"Lowland Fell" and "Treevenge"

Having missed every shorts program in the film festival, I decided to catch today's 11 a.m. screening of the best of the fest. It was a mixed bag, but I enjoyed a few of the selections and am already looking forward to Bumbershoot's One Reel Film Festival, always a terrific shorts showcase. The standout among the SIFF shorts was Lowland Fell, an (intentionally?) ambiguous account of a 17-year-old girl who takes her scooter into the Irish countryside and encounters two handsome brothers working by the side of the road. She asks them for directions, then starts up again, only to fall off her scooter and end up in a swampy ditch. When they help her out of it, she and they discover a dead man beneath the muck.

But this is no murder mystery; the guy they find has been there quite a while and looks positively mummified. The teens speculate that he may have been the victim of a sacrificial rite perpetrated by the Celts. In any case, they take him back to the boys' house (their parents are out of town, conveniently enough) and set him up by the fireside. What ensues is a strange combination of morbid fascination, sexual tension, and a dreamlike climax that leaves one surprise for the film's finale. I'm not exactly sure what that enigmatic ending means, but I do know that Lowland Fell is a sharply written and very well-directed piece of work.

Since I'd entertained thoughts of seeing SIFF's slate of horror shorts, I was glad that today's sampler included Treevenge, a graphic tale of Christmas trees that are mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore. There isn't a subtle bone in this scrappy horror-comedy's body, and some of the gags/deaths made me cringe inwardly as I laughed outwardly, but the central concept -- pine trees get back at us, big time, for our yearly massacre of their kind -- is hilarious, and the filmmakers' decision to let us see things from the trees' perspective, not just thematically but visually, really pays off. Though I could have done without seeing a sizable fir jump on a baby's head and splatter it, I have to commend the twisted minds behind Treevenge for balancing campy special effects with somewhat disturbing realism -- insofar as violence wrought by trees can be realistic.

SIFF Report #4: "Humpday" and "500 Days of Summer"

Local director Lynn Shelton's largely improvised comedy Humpday packs an impressive amount of emotional complexity into a premise that smacks of Judd Apatow and/or Kevin Smith. Ben (mumblecore icon Mark Duplass) and Andrew (Blair Witch alumnus Joshua Leonard) are old friends. Ben has a beautiful, sensitive wife, Anna (Alycia Delmore), and a responsible desk job, and he owns his own home in Seattle. Andrew, in contrast, is a traveler and an artist, albeit one who has trouble finishing the ambitious projects he starts. When Andrew breezes into town, surprising Ben and utterly bewildering Anna, the stage is set for Ben to journey away from his tidy domestic life and into Andrew's bohemian milieu.

So far, it's all predictable enough: Anna offers to make dinner for the guys, but Ben joins Andrew at a raucous, pot-fueled party and ends up staying very late, leaving his wife to sit at home beside his rapidly cooling supper. At the party, Ben and Andrew drunkenly hatch an outrageous scheme: They'll enter The Stranger's amateur porn competition with a video of two straight guys -- themselves -- having sex. It sounds good enough in the haze of alcohol and marijuana, but the next morning Anna (who knows nothing of the porn idea) is understandably pissed at Ben, and Ben and Andrew are experiencing a weirdness unlike anything their bromance has weathered before. Eventually, they talk about it. Each man essentially double-dog-dares the other to chicken out, but neither blinks. Ben assures Andrew that Anna is cool enough to okay their plan, and Andrew leaves the conversation thinking it's on. Now all Ben has to do is figure out how to broach the subject with Anna in a way that won't completely infuriate her. Oh, and did I mention Ben and Anna are trying to have a baby?

Shelton combined improvisation and her own strong vision to produce a movie that feels light in all the right places, and more substantive when it counts. She was intent on hitting certain "emotional beats" in each scene, so while the actors didn't generally know how a particular scene would play out, they knew what emotions their characters would go through. This process can be dicey in the hands of certain directors, but Shelton uses it to make her finest film yet, and easily the best new movie I saw at SIFF this year. Duplass and Leonard have tremendous chemistry, making their friendship much more interesting than the average cinematic "bromance." Humpday looks at exactly the kinds of issues I'd hoped I Love You, Man would explore, and it does so with a fraction of the budget and no big names. Though the film's central concept might put off some potential viewers, or conjure thoughts of broad, vulgar farce, Shelton's more interested in the romantic/platonic love triangle she's created than in the results of Ben and Andrew's wild idea.

Just as Duplass and Leonard never hit a false note in their portrayal of male friendship, Delmore and Duplass make one of the most compelling, credible screen couples I've seen in some time. You wouldn't expect it, but one of Humpday's greatest achievements is its depiction of a strong, vibrant marriage. Ben and Anna try to be completely honest with each other, but some things slip through the cracks; when Ben levels with her about his and Andrew's plan, she comes back with a confession of her own. Here Shelton's and Delmore's strengths truly come to light: What Anna has to say isn't as scandalous or dramatic as it could have been, but it still hurts Ben, and Delmore delivers it without malice, but also without regret. I see a lot of movies about relationships, and plenty about marriage, and I don't often witness such honest moments played so well. With unusual boldness, Humpday shows us realistic, well-meaning people who yearn for greater knowledge of each other and themselves -- and then recoil at what they find. The film has a distributor, Magnolia Pictures, and will open in Seattle this summer. I recommend it highly.

I was less enthused about 500 Days of Summer, the new romantic comedy starring Joseph Gordon-Leavitt and Zooey Deschanel (aka my movie-star girlfriend). Much of what's in the trailer unfolds in the film's first few minutes, leading us to wonder whether we're in for a dreadful slog. We aren't, but director Marc Webb's pastiche style misses and hits with about equal frequency, meaning that for every sharp bit there's a stale one in the offing. Gordon-Leavitt is a versatile actor, but he does better with gritty, darkly humorous material (like Mysterious Skin and The Lookout) than with lightweight romcom stuff. Though he brings his signature thoughtfulness to every scene, there's only so far he can go with his character, Tom, a would-be architect stuck in a joyless job at a greeting-card company. (Is the movie packed with easy jokes about greeting cards? Yes, indeed.) Similarly, Deschanel, as the titular love interest, has a fine time singing karaoke and playing the pretty, distant heartbreaker, but we don't get to know her so much as watch her in action.

Clark Gregg's performance as Tom's boss pretty much summarizes what's wrong with the film. Gregg is a capable actor, especially in roles that require dry wit, but Summer's script isn't dry or witty enough to showcase his talent. So he muddles through several underwhelming scenes and calls it a day. Webb shows a few flashes of directorial panache: There's a rousing song-and-dance number in which everyone, including Gordon-Leavitt, appears to be having a hell of a good time, and there are nice comic touches here and there, as when Summer seems not to have overheard something Tom said but proceeds to surprise him. And there's a wonderful black-and-white montage that illustrates Summer's charms in a way that makes fun of an age-old movie phenomenon: the lovely young lady who effortlessly charms the pants off every man she meets. Unfortunately, these fine moments aren't enough to make Summer more than the sum of its parts. On the plus side, the movie has a smashingly good soundtrack, and did I mention that Deschanel sings "Sugar Town"? I think I could watch that scene 100 times.

SIFF Report #3: "A Woman Under the Influence" and "Prodigal Sons"

John Cassavetes' 1974 film A Woman Under the Influence feels astonishingly fresh and intense 35 years after its initial release. Gena Rowlands' performance is a wonder to behold; much of it is both awful to watch and supremely compelling. The word "towering" came to mind; I learned after the screening that it's considered one of the finest performances ever captured on film.

That's not hyperbole as far as I'm concerned. Rowlands acts with her eyes, face, body, and voice, and her portrayal of a woman plagued by an unnamed psychological malady never idles for even a moment. Her Mabel is always up to something, and Rowlands lets the character's thoughts and emotions play powerfully across her face without giving away too much. Peter Falk, as her husband, Nick, shifts believably and very movingly from affection for his troubled wife to frustration, and finally to violent outrage at his own helplessness in the face of her demons.

Rowlands' performance reminds me somewhat of Sean Penn's in Milk, inasmuch as both actors throw themselves passionately into their characters and are riveting to watch but never draw undue attention from their costars. They aren't chewing the scenery, merely acting with rare force and intensity; despite the attention-getting nature of their portrayals, they give their fellow performers the space to develop their characters and provide a rich human context for the protagonist's trials. "Elemental" is another word I'd use to describe Rowlands' acting. There are moments in which she seems possessed, bringing to mind films like The Exorcist, and the fact that she adds this layer to the performance makes her character's plight that much more terrifying. It also explains why her husband might resort to physical abuse in an effort to snap her out of it.

The SIFF program mentions the movie's feminist leanings, and there's certainly the implication that a familiar domestic trap exacerbates Mabel's condition. To me, however, the film played more as a story about mental health, and to some extent the mental-health system. That no one, including the family doctor, attempts to name Mabel's malaise seems unthinkable in light of the 21st-century tendency to assign nearly every kind of problem behavior a multipartite name with a handy acronym and a future spot in the DSM. Poor Mabel, however, is just "nuts" or "crazy" in the eyes of her friends and family, and the treatment she ultimately gets is the usual Cuckoo's Nest cocktail: sedatives, group therapy, and electroshock -- in short, everything but lobotomy.

The Mabel we meet after six months of treatment is a quieter woman, a woman careful not to get too "excited" when she sees her kids for the first time in half a year. It's arguable that her condition needed some form of professional attention, that she wasn't simply a harmless kook dancing to a strange beat, but it's also apparent that her husband, an overworked construction-crew chief, simply doesn't have the resources to stand up for Mabel -- something she explicitly asks her father to do toward the end of the film.

The ending Cassavetes chooses only makes the movie even stronger: As Nick and his newly returned wife clear the dishes following an uncomfortable party in her honor, cheery instrumental music plays. Nick has shown that he regrets having Mabel committed; he's also made it clear that despite his questionable behavior toward her throughout the film, he loves her very deeply and would, as he says, lie across train tracks for her. Mabel, for her part, emerges from the hospital in an altered state, but the ending's upbeat tune isn't a sick joke at her expense, nor is it simply a satiric poke at fraudulent domestic bliss or the horrors of psychiatry.

The closing scene is, instead, a bittersweet way of saying that life goes on, though Cassavetes pointedly avoids picking sides or predicting the future. Nick may or may not become a better husband, Mabel may or may not improve over time, and who can say if this deeply burdened marriage will survive? All we know is that these two characters have chosen, this night, to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and clear the dishes. I don't think their ease and slight playfulness with each other during the credit sequence is anything less than a glimmer of hope; what it isn't is a guarantee of a neat and tidy happiness. Only a less masterful film would give us that.

Kim Reed's autobiographical documentary Prodigal Sons also examines the impact an individual's mental instability can have on family life. In this case, it's the director's adopted brother, Marc, who suffers from mood swings and erratic behavior. He always played a bit rough, according to Kim's biological brother, Todd, but only after Marc sustained a head injury at the age of 21 did he begin to act out in frightening ways. The film was originally intended to follow Kim's appearance at her high school reunion in small-town Montana. The catch: She's transgender, so the person her classmates knew, a star quarterback named Paul, no longer exists.

Somewhat surprisingly, most of Kim's friends and acquaintances take her transition in stride. One woman asks a bit rudely how she can be female but still attracted to women, but that's about as much flak as the filmmaker takes. Marc's breakdowns, outbursts, and sorrowful apologies end up hijacking Kim's documentary, but she seems much more interested in helping her brother than hogging the spotlight. She isn't a tremendously sophisticated director; her movie is technically average, structurally imperfect, and thematically unfocused. But Marc's fascinating, contradictory personality -- his rudeness, sweetness, anger, fear, self-hatred -- held my attention through most of the film.

In a particularly strong sequence, we hear one of Marc's sadder apologies over footage of Kim hauling various items through the snow from their late father's truck to her cabin. Kim's determination as she loads one heavy thing after another onto a plastic sled and tugs it to the house touchingly reflects how hard both she and Marc are trying to have good lives. We suspect, sensibly, that only one of them will succeed. Prodigal Sons isn't as startling as Cassavetes' film in its depiction of mental illness, but both stories force us to consider anew the definition of that term, and to think, however fleetingly, about what we'd do if someone dear to us was similarly afflicted.

More thoughts on "We Live In Public"

In the "About" section of her film's Web site, director Ondi Timoner makes the following observation:

[T]he virtual world is subsuming the physical world and determining how we spend our time and form and maintain our relationships more and more...

When I was in high school, I "met" someone via AOL chat. Her name was Sasha Pasulka, though at the time I knew her only as "patpv," her AOL handle. She was a few years younger than me -- I was 16 or 17 -- but she knew a lot more about certain things than I did (dating, for example). We also talked a lot about Tori Amos, the mutual interest that had brought us together in the first place. (She'd searched all AOL profiles for "Tori Amos," picked me pretty much at random, and started an instant-message conversation.) We often e-mailed each other, trying to decode Tori lyrics or just discussing details of our lives. I eventually contributed poetry to her literary blog, The Sweetest Cherry, and we stayed close -- as close as online pen pals can be -- until I graduated from high school. I rediscovered her via Friendster (I think) around 2004, and we e-mailed back and forth a few times before drifting apart again. Finally, last year, I found out through MySpace that she'd moved to Seattle, and I convinced her to meet me for brunch.

Originally, when we were IM and e-mail friends, Sasha didn't want to talk on the phone, but eventually she sent me a picture of herself with her prom date, so I knew what she looked like. (This was before Facebook and Flickr -- i.e., before displaying personal photos online was a ubiquitous practice.) When we met for brunch, I found her as smart and funny as I'd imagined she'd be, but I wasn't sure we'd end up being fast friends in the non-virtual world. She'd moved recently from L.A. and was just getting used to the Northwest's slower-paced, less glamorous lifestyle; I lived at the Kibbutz and had about five different outfits total. Still, Sasha came to both of my birthday parties -- the small karaoke night and the huge house party -- and proved herself to be a hell of a lot of fun, and very down to earth. I've also become a fan of Sasha's blogs (The Evil Beet, Zelda Lily, and Sasha is a Monster) and feel lucky to have witnessed the birth of her blogging career, which has become more successful than even she imagined it would.

I recount this story because I always thought of my relationship with Sasha, long before we met in person, as a "real" friendship. I really cared about her, was interested in her life, and enjoyed her company, even if it was virtual, and even if I'd never heard the sound of her voice. Sasha and I managed to break through the coldness of the technology and really connect. What I didn't write about yesterday while considering We Live In Public is that while Timoner seems concerned about the societal effects of the Internet and our culture of personal overexposure, Josh Harris isn't quite so down on the whole situation. He certainly learned a painful lesson from living in public with his girlfriend, but both in the film and during the Q&A he seemed to view our collective decision to live in public -- via Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, and many other platforms -- as more of an inevitability than a tragedy.

After all, technology is destiny. One of the things I like about Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television is that he rejects the common assumption that a given technology is neutral, that it's what we do with it that matters. Mander sees TV as something that was bound to have particular effects on society, and I think the Internet is similar. It's interactive, it allows for almost infinite exhibitionism, it's (mostly) free, and the laws governing its content are very few. The "Wild West" atmosphere that characterized the dot-com boom has changed form but remains intact. No other medium could contain "Two Girls, One Cup" and a video depicting U.S. soldiers in Iraq throwing a puppy off a cliff. There's no Interpol keeping "inappropriate" things from leading endless lives online, and nothing prevents any private citizen from becoming tremendously, intractably public. An article a while back called "Prisoners of YouTube" described the lives of people who found themselves immortalized on the video site. In most cases, they were embarrassed; some of them, like the "Numa Numa" guy, tried to capitalize on their unexpected online fame.

I've come a long way since my first experience with Web-based friendship. I have a blog, I check Facebook each day like a good little addict, I update my Twitter status, and I've posted video of myself, my friends, and my mother's dogs on YouTube. In Timoner's movie, when Harris steps away from the Web, he does it big time, first buying an apple farm and later moving to a small town in Africa. I think there's a lesson in that: The man who loves technology also needs, on occasion, to leave it far behind.

Several months ago, I gave up Facebook for a week as part of an exercise my Buddhist meditation group was doing. I missed it, but it was also kind of nice; interestingly, I felt the need to post a message before going on my hiatus so that my many Facebook friends wouldn't feel neglected if they tried to contact me and didn't hear back. These days, I hungrily check my profile for messages, notifications, event invitations, and -- best of all -- friend invitations. That hunger, that urgency, is part of what Harris and Timoner know all about: our desire to measure our popularity, and maybe even our worth, using online metrics like page hits or unique users.

Facebook has so cleverly incorporated features of other applications -- Flickr, Twitter, e-mail, Evite, and on and on -- that it does seem at times that my life itself is on Facebook, as much as it's anywhere. In Buddhist terms, it's a convincing projection of a false self, the ego made manifest in a medium that plays tricks on the mind. We Live In Public made me self-conscious about using Facebook and Twitter, not because I'm sharing too much of myself on the Web but simply because I'm living online too much. I'm glad to have a blog, a place where I can write informally on a regular basis, but it might be good to take stock, one of these weeks, of how much time I'm spending at the computer each day. It's all about balance, and I'd rather find a way to make my days healthier than have a total meltdown and find myself harvesting apples and riding around on a tractor. Though, actually, the second part doesn't sound too bad.

SIFF Report #2: "We Live In Public" and "Moon"

Ondi Timoner's new documentary and Duncan Jones' haunting sci-fi movie both feature men isolated from normal life by technology. The former film spotlights a man who predicts the future with remarkable accuracy; the latter is about a man who's already living it.

Josh Harris (pictured above), the subject of We Live In Public, was raised by television. The youngest child in a large family, he spent an inordinate amount of time in front of the TV set, often watching Gilligan's Island. This was partly because his mother told him to fend for himself if he asked when dinner would be ready -- she was usually too busy drinking martinis to notice the time -- and partly, I suspect, because Harris was born weird, or became weird so quickly that he might as well have come out that way. He was also born extremely smart, and his story resembles many others of the dot-com boom. He plugged into the potential of the Internet when it was in its earlier stages, and eventually he created Pseudo.com, a proto-YouTube that featured original, Web-only programming on subjects ranging from hip-hop to Hollywood.

He quickly amassed a fortune and spent it in highly creative ways; his parties were happenings on a Warholian scale, so it's no surprise that he soon became known as "the Warhol of the Web." While Pseudo was at its peak, he also took on a strange alter ego named Luvvy, a disturbingly fervent clown. The character, from the little we see of it, seems to be an id-powered channeling of Josh's intense desire to love and be loved. The sad part is that he never really learned how, so his disguised plea for affection came off as more than a little deranged. Eventually, he stepped down from the helm of Pseudo and embarked on a mission that would make him even more infamous in New York: a social experiment-cum-art project called "Quiet: We Live In Public."

Timoner took part in that project, which involved sealing dozens of New York art-scene denizens into an underground bunker for one month, just before the turn of the millennium. A cross between a protracted techno-rave and the Stanford prison experiment, "Quiet" included a gun range, an interrogation room (where an "interrogation artist" routinely brought people to tears), and cameras everywhere: the bathrooms, the showers, the bed "pods" -- really, everywhere. Though the citizens of "Quiet" emerged physically unscathed, they witnessed some frightening behavior before the NYPD broke up Harris' experiment, suspecting it -- understandably -- of being a millennial cult. What Harris did next is the part of his life, and Timoner's film, that really stayed with me.

Following "Quiet," the eccentric dot-com mogul found love in the form of Tanya Corrin, who had worked as a program host at Pseudo.com. The couple decided to move in together, but Harris had a very special request: He wanted his new girlfriend to join him in an experiment he would simply call "We Live In Public." In essence, it would be a more personal iteration of "Quiet," a multi-month project in which he and Corrin would live together in an apartment monitored by motion-sensitive surveillance cameras. Everything the cameras captured would go, in real time, to a specially designed Web site. Trusting his vision and her heart, I suppose, Corrin agreed to this setup, and "cultural history" -- as Harris liked to put it -- was about to be made.

What ensued was the most titillating, agonizing kind of reality television, albeit on the Internet. Visitors to WeLiveInPublic.com got to see Harris and Tanya have sex, fight, and eventually break up. Throughout it all, commenters gave their opinions on everything. The site's fans were so devoted, and so eagled-eyed, that at one point in the experiment, before things go sour, Corrin playfully looks at a camera and asks viewers whether they've seen her wallet. It's a startling moment, underscoring the way in which she and Harris let people into every corner of their home, and every inch of their life together.

It's no coincidence that this part of the film is the most compelling. "Quiet" was a daring, wacky thing to try, but "We Live In Public" serves up the more interesting insights into human relations, and also the more lurid ones. It's one thing to watch a man and a woman take a shower together in front of a dozen amused bunker-dwellers; it's quite another to watch a basically decent man turn into a quasi-abuser, as we watch Harris do, and then to see his girlfriend leave the room in tears, heartbroken. God help us all, it's real human drama, and it's virtually irresistible.

Through a combination of luck and persistence, Timoner gets to follow Harris' story nearly to the present day, and the turns it takes between the end of "We Live In Public" and his arrival in Africa are just as terrifically surprising as everything prior. We Live In Public, the film, starts off screamingly fast, zooming through the birth of the Internet and the development of Harris' career through the Pseudo years. When it slows down for the millennial bunker project, and for his and Corrin's doomed cohabitation, the movie trades speed for power and really starts going somewhere. Timoner begins with a doltishly obvious title card ("This is the story of the greatest Internet pioneer you've never heard of") and a silly visual gimmick (a computer cursor "types" what we read) and then burrows her way to the heart of the story.

The film impressed me more as it went along, and by the end it had shown me things that would stay with me for days. Harris is, in Timoner's opinion, a "walking cautionary tale" about what happens when you allow the media to raise your children. (Hint, hint to parents of Web-savvy toddlers: Don't let this happen to your kid!) But in my view, it's even more painful as an illustration of what happens when someone deeply unprepared for love doesn't know what to do with it. Corrin plays along as much as reasonably possible when Harris decides to broadcast their home life to the masses, but a girl can only take so much. (At one point, when he begs for sex, she responds: "I don't want to be your porn star.") Interviewed years later about the relationship, Harris claims that Corrin wasn't a real girlfriend -- he was essentially trying to cast a role in the reality show that was his life, and she fit the part perfectly. Asked about this statement, she dismisses it, explaining that people convince themselves of such things to protect their hearts. She has moved on to marriage and children; he, for better or worse, seems truly incapable of a "normal" life.

Yet he moves proudly forward, as his appearance following the screening proved. After the official Q&A, audience members crowded around Harris, presumably to pick his brain about the Internet's Next Big Thing. If Harris did, as Timoner suggests, predict our current Facebook culture with astounding accuracy, then he undoubtedly gave the assembled inquirers something good to chew on. (He's the one, after all, who updated Warhol's "15 minutes of fame" idea, asserting that in the 21st century, we all want 15 minutes per day.) I decided to leave the Egyptian and walk out into the beautiful, non-virtual spring sun.

The sun also happens to be a major player in Moon, British director Duncan Jones' film about a man named Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), whose job it is to help a large company harvest solar energy on the lunar surface and turn it into power for the denizens of Earth. The premise resembles that of Danny Boyle's memorable Sunshine: it's a stretch, but it doesn't beggar belief. When we meet him, Sam is nearly done with a three-year assignment that's begun to seem interminable. After all, his pretty wife and young daughter are back home, waiting for his return, and he's going a little bonkers up in the lunar station, despite the loyal companionship of a HAL-like computer named Gerty (voiced perfectly by Kevin Spacey).

The plot includes a number of twists, and to Jones' credit (he came up with the story), few of them are predictable. The computer isn't what I expected it to be, nor is Sam. The result is a thinky science-fiction flick that doesn't get bogged down in its ideas, such as they are, but also refuses to sacrifice thought and plot for knuckleheaded action sequences, of which there are precisely none. Moon is a small film, but it has transcendent touches. Clint Mansell's eerie, evocative score might be the best thing in the movie; it communicates the story's emotional pitch as well as any of the dialogue, and it even gives Rockwell's bravura acting a run for its money.

SIFF Report #1: "The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle" and "Paper Heart"

The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle is a movie about work and, secondarily, about corporate malfeasance. Its oddball corps of janitors, pictured above -- sweet, dimwitted Methyl (Tygh Runyan), puckish O.C. (Vince Vieluf), former data-entry slave Dory (Marshall Allman), goth goddess Ethyl (Tania Raymonde), and their boss, cross-dressing Gulf War vet Weird William (Richard Lefebvre) -- have adventures, affairs, and clashes with each other, and everyone learns a life lesson or two along the way. One thing all the characters learn is not to eat too many cookies.

Indie darling Natasha Lyonne plays Tracy, who works for a company called Corsica whose hot new product is a cookie that heats up in your mouth when it interacts with your saliva (for that home-baked feeling). The substance that brings about this miraculous chemical reaction still needs to be tested on humans, so Tracy begins leaving batches of the individually wrapped cookies out for the night crew, our trusty team of janitors, to nosh on while they work, have sex on conference tables, and so on. Unfortunately, the cookies turn out not only to be addictive but also to cause a reaction in certain people that's a lot more dramatic than their makers intended.

Seattle-based writer-director David Russo plays what could have been horror-movie material for laughs in this fanciful, scrappy, satiric work that recalls the nutty, sharp-toothed humor of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. I'd already seen one of Russo's short films at Bumbershoot; it was an arty stop-motion thing that somehow seemed to move in three dimensions -- across the length of the screen, but also towards and away from the viewer.

Dizzle shows that Russo can concoct a ragtag band of characters and a pretty compelling plot without losing the aesthetic he established in that short. The feature includes several cookie-induced hallucination sequences that could stand alone as exercises in inventive cinematic style, but they also fit nicely into the larger film's loopy vision. (The gorgeous opening credit sequence, which follows a message in a bottle through various seasons and seas, is a perfect example.) Shot in Seattle, Dizzle has a pleasingly anarchic spirit and a lot of energy, and considering that its budget must have been pretty low, it looks great. Much like Kaufman's Being John Malkovich, Russo's film immerses us in a world that looks a lot like our own but has surprising new rules, and by the end I was a little sad to leave it.

Paper Heart, the quirky romantic comedy I'd been anticipating pretty eagerly, is an endearing, low-key semi-mockumentary about a geeky comedian/musician, Charlyne Yi, who doesn't believe in true love. She clearly believes in the kind of love that sustains a friendship, since she has a best friend, and she seems to get along well with her family, so that sort of love makes sense to her, too. It's just the falling-in-love variety she has doubts about. After conferring with a number of comedian friends more famous than she is (Seth Rogen, Adventureland's Martin Starr, and Demetri Martin, among others), she and director Nicholas Jasenovec (played in the film, apparently, by Jake M. Johnson) set out on a cross-country road trip to interview regular folks about love.

What ensues is a series of chats with happy couples, possibly not-so-happy couples, Elvis impersonators, romance novelists, and kids on a playground. Charlyne often asks couples how they met, or how they knew their love was true, and their responses resemble the "interviews" sprinkled throughout When Harry Met Sally..., a canonical work in the romcom genre. Along the way, Charlyne becomes friendly with Michael Cera, star of Juno and Superbad, and Nicholas raises the inevitable question: Is Charlyne finally head over heels?

The film succeeds because of its overarching sweetness, and because of Yi, who has pretty much got to be every nerdy boy's dream girl. She's smart, opinionated, fun, odd, and complicated, and she's also pretty in a very real way. As Louis Menand once wrote in The New Yorker, there are three kinds of love stories: the kind where you, the viewer, fall in love with both lovers; the kind where only one of them wins your heart; and the kind where you don't really care all too much about either of them. Though Michael Cera fans will enjoy his usual stumbling, sensitive-boy mannerisms, Yi is the real find here, and her lightly sardonic toughness and rare moments of vulnerability play beautifully against the intentionally gimmicky premise.

What I especially like about the movie is that it presents a heterosexual man who doesn't have conventional masculine tendencies and a straight woman who's both strong and feminine, and there's no direct commentary about the shift in traditional gender roles. It's very 21st century: Geeks are chic now, and geek love has the transcendent power to mostly avoid fossilized ideas about what a man and a woman should be like in relationship. On a similar note, the romance novelist Charlyne interviews uses the term "H.E.A." to refer to her genre's stock ending. (It stands for "happily ever after.") Without driving the point home too obviously, Heart reveals how naive that old saw is without denying that the right partner can make your life more complete. And that's always nice to see.

Summer of love

The romantic comedy needs an overhaul. Not unlike the horror genre, which many would consider its polar opposite, the romcom has a bad reputation, and unfortunately it's often justified. There are some good horror movies, but many of them are awful, relying as they do on gimmickry, gore, and extremely tired formulas. Similarly, romantic comedies frequently err on the side of color-by-numbers plotting and character development that hold few surprises for the viewer. And since that's precisely the opposite of what love is actually like, it's easy to get cynical. The last cardboard Hollywood romcom I saw, He's Just Not That Into You, combined a lifeless, unintelligent script with meager direction and underwhelming performances from stars who should know better. Movies like this are why people love to hate romantic comedy, dismissing it as a frothy genre stuffed with untruths, the big-screen equivalent of the Harlequin novel.

The Stranger once declared Annie Hall the best romcom ever, and it's hard to disagree. Woody Allen's masterpiece captures the awkwardness and serendipity of dating (in the famous first-kiss sequence, for example), the hope that love inspires, and the way two people can grow apart slowly but surely -- and how hard it can be to let go of the other person, even when you know, in your heart and in your head, that you should. Annie Hall is funny and insightful, yet for all its intelligence it maintains a breezy tone. It's tremendously well structured; every corner of the film, every scene, every moment, is packed with signifiers and color and throwaway jokes and sharp observations. Yet despite its density, it's always a joy to watch, never a slog. It's the kind of movie I can't see too many times, the kind I have to watch until the end if I happen to find that it's on. It doesn't pretend that love is a simple undertaking, but it also captures love's simple pleasures, which are many if you're open to them. For anyone who's been in love and hopes to be again, Annie Hall is a touchstone and a virtual bible of relationship wisdom. With that film as the gold standard, many newer ones understandably -- but still regrettably -- fall short.

Enter 500 Days of Summer, one of the movies I'm most eagerly anticipating at SIFF this year. When I taught an Experimental College class at Oberlin on contemporary (post-Annie Hall) romantic comedies, I sought to include films that didn't conform too much to genre tropes. When Harry Met Sally..., that immortal statement about male-female friendship, was one movie I chose; High Fidelity, about how relationships shape and reveal us, was another. I titled the class "Chasing Love," which I hoped would contain both a whiff of Shakespeare's "What fools these mortals be!" perspective (the Bard, after all, is the source of many romcom tropes) and an intimation of the timeless emotional slapstick to be found in our pursuit of romance.

What Summer promises is a tale of unrequited love. Joseph Gordon-Leavitt falls for Zooey Deschanel (and who wouldn't?), but she doesn't fall quite so hard for him. Hard enough, it seems, to date him for the titular 500 days, but not so hard that she won't cut him loose after that. Gordon-Leavitt is an actor who's played both jaded rebels (Mysterious Skin) and downy innocents (The Lookout), and judging from the trailer he'll be working on the latter end of the spectrum this time around. Deschanel has played jaded to another actor's innocence (Elf and Almost Famous), but this role will require more nuance, and I'm sure she's up to the challenge.

What makes me optimistic about the movie is that it seems intent on doing what one of my favorite books, Blankets, does so beautifully: reminding us that love, real love, is heartbreaking whether or not it lasts, and regardless of whether it's requited. (The movie's lovely tagline offers a clue: "This is not a love story, it's a story about love.") Whether it's easier to be the adored or the adorer is an open question, but to open yourself so wide emotionally is always a trial. Of course, it's a trial that's good for us, but how many times will we submit to it before we turn away forever?

Charlyne Yi, the heroine of Paper Heart (which also stars Michael Cera, and is also at SIFF), thinks she's done with love. The film's mock-documentary approach was hard for me to grasp at first, based only on the trailer; I thought it was a fictionalization of a real relationship between Yi and Cera. In any case, Yi might well stand in for the cynical viewer who's ready to snipe at the first false note in a romcom. Justin Long giving a last-minute speech on Ginnifer Goodwin's doorstep, confessing his true love? Yeah, whatever. Paper Heart seems to be saying that even if we give up on chasing love, there's nothing stopping love from coming after us when we least expect it.

Finally, Adam (at SIFF as well) reveals the personality quirks that populate ordinary romcoms (Sally's habit of ordering everything on the side in When Harry Met Sally..., for example) to be molehills compared to the mountainous task of loving someone with bigger challenges. The film's title character has Asperger's, and the trailer suggests that his condition gets the kind of treatment -- sympathetic, but not sugarcoated -- that 500 Days and Paper Heart try to give romance in general. I've not yet seen any of these films, but I have reason to believe that they could help revitalize one of my favorite genres. Here's hoping.

Mumblecore meets hardcore

God, I loved writing that post title.

Anyway, Humpday looks fun. It's great to see movies big (I Love You, Man) and small (the aforementioned) giving male heteronormativity a well-deserved noogie. Reed says it's at SIFF, so I'd better get my ticket soon, since it's local and all.

Julie & Julia seems promising, too, and not just because it reunites Streep and Tucci post-Prada. It's also got wonderful, wonderful Chris Messina and my #2 movie-star crush, Amy Adams. Chick flick of the year? Likely. (P.S. When somebody wants to turn Red Blue Green into a movie, can we get Chris Messina to play me?)

And you know what? Even the new Woody looks all right.

One last note: The Grand Illusion is currently playing Plague Town, whose trailer is pretty disturbing. I may be moving tentatively toward horror, but I don't think I'm quite ready for something this fierce. I may experiment with a horror flick or two during SIFF, but we'll just have to see.

Long live the SIFFter!

The Seattle International Film Festival's new filtering application, which seems inspired by several popular Facebook apps, is truly excellent. It's one of those happy meetings of functionality and concept that don't come along often enough. (See also: the late, lamented Scrabulous.) Kudos, SIFF!

Oberlin does an alumnus proud

I know I'm always proud of my alma mater, but here's yet another reason to be.

In other news, I saw the new Werner Herzog documentary, in which the director -- whose droll, kindly, German-accented narration is the cinematic equivalent of comfort food for me -- makes good on his promise to present images of penguins quite different from those on display in March of the Penguins. Also, there's a big volcano and a woman who can fit in a carry-on bag.

Alan Ball at SIFF

There are few people I consistently refer to as heroes of mine, but American Beauty screenwriter and Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball is one of them. (Roger Ebert is another.) To my delight, I found out tonight that Mr. Ball will be attending both SIFF screenings of his new movie, Towelhead, which is based on the novel of the same name. Without much hesitation, I snapped up a few tickets.

The catch? The screening I'm attending happens June 14, when I was theoretically going to be in California. My June travel plans hadn't really snapped into place for me until tonight; now I think I'll spend a weekend or more in Portland between June 1 and the date of the screening, then drive down after the screening to Sacramento to visit my friend Emily Page, a former Weeklyite who now works at the Sacramento News & Review. I could also use part of June to prepare for my eventual exodus from Seattle, which should be happening later in the summer, after my Eurotrip.

In any case, the Alan Ball screening/appearance is a nice anchor for next month's planning. I think I'd regret missing an opportunity to see him in person, and having June even a little bit more figured out is kind of liberating. Not that unemployment has been particularly harsh so far. I'll make sure to blog about it when it bears down on me with all its guilt-inducing, monotonous force. But the first week hasn't been too bad.

SIFF opens with a whimper

First, some good news: Michael's latest Idolator piece in which he exposes his family to the Billboard Top 10 is absolutely wonderful.

Now for the not-so-good news: This year's SIFF Opening Gala was easily the worst in my Seattle experience (my first opener was in 2003). The movie, Battle in Seattle, was expectedly bad: simplistic, melodramatic, manipulative to the point of being propagandist, and predictable to the point of being kind of boring (and stuffed with embarrassingly obvious speechifying, some of it righteous in content but all of it self-righteous in tone). The party, on the other hand, was bad in ways that weren't as expected: There was no free booze (not that I had any, free or not, but I was outraged on behalf of my peeps who did), the whole thing was not very well attended, the music on the dance floor was noticeably stale, the films-projected-on-the-walls choices were uninspired, the venue was kind of depressing (partly because it was the subterranean Exhibition Hall, partly because its size made apparent how few people were there), and the food was either in short supply and almost entirely meat-based (the savory stuff) or disgustingly overabundant (the cake, which admittedly was pretty good -- but isn't the thing you want in overabundance). The VIP folks in their gated party community got to indulge in sushi and other healthy goodies, while we plebes waited an eternity for soggy egg rolls and, again, more cake than any human should consume at a single event. In accordance with the movie's theme of rebellion against the capitalist overclass, I proposed that we link arms and chant "The people united will never be divided!" until they let us into the VIP area, but alas, no one else was willing.

One highlight of the event: Watching my movie-star crush, Michelle Rodriguez, answer Serious Questions ("Did your involvement in Battle in Seattle inspire you to change your lifestyle?") with a combination of vacuousness ("I drive a Prius now!") and quasi-maniacal laughter. On the other hand, if André Benjamin had been any more awesome, his awesomeness might have caused the space-time continuum to telescope and dissolve. It's always nice to see André. He was wearing a large-brimmed hat and a denim sport jacket, plus jeans with deep cuffs. He's my kind of movie star.

The film did include a bunch of Seattle locations, which was gratifying (Cinerama! The Paramount! Zeek's!), and one scene with Charlize Theron was actually quite intense, but overall the movie was ugly to look at and dramatically amateurish (the writing was more at fault than the acting, but then again the cinematography was pretty poor, too). Its Afterschool Special-style earnestness was sweet, though, and it did make me want to do something unequivocally good for the world, like go down to New Orleans and help rebuild the city.

I'm not counting SIFF out just yet, though. Either tomorrow or Sunday I hope to see The Fall, which Geoff tells me is visually sumptuous, as I'd hoped it would be. And while I'm enjoying the flexible hours and fringe benefits of unemployment, I might as well pan for a bit more movie gold. After all, once I'm on the road (or whatever it is I'm doing next), there'll be no more Egyptian, no more Harvard Exit, no more -- sigh -- SIFF Cinema. Gotta log the popcorn hours while I can.