The Best—and the Rest

[February 20th, 2008]

It’s a shame that what will probably be the most widely viewed film about illegal immigration in 2008 will be the overly sentimental, intellectually underwhelming Under the Same Moon. On the other hand (literally), Irina Palm manages to take what you’d think would be a one-trick-pony gag, and turn it into a fully fleshed-out, crisp, funny and well-acted drama. LANCE KRAMER.

Three PIFF films featured stalking (or stalkerly behavior). Two were hideously dull: the uneventful In the City of Sylvia and the stream-of-consciousness thriller Yella. (But Mr. Foe made stalking kind of cute, in a pervy, John Cusack sort of way.) At the fest’s top tier, points go to Chop Shop for its a stark, street-life reality, and to Taxidermia for tossing (or rather, barfing) reality out the window entirely. AP KRYZA.

My favorite part of festival-going is feeling like I’m discovering a familiar director or subject for the first time. I had that experience a few times at PIFF: Gus Van Sant redefined himself with the stately and traumatizing Paranoid Park, while David Gordon Green re-established himself as America’s most promising filmmaker with Snow Angels. But the most expectation-defying movie of the last three weeks was Alex Gibney’s torture-policy documentary Taxi to the Dark Side—a movie that suggested that while we may not have reached a turning point in Iraq, we’re at least making progress in movies about Iraq. Meanwhile, I’d like to appeal personally to Peter West not to make any more Dale Chihuly documentaries after Chihuly in the Hotshop—and, if he must keep making them, at least to refrain from putting his Tom Tom Club record collection to such endless use. AARON MESH.

The best? Although I thought Kim Ki-duk’s Breath to be disturbingly perceptive about a woman’s inability to heal from internalized violence, I’ll give the nod to The Gates. As a portrait of the architecture and the sensibility of New York, this doc, shot over 25 years, ranks as an achievement on par with Woody Allen’s Manhattan. Bud Powell on the soundtrack doesn’t hurt, either. As for the worst, any number of bombs would fit the bill, perhaps especially the loathsome, amateurish 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days or the soap-sudsy The Home Song Stories. Even so, I think I’ll lift my hind leg on Portland civic pride and anoint Paranoid Park with the great dishonor. Gag-inducingly smug, Van Sant’s drooling over an underage pretty boy who kills has all the trappings of a recruitment poster for law-and-order conservatives. Secretly, I’d hoped to undergo at least one false political conversion this festival. With this film, Gus has given me the encouragement I needed to register as a Republican. N.P. THOMPSON.

Family drama filmed with handheld camera? Check. Languid character study set in European countryside? Check. My PIFF experience tended toward the grainy and the understated, and it was the rare festival where I didn’t find myself wishing for at least two hours of my life back. But if I were pressed, I would have to say that The Duchess of Langeais was the most demanding of my cinematic endurance, with a complete lack of character redemption. On top of which, it was a genre-tease: It masqueraded as a witty battle of the sexes, but was actually just dark and miserable. Dearer to my heart was The Monastery, the sweet but unsentimental story of a Danish bachelor’s lifelong dream to open his homes to Russian Orthodox nuns, and Duska, a Dutch study of an aging film critic, the ticket-taker he’s smitten with and a doubtful Russian guest. For its flaws—some lazy film symbolism—it was an engaging flick with consistent laughs. SAUNDRA SORENSON.