The Deets
The Stranger's SIFF Know-It-All Movie Quiz will take place Wednesday, May 22 at 8:00 p.m. in rooms 3200 and 3212 at Seattle Central Community College (voted #1 college in America by Time magazine!). DOORS WILL CLOSE at precisely 8:00 p.m. and NO LATECOMERS WILL BE ADMITTED. Bring two sharpened #2 pencils, your thinking caps, and loose, comfortable clothing. Scantron sheets and scratch paper will be provided.
The test will consist of 25 multiple-choice questions and one essay. In the event of a tie, the essay will be the tie-breaker. Quizzes will be graded by The Stranger's deft squad of adjudicators, and winners will be named before the end of the night. No contesting of grades will be permitted. Participants will be required to sign a pledge of honor before their exams are graded.
All of the questions on the test will consist of information taken from the materials published in our May 9 issue, in The Stranger's SIFF Quiz Cheat Sheet (also available online at www.the stranger.com)--but this is not, repeat NOT, an open-book quiz. A team of proctors and docents trained by Kaplan will inspect the test facilities before any exams are handed out. Cheaters will be held up for savage ridicule before the public both at the quiz site and in print.
The Prizes
· Four full-series VIP Passes to SIFF, which entitle the bearer admission to any SIFF event, with the exception of Opening Night, the Secret Festival, and Filmmakers Forum. Passes are non-transferable.
· Two tickets to Teatro ZinZanni's "Dinner and Dreams."
· Two full passes to Bumbershoot 2002.
· Gift certificates to Red Light and Belltown Billiards.
· The Stranger Guide to Seattle and various other junk that says The Stranger on it.
So there you have it. All you have to do is memorize the facts, show up on time, and either ace or bomb the quiz, and you'll be rolling in it all month long. One other thing: Here is a brief addendum to last week's Cheat Sheet, because life isn't fair:
In the film Renaldo and Clara, directed by Bob Dylan, and starring Bob Dylan as Renaldo and Sara Dylan as Clara, there is a character named Bob Dylan, who is not Bob Dylan, played by Ronnie Hawkins, the singer who fronted the Hawks; the Hawks (sans Ronnie Hawkins) backed up Bob Dylan when he went electric in 1965, and later became known as the Band; they made The Basement Tapes (as well as the LP Planet Waves) with Bob Dylan, who later joined the Band for its farewell concert in 1975 (as did Ronnie Hawkins), which was chronicled in Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz; the 1965 tour was chronicled in Eat the Document, a film by D. A. Pennebaker and Bob Dylan, while Bob Dylan's 1975 tour (without the Band), called the Rolling Thunder Revue, was featured in Renaldo and Clara, which also stars Joan Baez, Sam Shepard, Allen Ginsberg, and Mick Ronson, among others. There are no films from Afghanistan, Iraq, or North Korea in this year's festival. Three of the films in SIFF's tribute to the American films of the 1970s are The Parallax View, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and Shampoo, which proves that Warren Beatty was the greatest movie star of the '70s. The following short films will be screened at this year's festival (title, director/country): Brju, Heeraz Marfatia/India & USA; Dos Mas, Leon Siminiani/Spain; The Time I've Eaten Popcorn (Do Tempo Que Eu Comia Pipoca), Catherine Agniez & Heloisa Passos/Brazil; At Dawning, Martin Jones/UK; Baking Lessons, Lisa Porter/Canada; The Ballad of Courtney and James, Steve Collins/USA; Barrier Device, Grace Lee/USA; The Fine Line Between Cute and Creepy, Robert D. Slane/USA; Acid Petit Fours, Jonathan J. Detrixhe/USA; Breaking Up Really Sucks, Jen McGlone/USA; No Prom for Cindy, Charlie Adler/USA; Against Sadness, Beatrice Sasha Kobow/Germany; Eight, Sarah Basine/USA; Empty, Jared Micah Herman/USA; Faithful, Marzena Grzegorczyk/Poland & USA; 1000 Marys, Christina Gruppuso/USA; Apocalypse Part 9 & 16, Zbigniew Dowgiallo/Poland; The Crab Boy, Aaron Thedford/USA; Extreme Man and Insane Boy Episode I: The Screaming Skull, Webster Colcord/USA; Hasta Los Huesos (Down to the Bone), Alejandra Guevara Castillo/Mexico; Henry's Garden, Moon Seun & Kevin Geiger/USA; See the Truth, Jerold Howard/USA; Doppelganger, Gareth Smith/USA; Dream a Little Dream for Me, no director listed/USA; The Duchess, Eric Koziol/USA; The Host, Nicholas Tomnay/Australia. Petr Vaclav's Parallel Worlds, a Czech entry in this year's SIFF, took the coveted Golden Kingfisher Award at last year's prestigious Pilsen Awards. The documentary Hearts and Minds was "Presented by Henry Jaglom and Zack Norman," because the documentary was purchased from Columbia with money raised for Jaglom's second film, Tracks (starring Dennis Hopper), which was financed by way of a tax shelter scheme for doctors and dentists devised by Norman, who later appeared in several of Jaglom's films (including Babyfever and Festival in Cannes); Jaglom appeared in Hopper's The Last Movie, though Norman did not. "Valentino's agony was the agony of a man of relatively civilized feelings thrown into a situation of intolerable vulgarity, destructive alike to his peace and to his dignity. It was not [an unflattering press write-up] that was riding him; it was the whole grotesque futility of his life."--H. L. Mencken.
Saturday, June 16 is Bloomsday, the day during which James Joyce's Ulysses takes place. Bloomsday will be celebrated as part of this year's SIFF, with a party at the Richard Hugo House. In the 1967 film of Ulysses, directed by Joseph Strick, Fionnula Flanagan, playing Gerty MacDowell, has a 12-minute masturbation scene. The book Ulysses contains the adjective "scrotum tightening." The scrotum of Guillaume Depardieu, son of Gérard Depardieu, can be seen in several films, including Tout Les Matins Du Monde (dir. Alain Corneau, 1991), and Pola X (dir. Leos Carax, 1999). Speaking of bollocks, in the film In Love and War (dir. Richard Attenborough, 1996), the role of Ernest Hemingway was played by Chris O'Donnell. In Werckmeister Harmonies (dir. Béla Tarr, 2000), a controversy is caused by the public exhibition of a whale carcass. Rejected titles for the film that became sex, lies, and videotape included 46:02, 8 Millimeter, Charged Coupling Device, Retinal Retention, Mode:Visual, Visual Search, and Hidden Agendas. From "Helpful Hints for Writing Papers" (An Introduction to Film, Thomas and Vivian C. Sobchak): "Avoid words like 'great,' 'good,' 'effective,' 'emotional,' 'well-done,' and 'interesting' as simple adjectives in phrases like: 'The use of location was very effective,' or 'Light was used in a very interesting way.' Statements like these strung out on a page fill up the white space but do not say anything. If these words are used at all, they must be immediately qualified by more specific information, and supported by concrete details." The following bands and musicians are featured either as live performers or subjects in either the Exploding Cinema series or the Night Music program at this year's festival: They Might Be Giants, DJ Spooky, Ben Harper, Voyager One, DJ Maxwell Implosion, DJ Christo, DJ Kid Hops, Biggie Smalls, Tupac Shakur, the No Smoking Orchestra. The Motion Picture Association of America considers the presence of "bodily humor" as a factor in deciding what rating a film will receive. "You don't have to be a drug addict, pederast, sado-masochist or nitwit to enjoy Performance, but being one or more of those things would help."--New York Times. Donald Cammell, who wrote and co-directed Performance, killed himself after seeing the producer's cut of Wild Side, a film Cammell wrote and directed, which excised a full hour of material from the version submitted by Cammell. In 1993, the Olympia Film Festival screened a midnight-to-dawn program of Italian horror films by directors Dario Argento and Mario Bava, including Four Flies on Grey Velvet, The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, Inferno, and Deep Red, with prints borrowed from the private collection of Sage Stallone.
