Film
Alive Inside, the winner for Best Documentary at the Festival, had the audience gasping and in tears.
What’s not to adore about this super-friendly, hedonistic, 24-hour street party, what summer resident John Waters celebrates as “a gay fishing village,” and what I might label, oxymoronically, a “queer New Orleans.”
The beauty of this documentary is that even as it makes you laugh, the story’s essential sadness remains. Though it is very fast-paced, the film makes you stop and think — it’s as unsettling as it is charming.
By the end of the documentary, you’re in no doubt that Whitey Bulger was beneath dignity. Though not in his own eyes. There’s even vanity left in a crook who trims his white beard so scrupulously.
Ida proffers a cinematic experience that is austere and mesmerizing.
Unlike Sundance, where “independent” has been stretched to allow for expensive non-studio movies with slumming Hollywood stars, the films we watched at Seattle were mostly low budget.
The clips from both experimental and commercial cinema play well against the interviews from a group directors who are known for pushing boundaries.
Director Alejandro Jodorowsky is a fascinating artist, but this rehash of his own Dadaesque style is lurid, stale, and simplistic.
Artist/scholar Elizabeth Lennard has managed to evoke the breadth of Edith Wharton’s life and work in a relatively short and vivid film.
Arts Commentary: The “Maleficent” Syndrome — Making the Villain the Hero
Perhaps because real life is so painful, so tragic, we cannot bear to see evil in full flight. Evil must be relative, it must fly on wings of rationale, on a broomstick of retribution.
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