Secret Festival, In The Shadow Of The Moon, Rescue Dawn

I have to admit I kind of like Secret Fest days when the day is at its end because when I'm sitting here faced with having to write about everything I saw, I'm off the hook for at least one of those films. Not that I saw a whole lot today -- I bailed out on the last one, Manufactured Landscapes, and skipped the "maybe" one, Them.

In The Shadow Of The Moon is a documentary about the astronauts who visited the moon. The movie contains all kinds of never before seen footage of things like movie clips the men took of the moon, shots from space, the control room during launch, etc. This combined with the movie's very moving score give it a very awe inspiring feel. There are very personal, up close interviews with the astronauts which provide the narration that flows very naturally through the lifecycle of a trip. At the Q&A afterwards, director David Sington (notably British, as this movie was very much "American") said their aim was to get at least one astronaut from each space mission interviewed, and they ended up fairing even better than that in the end. The newly shown footage was found locked away in NASA's cold storage, which is apparently slowly being taken out from the wraps due to up and coming HD technology that makes it possible to get a decent high quality transfer done. The director stated that over 50 hours of footage were grabbed for eventual sorting through to make this movie, and who knows how many interview hours (2 days of interviewing for each astronaut). It seems like a hefty task, especially given the subject matter, but overall the film came out successfully achieving its goal of digging into the minds of those astronauts that made it to the moon and back, and telling their very personal accounts of an amazing journey.

Rescue Dawn is about a US soldier who gets shot down during battle (Vietnam), survives the crash, ends up being taken prisoner and then attempts escape. I won't spoil the ending, but it was a bit surprising and I think part of that was the build up in the first half. The movie is beautifully shot and directed by Werner Herzog with Christian Bale in the lead role whom many have remarked has frequent weight swings. The movie as a whole was a touching personal account as opposed to a "war movie" and the acting was very powerful. I don't really have a whole lot else to say about it except that I feel like the story itself is something I've seen before, which is why it didn't strike me as particularly exceptional except that Herzog treated the direction of it extremely well.

Audience Watch: During the Secret Fest movie, someone behind me whom I later realized was a kid struck probably 5 or 6 items on the Audience Tips list of things to avoid doing in a movie theater. He munched his popcorn with gusto, kicked the back of my seat randomly, and kept asking his mom, "what's he doing?" every time a character did some kind of drug. The worst part about this was that the mom answered back and did nothing to try to tone her kid down or teach him not to talk in a theater. The even worse part about this is that it seems a kid that age should be old enough to identify when someone is taking drugs through either smoking up, injecting or snorting. Then during In The Shadow Of The Moon, two people in different parties kept whispering obnoxiously throughout the duration of the movie. And last but not least, another irk that has cropped up recently is people pushing agendas through director Q&A. For example, those people gushing embarassingly at the Lisa Gerrard Q&A, or someone asking about why no female astronauts were chosen during In Shadow Of The Moon. I often wonder if these and similarly obnoxious or stupid questions are specific to Seattle and it's down to earth non-ritzy festival, or whether it happens at film fests all over.

Earlier today, I sliced a good chunk of my finger on the plastic covering to the Full Series pass. Which is sort of funny because I never even really used it for any movies today since they were stacked so close together that the theater was already letting ticketholders in by the time I arrived.