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Safe and secure in my setting, my mindset—on the other hand—has been volatile, a wild card, and I throw that out there to qualify how grief can affect reception and perspective on a film. Stories of children in peril, death watch sequences, testimonials of social injustice, have always been problematic for me to handle emotionally, but even more so this go-round. Exhaustion and rogue waves of overwhelming sorrow have weakened my patience for long takes, slapstick gags, and indie narratives that seem slight, even unnecessary. That being said, I am convinced more than ever that films are never seen in a vacuum; that our subjectivities—however affected by the crises in our lives—influence how we perceive and interpret the frenzy on the wall, which is in essence the symbiotic thrill of the cinephilic experience. That's not meant to be an apology for how I have reacted to the films I've seen in my first week at the festival, but merely a statement of cinematic fact. Offered with a note of gratitude at how cinema has helped me steer—yet again—through a tumultuous period of my life. I dedicate this year's coverage to my dear sister Barbara.
Unable to negotiate opening night, my opening pitch for SFIFF was Pittsburgh Pirate Dock Ellis's infamous 1970 no-hitter on LSD, the obvious hook to Jeff Radice's No No: A Dockumentary (2014) [official site] which Radice expands upon to assemble a fascinating, rich documentary about the baseball player nicknamed "the Muhammad Ali of the ballpark." St. Augustine in all his late life contrition could have played shortstop to this tale of a man who was proudly black, loudly opinionated, addicted to drugs and alcohol, but who—in his later years—discovered the value of remorse and turned his life around to counsel other athletes battling demons with which he was all too familiar. I'm not a sports enthusiast by nature, but am certainly enthused over Radice's sports doc, which reaches past the diamond to reveal the social pressures of a time and place on a beloved American sport and its players. An added high-five to the film's funky psychedelic score by Adam Horovitz (of the Beastie Boys). Further thanks to Alex Hecht for forwarding the url to No Mas and artist James Blagden's animated rendition of Dock Ellis' legendary LSD no-hitter.
Speaking of high fives, Mike Jacobs' captivating 10-minute short The High Five (2014) preceded No No: A Dockumentary. They're perfect teammates. On October 2, 1977, Dusty Baker hit his 30th homerun of the season, making history as the 4th player on the Dodgers to hit 30 or more home runs. As Baker rounded the bases, an excited rookie named Glenn Burke met him at home plate, raised his arm high in the air and slapped Baker five. It was the first high five recorded in the history of sports. A year later, Burke was forced out of baseball amid rumors of his sexual orientation. The film takes audiences back to the spontaneous moment between the two men and tells the story of how the celebratory gesture spread throughout the sports world at the same time Burke was being forced from the game he loved. Again, though not necessarily a sports enthusiast, I am highly respectful of this reclaimed gem of gay history. It sparkles.
Contemporizing Jonestown's mass suicide through the use of digital cinematography and found footage tropes, West converts the memory of Jonestown into a piece familiar to his genre fanbase, eschewing his previous forays into supernatural horror to focus on the (natural?) horror of religious fanaticism and—perhaps even more horrific—the voyeuristic witnessing of same. Effective enough, The Sacrament fails however to really bring anything new to the table except its prurience, although I'm pleased—after years of monitoring the work of Joe Swanberg, A.J. Bowden and Kentucker Audley—to witness the unfolding maturation of their performances. They continue to come into their own within acting ensembles. Swanberg is a rooted actor with a gift for the comic, Bowden manifests grounded, serious virilities, and Audley exhibits a sensual befuddlement that's attractive. As "Father", Gene Jones reigns over them all channeling Jim Jones to a chilling "t", right down to the characteristic shades.
Unfortunately, not every viewing experience at a festival can be a favorable one, no less for grief or a mild concussion. Within that camp I would have to include Serge Bozon's Tip Top (2013), misleadingly billed in SFIFF's program as a "screwball comedy". Along with brisk pacing, I expect screwball comedies to be characterized by warmth and wit, neither of which Tip Top possesses, even as it sordidly rushes along with its sadomasochistic obsessions. All in all, I found the film to be a mean-spirited humiliation offered up for laughs. To each their own laughter.
Neither was I impressed with the moribund pacing and flat visuals of When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism by Romanian auteur Corneliu Porumboiu who seems intent on taking all magic out of moviemaking, making even the casting couch a plebian exercise. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood for endoscopy as entertainment? I can go to my doctor for that? To each their own endoscopy?
Ming-Liang is threatening to give up filmmaking because audiences just aren't "patient" enough for his cinema. He's disgruntled with audiences that want narratives to clip along at a steady pace or, as I've suggested, narratives that filet reality to appease an appetite for catharsis. I find Tsai Ming-Liang's complaints partly disingenuous, especially since he is an arthouse darling who does everything he possibly can to test the patience of his audiences. It strikes me that—when audiences become impatient with his films—he's achieved his creative goal, so why the complaint? To crib from Laura Nyro, "I've got a lot of patience, baby, but that's a lot of patience to lose." And lost it, I'm sorry to say, I have. Ming-Liang's latest snoozefest displays his talents for composition and atmosphere, yes, but gone are the humor and whimsy of his earlier films, and an appreciation for their structural beauty is harder won. But I appear to be a loud minority here at SFIFF when it concerns Stray Dogs. Others have accepted the film on its own merits and countered that it "works" for them. Eminently more patient than I am, and probably more to be trusted in articulating these practices, Brian Darr recently synopsized at Hell on Frisco Bay: "Tsai's films have long developed recurrent themes of home and rootlessness, but with Stray Dogs he uses these to create his rawest, bitterest attack on Taiwan's inequalities thus far. His first digital feature employs surveillance-style footage of his actor fetiche Lee Kang-sheng and two youngsters tramping through and setting camp in locations 'stolen' whether by crew or characters. It culminates in a fourteen-minute take that's simultaneously unforgiving and about forgiveness."
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