Notes from the festival screening desk

Hang on, is she still in that same suit?

Making a film has ruined watching movies for me.

Okay, that’s overly dramatic. But I now notice so many things that did not matter to me in the past.

At the end of September, I was invited to join the screening committee for the Seattle Jewish Film Festival. Yes, it is a helluva time to dive head-first into films about Jewish and/or Israeli identity and history, but here we are.

(Sidebar, if you want to know what I’m feeling about the whole disaster in Israel/Gaza, I have written about that here.)

I’m eyeballs deep in movies. Short ones. Long ones. Fancy deep pockets features and scrappy little student documentaries. A lot of them are … good! Really, really good!

I’ve seen one that I hated and that was a story problem, not a production problem. I’ve been neutral on a handful. I have a short list of three that I just loved, though there’s a minor technical issue in one of them that drove me nuts.

It’s like that.

I don't listen to what art critics say.
I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.
Jean-Michel Basquiat

I just finished a feature where the mood in the music was completely out of sync with the plot. Nothing menacing happens, why is this music so menacing? Nothing screwball happens, what’s with the lighthearted comedy vibe in the soundtrack?

In another film, the sound on the freeway sequences was all wrong; the ambient background noise drops out when they cut to the drone shot of the traffic-choked roads. It creates a weird speed bump in a movie that is otherwise flying along.

Another picture takes place across a time period of many years, but the shift in clothing isn’t sufficient, nor is there any visible aging in the main characters. In that same film, a central character is always in the same outfit but it makes no sense, she’d absolutely have more than one set of clothes. I know that costume changes cost money, but I kept thinking, “Why is she still in that same outfit? This doesn’t look like a cheap production. She’d change. She would.”

I’m less picky about production values on the documentary side of the house, but for one of the films I viewed, my notes said, “This film leaves a whole bunch of baseline questions unanswered. I want to send them back to do it again properly.”

People hate critics. Artists hate critics. Artists are always their own worst critics, so sometimes, we hate ourselves too.

The painter Jean-Michel Basquiat said you don’t need a critic to tell you what art is. He was right. But you can’t unsee, unhear things once you’ve tuned into that particular frequency. Spend the extra hundred dollars. Get her another outfit. Someone’s going to notice.

For what it’s worth, I’m absolutely terrified about what you’ll notice in our film.