SF IndieFest: The Proposition
As our cab pulled up to the Castro Thursday night, our driver said "ANOTHER film festival? Don't we have one of those every week?" While a look at our email inbox indicates that he's not that far off base, dude, it's IndieFest! If IndieFest happened every week, we'd be in the hospital, rehab, or morgue, but we would have had a hell of a time getting there.
Joining the crown filing into the The Proposition, it was sort of surreal to see the SFist logo flash across the screen, as one of the sponsors of the Festival. Go us!
As with all "opening night" screenings, it began with the appearance of a local "celebrity." We really mean it with the quotation marks, because in this case, when we say "celebrity", what we mean is "Jan Wahl". Our favorite moment of her opening remarks was when, as she went on (and on) about (gasp!) the unique nature of San Francisco, she rhetorically asked "And what other city would let me keep brodcasting for so many years?" Around us, oh so many non-rhetorically responded "good question."
After some words from IndieFest's Founder/Director Jeff Ross (and we got mentioned again! And people who wetre not us clapped! Thank you, clappers!) and Director of Programming Bruce Fletcher, and some to-be-expected technical difficulties (would it be IndieFest without them?), we settled in for The Proposition.
Directed by John Hillcoat and written and scored by Nick Cave, The Proposition takes the Wild West cinematic tradition and transplants it to 19th century Australia, where it flourishes. The beloved themes of outlaws, slaughter of the native peoples, rape, horses, and poor personal hygiene remain the same, even as the landscape and accents differ.
Before you know what's going on, you're in the middle of a gun battle, with no clue who the good guys and bad guys are. It comes out that two of the battle's participants are members of an infamous crime family that's been raping and murdering its way across the outback. One of the captured brothers is sent out to murder the Mansonish leader of the gang (Danny Huston), with the youngest brother held hostage in exchange for the deed.
We wanted to like this movie -- we like Westerns, and killing, and crime. But, in the words of our companion, "the movie couldn't tell whose story to tell." Every stinking (and we mean that literally because boy did these people look dirty) character got his or her own storyline, which works great on "Lost" but seems needlessly-complicating in a broad-stroke genre film such as this one.
Guy Pearce did his best Clint Eastwood as the man sent to kill his brother, but what seems laconic on Clint seems just passive in Pearce. Now that we think about it, maybe that's our frustration with the whole movie -- so many of the characters seemed so damned passive, content to let the (frequently dreadful) events wash over them. The only person who really seemed capable of action was the murderous gang leader. Is that truly how the West was won, by men and women waiting for fate to catch up with them? Watching people wait to get killed is less fun to enjoy when you feel like they could get out of it if they'd just get off their asses and do something.
After the movie, we headed over to the opening night party at Balazo Gallery. God, that place is huge. Besides all the usual IndieFest folks (like big hunk of meat guardian Jeff Ross, in the picture above), we saw the publication-transitional Harmon Leon, Blood Tea and Red String's director Christiane Cegavske in period dress, and some dude who made fun of our purse.
Strangely, we went from ready to kill to ready to take him to dinner in less than 10 minutes, a true testament to the spirit of IndieFest at work. We suspect that this is neither the first nor the last time that this will happen over the next two weeks. We promise to keep you posted.