The Golden Space Needle Award winners were announced at a ceremony on Sunday. More than 60,000 ballots were cast by SIFF audiences to determine the winner in six categories: Best Film, Best Documentary, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Short Film. So, without further ado… SIFF 2009 Golden Space Needle Audience Awards Best …
One of the centerpieces of the festival was the Evening with Francis Ford Coppola, which I hemmed and hawed about, then finally bought a ticket a day or two before the event. Depending on how chatty the subject is, and more importantly, if the subject has anything interesting to say (no matter how famous or …
As the fest goes on, I sometimes find it hard to remember what movies I saw on a certain day. You know that you are getting fest fatigue when you can’t remember the films that you saw earlier in the same day. This is especially true when you get that rare (for me) opportunity to …
Finally! Through some finagling, I’ve gotten to take a couple days of hooky from the “real” job so that I can instead sit inside a theater on a sunny day and see three movies in a row, all before I would even have left my desk on a normal day! Hoorah for being able to …
SIFF 2009: Piles of garbage, piles of snow, and one scary scary cliff Read More »
Ever since seeing Léa Pool’s lovely 1999 coming of age film Emporte-moi (Set Me Free), I’ve looked forward to her films. Not that she has gotten close to that lovely, sublime film since, but I keep hoping. Her latest returns to that familiar theme: a seemingly happy suburban family unravels over one fateful summer in …
SIFF 2009: Women who are moms, women who are soldiers Read More »
Are you ever just tired at the end of the work week? You know, like really really tired? Cancel your social plans tired? “Please, you guys should go out anyway without me…” tired? I knew I had a big-ass frosty microbrew in my fridge that had been beckoning for a couple weeks. One of those …
SIFF 2009: Auto-erotic asphyxiation (not me!) and takin’ a couch day Read More »
Our little heatwave wrapped up last night, and it happened within the two hour span of time in which I was sitting in the theater! As I walked to the Harvard Exit after work, it was still a sweltering 90-ish degrees. I should have known things were in the air when I saw a giggling …
People seem to have zombies on the mind this week. Perhaps it is because of the heat… or maybe because mid-festival fatigue is actually starting to set in. But here are my observations of the day regarding this curious theme: A) The most buzzed about movie of the week (at least in these ears) has …
So I’m in the midst of taking a couple days off of SIFF, but in the meantime, I’ve got some scoops. If you love seeing celebs at screenings (admit it: there’s a celebrity whore in all of us), here are some peeps in town this week that you may have heard of (and their respective …
SIFF 2009: A little break, and some Short Film Awards! Read More »
Many moons ago at the now defunct Women in Cinema film festival (also put on by SIFF), I saw this weird amazing movie from Argentina called La Ciénaga. I have never met anyone since who had even heard of the film, so I was thrilled when SIFF decided to honor its director Lucrecia Martel as …