Duck Season Tagged Articles at Cinematical

This week's weather report for the lovely Puget Sount area: rain, followed by more rain, with occasional showers breaking through. Yup, it's March in Seattle. Fortunately for us, my fellow Seattleites, it's always raining film in Seattle as well. I know, 'round here we don't let a little rain stop us from getting out and doing our biking, hiking and mountain climbing, but when you get done with all that, go bask in the warm glow of the projector light and watch one of the many cool films showing around the Seattle.

UW Film Club 

Be Here to Love Me, FREE screening, Thursday, March 30 @ 7:30PM, UW, Smith 120 

UPCOMING:

Seattle Arab and Iranian Film Festival 2006, March 31-April 6 - The festival has some promising films lined up, including Sundance winner Iraq in Fragments.

Fernando Eimbcke's Duck Season is on the surface such a simple film that I keep forgetting how much of it I enjoyed. There are some personally relative morsels that remain vividly in my consciousness, but above all it plays out with such a soothing, leisurely calm, its resonating effects easily go unnoticed. Though filled with ideas, it hardly sparks reflection let alone discussion. Instead it affects a negligibly warm sensation, not like a feel-good movie does, but like an afternoon with friends or a piece of candy taken for granted in their accessibility.

Yet it appears to be significant to some, enough to sweep Mexico's Ariel Awards (their equivalent to our Oscars), win the Grand Jury Prize at The AFI Fest, contend for the best foreign film at this year's Independent Spirit Awards, and find a gracious fan in director Alfonso Cuarón (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), who secured its American distribution by presenting it under his new Esperanto Filmoj banner. Not bad for a glorified student film, black and white and all, about two pals in an apartment with nothing to do. With its inordinately stylish direction Duck Season would work best as a calling card, but surprisingly it has served Eimbcke as an all-out initiation into the club.

While I originally intended this edition of Trailer Park to profile more of the films screening at Sundance, I soon realized that most of the footage arriving online (except for Moonshine) comes in the way of film clips. Don't get me wrong, I dig clips, but this isn't Clip Park - it's Trailer Park.

However, while I was assembling the trailers to go along with my theme, I realized that three of the films played last year's Sundance fest. Not only that, but three of them are also from first time directors and all of them have something to do with growth, or the lack thereof. Sure, the title of this post may remind you of some old school 90's R&B song, but that particular tug-of-war into adulthood plays a big part in each of the films. Maybe not so much for one of them, but you'll see what I mean. So here we are, attempting to grow up, in this week's Trailer Park...