Just as director Quentin Tarantino chewed the fat with Seattle International Film Festival fans and gave hyperventilating praise for overlooked genre director William Whitney in 2001, conservative critic Michael Medved shared the stage with other cinema authorities this year for a similarly enlightening gabfest. The timely topic pondered by Seattle’s local icon was "Why America Cannot See (or Doesn’t Want to See) Movies for Grownups."
German director Tom Twyker dazzled past Seattle International Film Festival audiences with his breakthrough films Run Lola Run and Princess and the Warrior, and was dubbed an Emerging Master. This year, Julio Medem was one of four new directors chosen for the category, and his latest film, Sex and Lucia, represented the latest in an ongoing tidal wave of popular Spanish titles that began with Amorres Perros and Y Tu Mama Tambien.
While last year’s bullet-riddled Brother introduced legions of crime film aficionados to the dry, laconic style of Japanese legend Takeshi Kitano (also known as "Beat" Takeshi when taking on "actor" mode), fellow Asian cult celebrity Takashi Miike unveiled two new, characteristically genre-bending epics, Agitator and Happiness of the Katakuris. Miike was also selected this year for Emerging Master status.
Lurking about in the shadows of SIFF, director John Waters brought his pencil moustache and a vintage copy of Female Trouble to Egyptian Theatre audiences salivating to be in the presence of Baltimore’s own Baron of Bad Taste.
For a sampling of this year’s typically diverse platter of over 170 features from 40 nations around the world, gorge yourself on the SIFF hors d’oeuvres listed below. Choose from escargot (Uzumaki, the Japanese chiller that’s heavy on spiral, snail-shell imagery), birthday cake (featured in the opening scenes of Agitator, before a perverse karaoke party that you’d never want to attend), and lots of wine (chugged down by Trudi Styler’s sloshed matron in Me Without You). Bon Appetit!