winning tearjerker All About My Mother (Todo Sobre mi Madre), I'm inclined to agree.
Really, though, it's more that Almodóvar has thrown off the freneticism, never a part of Sirk's oeuvre, while hanging onto the rest, like the focus on women--including trans women and those of "a certain age"--and a brilliant use of color. All About My Mother, after all, much like Imitation of Life, revolves around an actress and mother and the women in her orbit, though I believe Sirk's influence has been more of a boon for Ozon and Haynes.
Though the French filmmaker adapted his most recent feature, star-studded musical murder mystery 8 Women (8 Femmes, below), from an obscure 1960s stage play by Robert Thomas that feels like Agatha Christie with a side of kink, it sure looks like Sirk, right down to the deer in the snow at the beginning--an obvious tip of the chapeau to All That Heaven Allows, which Ozon claims to adore. As he explained to Paris Expatriate earlier this year, "I love his movies. They are very simple but very stylish. I love the color, the mise-en-scène. He makes a Greek tragedy out of a simple story."
It doesn't hurt that one of Ozon's previous films was a 1999 set-bound adaptation of Sirk protegé Fassbinder's play Water Drops on Burning Rocks (Gouttes d'eau sur Pierres Brûlantes) or that he had already made another, 1998's Sitcom, about a suburban family with some rather serious problems (dad's a giant rat!). Granted, the latter is more black comedy than melodrama, but the idea of a beautiful home that feels like a prison provides a link with Sirk.
The 1950s-set 8 Women, with its kitschy jewels-and-flowers opening with all the words in pink script, essentially reproduces the falling-diamond opening to Imitation of Life. The period outfits, including furs and leopard-print coats, and immaculately-coiffed divas--Catherine Deneuve, Fanny Ardant, and Isabelle Huppert in the Agnes Moorhead role--only serves to confirm the connection. The comparisons to Almodóvar don't hurt much either.
Then there's Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven. Sirk, whose adherents include gay filmmakers John Waters--All That Heaven Allows is his favorite film--and The Deep End's Scott McGehee--a big fan of Written on the Wind--may not have been gay himself, but as Haynes joked to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel this fall, "He was a German intellectual, so he was close, I guess." He adds that producer Hunter was "a flamboyant gay fellow in that period."
Though Haynes takes Fassbinder's lead in using All That Heaven Allows as a jumping-off point, his film is even less of a remake. As he explained to Eye Weekly prior to a sold-out screening at the Toronto International Film Festival--even Roger Ebert was shut out--it isn't "about the '50s in America. It's about filmmaking in the '50s in America and the language of Hollywood filmmaking at that time. Everything is filtered through a California-sound-stage mentality."
Haynes reunites, after Safe, with Julianne Moore for the story of Cathy, a well-off housewife living a life of "quiet desperation" in 1950s Connecticut--my hometown of Hartford, to be exact--until confronted by the sexual confusion of her husband Frank (Dennis Quaid) and a "forbidden" attraction to her sympathetic black gardener, Raymond (24's Dennis Haysbert).
Says Haynes, "Creating a '50s-era melodrama today and playing it straight, smack in the midst of this pumped-up, adrenaline-crazed era, might seem a perplexing impulse. Yet the strongest melodramas are those without apparent villains, where characters end up hurting each other unwittingly, just by pursuing their desires. To impose upon the seeming innocence of the 1950s themes as mutually volatile as race and sexuality is to reveal how volatile those subjects remain today and how much our current climate of complacent stability has in common with that bygone era."
And yet, by making such a film in 2002, he can tackle these subjects with a greater degree of, well, frankness--hence the name of Quaid's character--than Sirk or his 1950s contemporaries George Cukor or Vincente Minnelli ever could, including an on-screen kiss between Quaid and a male paramour. It goes without saying that that would have been unthinkable during the Production Code-era in which Sirk produced his most lasting works.
By reviving his legacy with such obvious affection, while commenting on it at the same time--an acknowledgment that many of Sirk's best films were commentaries at heart--Far From Heaven seems likely to stand as the ultimate homage to his work. If it encourages even a few curious viewers to seek out All That Heaven Allows, let alone other Sirk masterworks, Haynes will have done more than enough. That it's destined to rank among the year's best is the coconut-covered icing on the red velvet cake.
There will always be those who write off Sirk as glossy and insubstantial, while others revel in his work due to its perceived "subversiveness," as if everything must have a hidden meaning and nothing can be taken at face value, but as Sirk once said, "There is a very short distance between high art and trash." I believe his true worth lies in the way he transformed that trash, or "rather impossible" material, as he charitably put it, into art.
As Fassbinder exulted, "I've seen six films by Douglas Sirk. Among them were the most beautiful in the world." And in that beauty, he found truth. As Andrew Sarris predicted in The American Cinema, "Time, if nothing else, will vindicate Douglas Sirk as it has already vindicated Joseph von Sternberg. Formal excellence and visual wit are seldom as appreciated at first glance as are the topical sensations of the hour." Clearly, that time is now.
Kathleen Fennessy writes about music and film for Amazon.com, The All Music Guide, and Tablet. She considers Todd Haynes' psychodrama Safe one of the finest films of the 1990s and wouldn't mind if the filmmaker worked as often with Julianne Moore as Douglas Sirk did with Rock Hudson.
This review originally appeared in Bob Ham's Portland film screenings newsletter Daily Projections some time on or after September 14, 2016.
HOOLIGAN SPARROW
(Nanfu Wang, 2016, China/USA, 84 minutes)
At times, Nanfu Wang's vertiginous documentary, Hooligan Sparrow, feels like a spy thriller as she does her best to keep up with Chinese women's rights activist Ye Haiyun, code name Sparrow, her unstoppable subject.
There are clashes with police, government stooges, and other antagonists who aim to curtail Sparrow's activism and to force Wang to stop filming.
Instead of opinion editorials and other conventional forms of communication, Sparrow engages in high-risk activities in a country infamously adverse to free speech. Aside from videos, protests, and photo projects--some featuring art world star Ai Weiwei--she once offered her services to migrant laborers for free in order to publicize the plight of sex workers.
Wang, who lives in New York, returns to her native China to document Sparrow's work. She swiftly finds that national security agents are monitoring her actions, simply because she's walking around with a video camera, so she switches to concealed micro-cameras.
When they meet for the first time, Sparrow and her sister activists are organizing a protest against a Hainan Province principal who coerced six underage girls into prostitution.
Sparrow's attorney, Wang Yu, notes that China's protection laws for women and children are not strictly enforced. Furthermore, there's a loophole in the child prostitution law that allows government officials to skate free (the principal explains that the 11 to 14-year old girls were intended as "gifts").
Wang continues to document the outcome of their action. Though they garner messages of support across the social media sphere, Sparrow suffers beatings, arrest, detention, raids, and death threats. A group of men, presumably paid government thugs, even holds up a banner outside her apartment building that reads, "Sparrow, you whore, get out of the city."
The police, who seem to see her as a nuisance, do little to help, despite the fact that her 13-year-old daughter could also really use their protection.
The situation becomes even more fraught when Sparrow's apartment manager kicks her out, and no other building will take her, even as she travels to two other provinces to secure housing. At the same time, the police are questioning everyone who knows the filmmaker. Sparrow copes by depending on the kindness of family members, while Wang evades detection by avoiding hotels stays, train travel, and all other transactions that require identification.
If Wang never gets to the bottom of the reasons why Sparrow has decided to risk her life for a cause--other than the fact that Chinese women can only benefit from her advocacy--it doesn't weaken her film in any way.
Instead, she provides a you-are-there look at the risks one Chinese activist faces on a daily basis. Though the hazards can be disheartening, it's hard not to notice that she's rarely alone. From her daughter and boyfriend to her friends and associates, Sparrow is never completely isolated. Whether that will be enough in the years to come is an open question, but she's launched a movement that can only gather strength with time.
Images from Austin Film Society (Sparrow alone and with associates) and Doc NYC (Nanfu Wang). Hooligan Sparrow is available on DVD from Kino Lorber and on VOD from Amazon, Apple TV, and other digital platforms.
In honor of Park Chan-wook's Donald Westlake adaptation, No Other Choice, I've revived a piece I wrote for SIFF's Reel News about the festival's 2002 quartet of Emerging Masters. Park was joined by Julio Medem, Jacques Audiard, and Miike Takashi.
I was first introduced to the South Korean filmmaker's work when SIFF programmed Park's third feature, 2000's Joint Security Area, aka JSA, and I've been a fan ever since (SIFF also introduced me to Audiard's work when they programmed his second feature, A Self-Made Hero, in 1997).
I'm glad Park is still going strong, with eight features since 2002's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, first in a trilogy with Oldboy and Lady Vengeance, though I regret that both Reel News and Emerging Masters are things of the past. (This piece has been lightly revised from the original text.)
THE LATEST CROP: SIFF'S 2002 EMERGING MASTERS
Each year SIFF selects four directors from around the world who have, within the span of a decade or a handful of films, established themselves as potential cinematic masters. This series celebrates outstanding talents whose films reveal an original vision or point of view and a grasp of craft that sets them apart from the preponderance of filmmakers, clearly establishing them as artists of a high order.
These are directors with the ability to break into the mainstream of American filmgoers' consciousness in the near future.
Past honorees have included Tom Tykwer (Wintersleepers, Run Lola Run), François Ozon (Under the Sand, 8 Femmes), and Michael Winterbottom (Welcome to Sarajevo, 24 Hour Party People).
PARK CHAN-WOOK
First out of the gate is Park Chan-wook, dubbed a "giant in the Korean movie world" by The Korea Times. Park is the director and co-writer of powerful political thriller Joint Security Area (Gongdong Gyeongbi Guyeok, SIFF '01), which became the biggest box office hit in South Korea within weeks of its release. JSA (pictured above) was also a local Seattle favorite, where it won SIFF's New Director's Showcase Special Jury Award and was a Runner-up for the Golden Space Needle Audience Award for Best Film.
Although some critics have compared it to Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon--high praise indeed--the twisty, masterfully shot (in Super 35mm) motion picture reminded this viewer more of John Frankenheimer's iconic Richard Condon adaptation The Manchurian Candidate,but with a greater sense of humor.
Park was born in Seoul and graduated from Sogang University, a Jesuit institution, with a degree in philosophy. He also worked as a film critic and started directing in the early-1990s (The Moon is…the Sun's Dream, Trio), but JSA was the first of his feature films to gain worldwide exposure.
As The Korea Times notes, "His works have always been about socially neglected people, such as the three heroes in Saminjo (Trio): a struggling saxophone player playing gigs in cheap nightclubs, an uneducated tough guy, and a single mother."
Even before the release of JSA, Park was working on the screenplay for his latest release, riveting crime drama Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (above), which, like JSA, was shot in widescreen and, like Trio, concerns a group of "socially neglected people," and the ways in which their lives intersect.
Sympathy reunites Park with two favorite actors: Song Kang-ho (Shiri, SIFF ’00, The Foul King, SIFF '01) and Shin Ha-kyun (Save the Green Planet!). He has cited the hard-boiled detective fiction of American writers Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammet, and Ernest Hemingway for its inspiration.
JULIO MEDEM
Like Park, Spain's Julio Medem didn't start out as a filmmaker--not formally, at any rate--but as a medical student at Basque Country University. While there, however, he wrote about film for a San Sebastian newspaper.
Medem bridged the gap--some would say gulf--between film criticism and filmmaking by teaching himself cinematography using his father's Super 8 camera and shooting a series of inventive short films in the 1980s before releasing his full-length debut, Vacas (Cows, SIFF '92), in 1991. He was off to an auspicious start. The Basque-set historical fantasia won an award for Best New Director at the 1993 Goyas (the Spanish Academy Awards).
From his short films to his most recent feature (left), Medem has continued to reveal a boundless fascination with fate, romance, and the fine line dividing reality from illusion.
He has become known and renowned for the sensuality, lyricism, and sophistication of his imagery, inspiring comparisons to such stylistic brothers-in-arms as Gabriel Garcia Marquez (100 Years of Solitude), Carlos Saura (Carmen), Raoul Ruíz (Time Regained), Luis Buñuel (That Obscure Object of Desire), and David Lynch (Mulholland Drive) with a little Emir Kusturica (Underground) thrown into the mix. Empire has described him as a director of "daring intelligence, stylish invention, and visual dynamism."
As he explained to The New York Times' Leslie Camhi in 1999, his approach towards each film is largely visual and intuitive: ''When I'm working, if I come up with something that has a very clear and concrete meaning, I almost always put it aside.'' Medem has long been a favorite of SIFF audiences, who have been able to enjoy every one of his films thus far--although The Red Squirrel (La Ardilla Roja, SIFF '94), which was supposed to be part of 1993's slate, was, unfortunately, delayed until the following year--many would probably agree, however, that it was worth the wait.
His other films include Tierra (Earth, SIFF '97), nominated for the prestigious Palme d'Or at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, The Lovers of the Arctic Circle (Los Amantes del Circulo Polar, SIFF '99), nominated for a Golden Lion at the 1998 Venice Film Festival and Best Screenplay at the 1999 Goyas, and, his most recent, Sex and Lucia (Lucía y el Sexo), nominated for Best Screenplay and Director at the 2002 Goyas.
JACQUES AUDIARD
France's Jacques Audiard was, essentially, born into the world of film, since his father is screenwriter Michel Audiard (The Night Affair), a favorite dialogue writer of French great Jean Gabin. Michel passed away in 1985.
His son got his start as an editor, playwright, and screenwriter before turning to directing with 1994's acclaimed See How They Fall (Regarde les Hommes Tomber), winner of the Best New Director Award at the 1995 Césars (the French Academy Awards). The intense noir received precious little exposure in the US despite the participation of Jean-Louis Trintignant (The Conformist) and actor/director Mathieu Kassovitz (Amélie).
Like Audiard, Kassovitz is a second-generation cineaste--his father is writer/director Peter Kassovitz.
It was, in fact, the uncanny resemblance between Trintignant and the elder Kassovitz that led Audiard to again cast the veteran actor in his darkly comic 1996 follow-up, A Self-Made Hero (Un Heros Très Discret, SIFF '97).
Kassovitz, who made 1995's La Haine, his own well received directorial debut, had already been cast as Resistance "hero" Albert Dehousse; Trintignant was added as the same character in later years. A Self-Made Hero went on to win the Best Screenplay Award at the Cannes Film Festival.
With his latest film, Read My Lips (Sur Mes Lèvres), Audiard takes a more direct, less stylized approach than that of A Self-Made Hero. The kinetic psychological thriller is marked by impressive performances from Vincent Cassel (Kassovitz's La Haine and The Crimson Rivers, SIFF '01) and Emmanuelle Devos (La Sentinelle, SIFF '93) and concerns the unconventional--and potentially deadly--relationship that develops between an insecure, hearing-impaired secretary and an aggressive, recently-paroled ex-con. It resulted in another success for Audiard, winning awards at the 2002 Césars for Best Writing, Best Editing, and Best Actress (Devos). Audiard was also nominated for Best Director and Cassel for Best Actor.
All the while, Audiard has continued to write for other directors, including Tonie Marshall's Venus Beauty Institute (Vénus Beauté, SIFF '00), another multiple-César winner, and Read My Lips looks set to increase Audiard's steadily growing and richly deserved international reputation.
MIIKE TAKASHI
Last, but certainly not least, is Japan's Miike Takashi, who got his start by assisting legendary director Shohei Imamura (The Eel) in the 1980s.
Since then, the tireless Miike has directed countless made-for-video and television productions, honing his considerable chops all the way. Starting in the mid-1990s, he has increasingly been at the helm of theatrical features, such as The City of Lost Souls (Hyôryuu-gai), Dead or Alive (Hanzaisha)--which features what must surely be one of the most infamous opening sequences of all time--and Ichi the Killer (Koroshiya 1), among others.
The word "prolific" often accompanies mention of his name, along with other such colorful words and phrases as "graphic," "hallucinatory," "jaw-dropping," and my personal favorite: "flamboyantly weird," but don't be fooled by that first word. As Sight & Sound's Tony Rayns, an early champion, has noted, Miike is prolific in the way that Rainer Werner Fassbinder was prolific, if closer in spirit to Joseph H. Lewis. "Almost all of [his films] are interesting and some of them phenomenal," Rayns raved.
The best way to describe Miike, however, is probably the simplest: anything goes. There's literally nothing this man won't try.
As such, he's been compared to everyone from Seijun Suzuki (Tokyo Drifter) and Takeshi Kitano (Hana-bi) to Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction) and even the "Godfather of Gore," Herschell Gordon Lewis (Blood Feast).
His themes include those associated with Japanese actioners from Suzuki's 1960s cult classics to today--primarily the yakuza and the drug trade--but a surprising number of his films are more than just hyped-up action fare, since he also takes the time to grapple with discrimination against foreigners, both non-Asians and non-Japanese Asians, and other more sober-minded topics.
As for versatile, well, The Happiness of the Katakuris (Katakuri-ke no Kôfuku), just happens to be a family-oriented musical, though one unlikely to be mistaken for The Sound of Music anytime soon, despite the mountain-setting similarity. Zombies, stop-motion animation--Happiness has it all.
To date, Miike's most significant cinematic achievement must surely be the artful, if extremely disturbing Audition (Odishon, SIFF ’00), which won the FIPRESCI Award at the 1999 Rotterdam Film Festival "for its narrative freedom, technical mastery of genre and the inventivity [sic] of an important new and prolific director." (That word again!) It's the film that put Miike over the top, as it were, with raves in The New York Times and other major publications. He couldn't have been more pleased. As he exclaimed to BBC Online's David Wood in 2001, "This [success] is something I am very excited by. I like to work hard and to work fast, refining my skills, but to have a film receive such a good response worldwide goes beyond my wildest dreams."
And, with that, here's to more powerful thrillers, wild dreams, weird nightmares, and other delights from this year's crop of Emerging Masters at SIFF: Park Chan-wook, Julio Medem, Jacques Audiard, and Miike Takashi.
Kathleen Fennessy writes about music and film for Amazon.com, All Music Guide (www.allmusic.com), and The Stranger. She has also contributed to Microsoft Cinemania, Film.com, and The Anchorage Times, among other websites and publications. She has been a SIFF volunteer since 1994.
No Other Choice plays IMAX theaters for one-night only on Dec 8 and returns for a regular run in Jan. Images from the IMDb (Park Chan-wook with Lee Byung-hun, Shin Ha-kyun, Song Kang-ho, and Lee Yeong-ae on the set of Joint Security Area, Julio Medem and Paz Vega on the set of Sex and Lucía, and Miike Takashi in Hostel), Rotten Tomatoes (Park and Song on the set of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), DVD Talk (Cows), Variety (Jacques Audiard / Courtesy of Shannon Besson), Metacritic (Mathieu Kassovitz in A Self-Made Hero), and Screen Slate (Happiness of the Katakuris).
Coverage of the Seattle International Film Festival and year-round art house programming in the Pacific Northwest.
Kathy Fennessy is President of the Seattle Film Critics Society, a Northwest Film Forum board member, and a Tomatometer-approved critic. She writes or has written for Amazon, Minneapolis's City Pages, Resonance, Rock and Roll Globe, Seattle Sound, and The Stranger.
