I'm beginning to think this may be summertime

We had quite a busy weekend here. The heat had been building through the latter part of the week, culminating in temperatures in the low nineties on Saturday and Sunday. To escape the heat on Saturday, we got a Zipcar and drove out into the Cascades for a day hike on the Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie River, which was only about an hour and a half away. Fortunately, the trail was shaded most of the time, but it was still hot and humid, even under the trees!

There was a nice pedestrian bridge over the river, with a nice pedestrian on it:

We were surprised at how much water there was in the river at the end of June, but then, we're not in California anymore.

In the next photo, those aren't waterfalls; they're the remains of the snowpack. It was a little bizarre to be looking up at nearby snow on such a hot day.

And here's a video showing the cool, flowing water (with a surprise at the end).

We didn't stay out there late; we had to get back to the city for dinner with Peter Tannen and his partner David, who were up from San Francisco on a two-week trip around Washington State. We met in Lower Queen Anne at Racha Thai, which is so far my favorite Thai restaurant in Seattle. Peter and David have friends, personal history, and family here in Washington, so they have plenty of places to go and people to see while they're here. We were glad we got to spend some time with them.

Sunday was even hotter than Saturday! I grumbled and wilted; I didn't move here for this, I was thinking. We ended up checking out the Ballard Locks and Fish Ladder (the official name is the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks). We spent some time watching the salmon climb the ladder in the welcoming coolness and darkness of the underground viewing area; then we watched as the large lock filled up with dozens of small-to-medium-sized boats waiting to enter the Lake Washington Ship Canal. I had never seen locks in operation, so I was glad I had the chance to see how they work. As we walked up to the platform beside the locks, we heard a brass band playing, and I thought it was a recording played by the lock operators to create a festive atmosphere for the boaters. It certainly seemed that way on that Sunday of hot, brilliant sunshine. But it turned out that there was a band concert going on in the park next to the locks.

It's supposed to cool off slightly today, and temperatures are expected to return to a more tolerable mid-seventies later in the week. Thank goodness; I don't have the wardrobe for this weather.

You don't want to know what the penguins did to me

A corps of young Greenpeace workers has been saturation-canvassing downtown Seattle this week. At lunchtime and after work they're on every corner. They always manage to hit me when I'm trying to move with a purpose — when I need to catch a bus home, or when I'm on my way to meet David for lunch. They're well-trained in clever and varied approaches. One young man's opening line as I was trying to hurry past yesterday was, "Do you like polar bears?"

What I said over my shoulder as I raced on down the street was, "I love them, but I'm on my way to meet someone right now, sorry." Later I came up with a better response; I should have stopped, given him a shocked look, and choked out, "A polar bear...ate my brother!"

So many missed opportunities...

Summer Solstice

Last Saturday we went to the 20th Annual Solstice Parade and Fremont Fair. I remember from my years of living in Minneapolis in the early ‘90s that when one lives at such a northern latitude, the summer solstice is a big deal. People really want to get out and celebrate the longest day of the year. They tend to go a little crazy, in fact, as some of the photos and videos you'll see later in this post will demonstrate.

We had been told that the Solstice Parade was a must-see Seattle event, so a little before noon, we got on our bikes and rode the three miles north across the channel to Fremont, the artsy neighborhood that calls itself “The Center of the Universe,” and took up a spot along the parade route.

We were not disappointed. The Solstice Parade is a wacky, funky, grassroots community parade that has four rules for all participants:

* No printed words or recognizable logos.
* No live animals (except guide animals).
* No motorized vehicles (except necessary wheelchairs).
* No (real) weapons.

Those rules right there made me want to go. Mainly the first one — most parades you see these days are just vehicles for political campaigning and commercial exposure, which makes them repetitive and boring, in my opinion. Take away the printed words and the recognizable logos, and voilà — you have an ad-free event. (When was the last time you attended an ad-free public event?)

As is traditional, the parade was led (or preceded) by dozens and dozens of bicyclists, many of whom were in costume, and many more of whom were wearing only body paint and some strategically deployed accessories. Luckily for them, it was a warm day. The cyclists rode their bikes back and forth numerous times from the head of the parade to the end of the route, so we got to see our favorites several times. There was the pair of women, one painted like a zebra, the other like a leopard; the woman painted green with an allover pattern of big red lips; the guy painted bright red and wearing a short vinyl gladiator skirt; the two women with extremely intricate and carefully painted paisley patterns in coordinating shades of blue and green; the man on an orange bike who was expertly tiger-striped. And too many more to mention.

Since pictures are really better than words in this instance, here are a few shots from our cameras.

(All of the still photos except the orange praying mantis and the blue Ganesha are mine; all the videos are David's.)

After the parade, we locked up our bikes and wandered around the fair a bit, but it was too crowded (and hot & muggy, believe it or not), for us, so after we had our veggie gyros and beer, we headed home. I would definitely go to that parade again. Maybe even be in it! (But only if I can be fully clothed.)

SIFF Part 9: "Bottle Shock" and closing night gala, plus some final thoughts

A couple of hours after seeing “Fairytale of Kathmandu,” we went down to the Cinerama in Belltown for the 6:30 screening of “Bottle Shock,” directed by Randall Miller and starring Bill Pullman, Freddy Rodriguez, and Alan Rickman. (Miller, Pullman, and Rodriguez attended the screening.) “Bottle Shock” is the story of the events leading up to the 1976 Paris Tastings, in which wines from Napa Valley beat the competing French wines in both the white and red wine categories in a blind tasting. “Bottle Shock” tells the white wine side of the story, with Chateau Montelena’s Bill Barrett (Pullman) and his son Bo (Chris Pine) overcoming internal and external obstacles to get their winning Chardonnay to the tasting. Rickman plays Englishman Stephen Spurrier, owner of a little-patronized Paris wine shop, who organizes the tasting as a means of publicizing his shop. Rodriguez plays Gustavo Brambilla, son of a migrant worker and a natural winemaking genius, who works at Chateau Montelena until he strikes out on his own.

“Bottle Shock” isn’t a bad movie, but I’m not really sure how to judge it because it’s way too mainstream for my tastes. On the plus side, how could one not love the story of the struggling California winemaker who beats the French at their ancestral game? And the movie sure looks good; the wine country is a cinematographer’s best friend. (Of course, I had sentimental reasons for enjoying the swooping helicopter shots of the toast-colored hills of California and the rows of trellised green vines running over them.)

The performances are good overall. Pullman is excellent, showing pain and vulnerability and anger and some intriguing undertones of menace in the character of Bill Barrett. Rickman does his world-weary Englishman act, which he does so well that it’s still fun to see him do it even if you’ve seen him do it before. Pine and Rodriguez provide likeable support, which is pretty much all they’re asked to do.

However, there isn’t enough originality here, or ambiguity, or tension, or irony, to really capture my interest. The dialogue too often runs to clunky exposition. And then there’s the gratuitous scene of the hot young blonde intern (Rachael Taylor) hosing out the grape press while the workers watch, drooling (complete with cheesy rock soundtrack and music-video visual style). Like I said, too mainstream for me.

After the screening, we went to the SIFF Closing Night Gala at the Pan Pacific Hotel (which is conveniently located about four blocks from our apartment). We ended up sharing a table and chatting about film with a young couple named Bridget and Brian, who were Platinum Pass holders and who had seen more than thirty of the films. Sparkling wine was passed, tasty eggplant sandwiches were served, mellow was the buzz, and when we’d had enough, we strolled easily home.

This is only the second non-festival day for us (there were some more screenings on Sunday, but we didn’t go to any of them). I’m expecting to get hit with a post-festival letdown around Thursday when I realize that there are no more movies on my calendar. But it is nice to be done with it, too. This is the first film festival I’ve ever really thrown myself into; we went to twelve films all told, over sixteen days, and while that’s nothing for some truly dedicated festival rats, it was a lot for me. It was almost like being out of town. Laundry went undone, groceries went unbought, meals out outnumbered meals in. (Bridget told me that she and Brian wound up skipping some screenings they had intended to attend because, as she put it to him, “I just want to eat a real dinner tonight. Like, with a fork.”) And keeping up with this blog has been tougher than I expected it would be, although posting reviews has been a great way to clarify for myself what I think about the films I’ve seen.

Wish us luck with our re-entry into the ordinary world. I may take a little break from blogging as well as film...but you never know; I may not be able to stay away!

SIFF Part 8: "Fairytale of Kathmandu"

So, as I mentioned in my "Part 6" post, we went to see "Fairytale of Kathmandu" at 11:00 at Pacific Place Cinema on Saturday. It's a documentary about Irish poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh (pronunced "KA-hal O'SHARkey), a well-regarded Irish-language poet also respected for his courage in coming out as a gay man and continuing to live in rural Ireland. Filmmaker Neasa Ní Chianáin (didn't catch the pronunciation of her name) had long admired Cathal's poetry and his philanthropic activities in Nepal, so she set out to make a documentary about him and was invited by Cathal to accompany him on one of his trips to Kathmandu.

But during the course of the trip, Neasa eventually has to face the fact that Cathal's "philanthropy" actually consists of plying very young men (as young as sixteen, the age of consent in Nepal) with cash "for their studies" and gifts in exchange for sex. While his activities are not actually illegal, they are clearly exploitative and damaging to the young men involved.

A key part of the film is Neasa's own journey from being an uncritical admirer, to a willfully oblivious half-observer, to a witness of conscience. She ends up interviewing some of the young men and then confronts Cathal on camera about the harm he has caused. He, of course, denies that he has done anything wrong and insists that he has helped these Nepalese boys.

Neasa Ní Chianáin was at the screening, and the Q&A session afterwards was riveting. When she realized that she wasn't going to be able to make the feel-good film she originally set out to make, she had to go back and explain that to her three funders, who were very nervous about the film's new direction but eventually went ahead with it. Even before the film came out, it generated tremendous controversy in Ireland, with the Irish-language and gay communities rallying to Cathal Ó Searcaigh's defense, saying the film misrepresented him, and others expressing outrage at the poet's activities and demanding that his poetry be pulled from schools. I was very impressed with Neasa Ní Chianáin's courage in bringing this film to the public and telling the story that needed to be told.

This film has everything you want in a documentary: It has a strong subject, it challenges your assumptions, it raises difficult questions, it makes you feel uncomfortable. (I'm beginning to formulate an idea about documentaries: If it makes you uncomfortable, it's a documentary; if it doesn't, it's publicity.)

SIFF Part 7: "Alexander Nevsky"

Last night after work we went to Benaroya Hall downtown for a 7:00 screening of Sergei Eisenstein's "Alexander Nevsky," with the original score by Sergei Prokofiev performed live by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and Chorale, under the direction of guest conductor Xian Zhang. "Alexander Nevsky" was made in 1938 and was the product of a close collaboration between the director and the composer.

I hadn't really watched an entire Eisenstein film before, and it was especially interesting in light of the screening of "In the Land of the Headhunters" I had seen three nights earlier. While "Headhunters" seemed primitive, "Alexander Nevsky," made just fourteen years later, seemed completely modern as a film. Although the acting style is mannered in a way that seems old-fashioned today, which garnered some unintended laughs from the audience on Friday night, the way the film is shot and edited tells the story in much the same way filmmakers tell stories today. I was especially struck by how skilled Eisenstein is in creating powerful, memorable images, and, ironically, his use of color. Being a black-and-white film, the only colors on the screen in "Alexander Nevsky" are black, white, and an infinite number of shades of gray, but Eisenstein uses those shades, as well as light, to brilliant effect.

The Prokofiev score is delightful. (I think it's hard not to like Prokofiev's music; when I was a kid listening to classical music — before I was old enough to discover rock and radio — I used to love listening to Prokofiev.) And it was a great experience to see this film projected on a screen suspended over the live orchestra and chorale. It was especially exciting to see the members of the chorale, who were seated behind the orchestra when they weren't singing, stand up in unison a couple of measures before their cue, because it always happened at some point in the film when you knew something significant was about to happen, and to have the singers rise to their feet as one just added to the anticipatory rush.

Another one of David's excellent picks! I told him he was promoted to Film Program Director for the household.

SIFF Part 6: "Garrison Keillor"

On Thursday night we attended the 7:00 world premiere screening of "Garrison Keillor: The Man on the Radio in the Red Shoes" at the Egyptian Theater. (It's listed in the SIFF program as "The Man on the Radio in the Red Tennis Shoes," but at the screening, director Peter Rosen and screenwriter Sara Lukinson said that when they showed Keillor the title, he thought it was great but asked them to get rid of the word "tennis." I guess the shoes he wears are a different kind of athletic shoe. Writers are picky that way about details.)

The film was made for the PBS "American Masters" series, and so was essentially a love letter to Keillor and "A Prairie Home Companion." What was interesting (if sometimes frustrating) is that the film made no attempt to delve into Keillor's life story, his childhood, etc. The focus was all on his work with "A Prairie Home Companion," and all we know about the man is what he tells us in his stories, which may be true, exaggerated for comic effect, or completely made up. The director explained after the film that this is really a part of who Keillor is, and they intentionally tried to preserve this sense of enigma about him. "We didn't want to do the Ken Burns thing, and zoom and pan around on family photos," Rosen said. Given the aims of the filmmakers and the nature of the subject matter, it was probably a good approach. I guess we'll have to wait until later for the exposé and the critical study.

Keillor did say something I liked. I'll have to paraphrase, but it went something like this: "When you tell lies about a place like Lake Wobegon, you become obsessed with the accuracy of your lies. You think that if you can just get your lies all correct, down to the very last detail, then one day you will be picked up, and transported, and set down in this wonderful place that you've told all these lies about." I think that tells us a lot about what he's up to in "A Prairie Home Companion."

My post on last night's screening of "Alexander Nevsky" will have to wait; right now we have to run to the Pacific Place Cinema for the 11:00 screening of "Fairytale of Kathmandu."

SIFF Part 5: “In the Land of the Headhunters”

On Tuesday night we went to the 7:00 screening of “In the Land of the Headhunters” at the Moore Theatre downtown. The Moore is the oldest remaining theater in Seattle and is currently celebrating its centennial year. To add to the historical echoes of this event, “In the Land of the Headhunters” had its world premiere at the Moore Theatre back in 1914.

The film was made by Edward S. Curtis, an American photographer famous for his photographs of Native Americans from tribes all over North America. (I saw an exhibit of his photographs in February in San Diego at the Museum of Man.) “Headhunters” is a silent film set in the Pacific Northwest that tells a story of love and war among the original people of the region. We knew we weren’t seeing the film in its original form; much had been lost to time and decay, and the print we watched had been reconstructed from a decomposing original. There were whole scenes that had to be replaced by stills from the surviving frames and by photographs taken on the set.

The interesting thing for me was the experience of being a modern viewer and watching this early film. In the years since “Headhunters” was made, the visual grammar of film has grown so sophisticated that it took me a while to figure out how to watch it. There were no close-ups and very few cuts. Camera angle hardly ever varied and the camera itself never moved during a scene. I was a static observer, as if I were watching something happen across the street, with very little of the usual cinematic guidance to direct my attention and help me understand what was going on. It was fascinating as an artifact of both film history and native culture. I also liked the music; the original score was performed by a live orchestra, and blended western music with some native-sounding elements in a way that effectively supported the film.

The real treat of the evening, though, were the performances of tribal dances by members of a First Nations band from British Columbia, the Kwakwaka’wakw (and don’t even think about asking me how to pronounce that), several of whom were descendants of people who had taken part in making “Headhunters.” After the film was shown, a group of around twenty dancers, singers, and drummers performed half a dozen traditional dances in full costume, including some enormous wooden bird masks very similar to those seen in the film. I was struck by how varied the dances, songs, and rhythms were. The tribal chief was present, and he welcomed the audience to the land of their ancestors. The leader of the performing group introduced each dance with a short explanation of its significance. I think a number of the audience members were also members of various Northwest tribes, which contributed to the feeling of importance and authenticity of the evening.

A great evening, and I have to congratulate David here for picking this one out of the SIFF schedule.

SIFF Part 4: “Saving Luna” and “Walt & El Grupo”

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming. On Sunday we saw the 1:30 screening of “Saving Luna,” a Canadian documentary about a young orca who somehow became separated from his pod and mysteriously ended up in the remote waters of Nootka Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island, B.C.

I wanted to see this film, but I also kind of didn’t, because I knew I would end up crying through pretty much the whole thing. (“Do we need to bring a box of Kleenex to the screening?” David asked me. “And a mop,” I replied.) It’s a very sad story: An abandoned baby from an intensely social species, Luna had plenty of fish to eat in the Sound, but his craving for companionship was so great that he began seeking interaction with boats and people. This prompted an intense debate among the public, policymakers, and the local First Nations tribe, over whether an attempt should be made to reunite him with his pod, whether he should be left alone and prevented from interacting with humans, or whether he should be provided with structured human interaction through a program of stewardship. Many of the local residents became deeply attached to Luna and the strong bond this wild animal seemed to have with the human community; others found him a dangerous nuisance. After a couple of years of controversy, during which Luna grew bigger and began to cause damage to some boats in his attempts to play and have some human interaction, he ran afoul of a tugboat’s propeller one night and was killed.

There’s a lot more to this story than I’ve included here; for a very good summary, see this article from the Seattle Times. Although it did seem a bit heavy-handed and manipulative at times, “Saving Luna” was well worth seeing. The filmmakers, husband-and-wife team Suzanne Chisholm and Michael Parfit, are journalists who went to Nootka Sound to report on an attempt to capture Luna in 2004, and ended up staying for several years, going deeper into the story and ending up becoming advocates for the whale. The resulting film clearly shows the complexity of the situation and left this viewer with a lot of food for discussion. And a big pile of used Kleenex.

That evening at 6:30 we went to see “Walt & El Grupo,” coincidentally another documentary by a husband-and-wife team, Theodore Thomas and Kuniko Okubo. In 1941, the U.S. Government funded a goodwill tour of Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Chile for Walt Disney and a group of his artists. (Director Theodore Thomas is actually the son of one of the artists who went on the tour.) “Walt & El Grupo” reconstructs the tour through archival photographs, films, sketches, and interviews.

What we didn’t realize until the first words appeared in the opening titles was that “Walt & El Grupo” was funded by the Walt Disney Family Foundation. As one might expect, the production values were very high and the film was very well put together. But the Disney company is famous for protecting its image, and we could sense the weighty hand of that control hovering over the entire film. As David put it, “Maybe we couldn’t expect this film to be very critical, but couldn’t it have been at least a little more curious?” So it’s hard to feel that we could trust much of anything we saw in this film. But, as I said, the movie was very well-made; the Latin music used throughout was wonderful, and I was captivated by the watercolors and sketches the artists made during the tour.

Next up: “In the Land of the Headhunters.”

News flash: Seattle has moved to the Southern Hemisphere, skipping summer & fall and going straight back to winter

I’ll get to my reviews of the two films we saw on Sunday, “Saving Luna” and “Walt & El Grupo,” in my next post. But first, this headline from the front page of this morning’s Seattle Times: “Colder than Siberia!” That’s right, the temperatures in Seattle lately have been colder than those in the Siberian city of Tomsk, as well as those in Oslo, Fairbanks, International Falls (Minnesota), and Portland (Maine). It certainly feels colder than Siberia here, especially downtown on 3rd Avenue, where it always seems to be colder than it is around our apartment or even downtown a few blocks further up the hill from Elliott Bay. The high temperature yesterday was 58 degrees — normal is 68 degrees. And just in case you read that too casually, that was the high temperature! On June 10! (Confidentially, I feel rather smug about being stoic enough to put up with it.)

SIFF, Part 3: “The Drummer” and “Half-Life”

After seeing three of the SIFF films over four days, I wanted to take a break, so except for Monday’s "Song Sung Blue," we didn’t see any films during the week. But by Thursday or so, I was starting to go into withdrawal; I missed going out to the movies. Fortunately, on Saturday we made up for it with our most aggressive schedule yet: "The Drummer" at 11:00 at Pacific Place Cinema downtown, and right after that, "Half-Life" at 1:30 at the Harvard Exit in Capitol Hill, a little over a mile away.

We went with our friends Angela and Sean; Angela used to work in my department on the same floor as I did back in San Francisco; then, last year, the department moved into a new building and I lost track of her. It turns out that she and Sean moved to Seattle last year just a few months before we did so that she could take a job at Amazon, which I only discovered because Angela and I ran into each other on 3rd Avenue one day last winter on our way to our respective bus stops. Small world! (Or maybe just small West Coast.)

"The Drummer" (Hong Kong, director Kenneth Bi) is the story of a gangster’s son, Sid (played by Jaycee Chan, Jackie Chan’s son), who plays drums in a rock band and has the poor judgment to sleep with the girlfriend of a powerful mob boss. To protect him, his father sends him into hiding in Taiwan, where he stumbles upon a community of Zen drummers who live and train in a kind of monastery in the mountains. Enthralled by the sight and sound of them, he persuades them to let him stay with them, but this spoiled kid has a lot to learn about humility and discipline before he can be a real drummer. It’s a familiar story, but "The Drummer" provides a nice treatment of it. The drummers (both male and female) in the film are the actual members of one such community, and they are beautiful to watch, both in their drumming and in the way they interact with one another. Jaycee Chan has much of his dad’s charm and gift for comedy. And of course, having done taiko drumming for a couple of years with San Francisco Taiko Dojo, I appreciated seeing the art form portrayed on the screen. Although I thought it lacked the originality of vision to be a great film, I still enjoyed "The Drummer" and was glad I saw it.

With less than thirty minutes to get to the Harvard Exit, we had to race to make it to "Half Life" in time (fortunately, Sean and Angela had their car) and just barely succeeded. The film itself was disappointing. The blurb in the SIFF program had sounded intriguing; in the world of the very near future, global warming has passed the tipping point, creating unrest both in the larger world and in the immediate world around the Wu family. Although there were some interesting visual effects, and I enjoyed the familiarity of the setting (Diablo Valley, inland from San Francisco Bay), the story was weak, and I thought the film failed to make a meaningful connection between the global warming framework and the domestic drama.

After "Half-Life," David and I were done for the day, but then, we’re just amateurs; Sean and Angela had two more screenings planned for Saturday (or was it three more?), including one midnight screening. Hard core! Not us; we had to rest up for Sunday…(to be continued)

SIFF, Part 2: "Song Sung Blue"

On Monday night after work we went to see “Song Sung Blue,” a documentary about a husband-and-wife singing duo from Milwaukee; he is a Neil Diamond impersonator, and she sings Patsy Cline songs. David had to persuade me to go see this movie; I’m allergic to Neil Diamond, and I feared the worst. But it turned out that the film was very different, and much better, than I expected. (For one thing, Neil Diamond wasn’t in it, so that was a plus right there.)

Mike and Claire Sardina perform as “Lightning and Thunder” (he’s Lightning, she’s Thunder). She’s a single mom on welfare when they meet; he’s a modestly successful Neil Diamond impersonator looking for a singing partner. They pair up and their career begins to build. They’re getting regular gigs in the Milwaukee-Chicago area and they have some loyal and enthusiastic fans; they even get to meet Eddie Vedder and open for Pearl Jam at a music festival. Then a freak accident occurs; while Claire is gardening in her front yard, an elderly driver mistakes the gas for the brake, runs up onto the front lawn, and pins Claire against the concrete front steps of her house, severing her left leg below the knee.

What ensues is a descent into depression, dependency on medication, aborted divorce proceedings, bankruptcy, the pregnancy of Claire’s teenage daughter, a quintuple bypass for Mike*, and the first stirrings of doubt about whether Lightning and Thunder will be able to go on pursuing their dream after all. But, fueled by Mike’s inextinguishable (possibly delusional) optimism and will, they pull themselves back together and begin to get gigs again...shortly after which Mike suffers a cerebral hemorrhage and dies. Eddie Vedder, when he hears the news, sends Claire his condolences in the form of a Gibson guitar and a respectful, heartfelt note of sympathy.

I can see I’m not really getting across to you the true merits of this film. What makes this documentary work so well is the non-chronological, meaningful way in which the details of Mike and Claire’s history and character are revealed, the unflinching honesty of the scenes showing the trials and tensions of their lives, the respect the filmmakers have for the humanity of their subjects even at their worst, and the nuanced way the film explores what it means to be devoted to pursuing a life’s dream, even when that dream looks like a completely bad idea. Recommended, and not just for Neil Diamond fans. Maybe especially not for Neil Diamond fans.

*I’m sure there are some more calamities I’m forgetting to include in this list.

Seattle International Film Festival, Part 1: "Captain Ahab" and "Garden Party"

The Seattle International Film Festival is underway. At first I wondered why they would schedule a film festival here just when the weather is starting to get more pleasant, but then I reasoned that it might not be good public health policy to encourage people to spend any more time indoors in the dark than they already do during the winter.

Over the weekend, David and I saw "Captain Ahab," a French film directed by Philippe Ramos; it's a prequel to Moby-Dick which portrays Ahab's life from childhood on, through the perspectives of five different narrators. We didn't care for it too much. Part of the problem was that, perhaps unfairly, we were having trouble accepting this French-language take on a revered classic American novel. The scenery and atmosphere did not evoke New England to us, either, and that's so much a part of the mythology of Moby-Dick in our minds that it made it harder for us to get into the film. Perhaps more fairly, I didn't think the film offered enough fresh insight into the character of Ahab. Ah, well — such is the potluck of a film festival.

We also saw "Garden Party," directed by Jason Freeland. It's the story of five characters whose lives intersect in Los Angeles. We really enjoyed this one. It was very well cast and had some good moments of humor and drama. The director and producer were there at the screening, which they said was only the second screening the film had ever had in front of an audience. Ah — such is the coolness factor of a film festival!

More to come in the next couple of weeks...