Blithely defying industry norms, Film Independent’s Los Angeles Film Festival (June 21-July 1) managed the unlikely achievement of figuratively conferring independent filmmaker status on blockbuster director Michael Bay by presenting the L.A. premiere of DreamWorks’
Transformers to an audience of 4,000 in four theaters simultaneously during the height of the festival.
By now Film Independent’s affinity for mini-major product and studio specialty fare featuring high-profile talent, as evidenced by both the annual Independent Spirit Awards and Los Angeles Film Festival (LAFF) programming, is so well established that even the
Transformers premiere drew little more than shrugs from filmmakers and festivalgoers.
Elsewhere in the fest lineup, those same inclinations were reflected by the gala programming, which put Focus Features’
Talk to Me up front as the opening night film. Kasi Lemmons’s period biopic of 60s radio icon and ex-con Ralph Waldo “Petey” Green Jr. features an awards-worthy performance by Don Cheadle in the DJ’s role, stirringly abetted by Chiwetel Ejiofor as his manager Dewey Hughes and Taraji Henson as Green’s girlfriend. Following his release from prison on an armed-robbery conviction, Petey storms Washington, D.C.’s WOL radio, where station manager Hughes gives him a slot on the morning show and runs interference with upper management to keep Green’s irreverent broadcasts on the air.
Talk to Me has charisma to burn during the first half, but gradually loses some allure as Cheadle’s role diminishes with the decline of Petey’s career.
Fox Searchlight Pictures filled the closing night slot with the North American premiere of Danny Boyle’s highly anticipated sci-fi adventure
Sunshine. Continuing his habitual genre hopping, Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland construct a classic near-future premise about a spaceship crew on a mission to revive earth’s dying sun with the jolt of an onboard nuclear device. Miscalculations soon lead to mishaps that take on disastrous proportions, but midway through, the film shifts from a metaphysical mediation on man’s place in the universe to a space thriller, with ultimately uneven results.
Between the two specialty releases, LAFF thrived in its second year at a newly expanded Westwood Village location, a compact, accessible neighborhood adjacent to the UCLA campus that features several 500-plus-seat single screen theaters favored by the studios for premieres, as well as scattered smaller venues, a filmmaker lounge and dedicated space for post-screening parties and special events.
Seven world premieres competed among the eight films eligible for the narrative competition jury prize. While debate continues regarding the significance of prioritizing festival premiere screenings, suffice it to say that an emphasis on debuting new titles necessarily balances the opportunity for exciting discoveries with the risk of foregrounding mediocre material. For instance,
Severed Ways, subtitled “The Norse Discovery of America,” augured a low-budget epic as the tale of two Vikings stranded on the Northeast coast of the continent in 1007 AD. Shot primarily on his parent’s Vermont property in luminous widescreen HD, Tony Stone’s debut feature displays an evocative visual style, but with minimal dialogue and some dubious plot twists, the thin storyline gets stretched to the point of improbability well before its final existential gasp.
Margarita Happy Hour writer-director Ilya Chaiken presented her second feature,
Liberty Kid, an affecting account of two Brooklyn buddies idled after the September 11 attacks sideline their jobs at the Statue of Liberty. Although Chaiken demonstrates a discerning ear and keen eye for the vernacular rhythms of borough life, achieving striking production values on a modest budget, the principal characters don’t develop much beyond the second act, leaving later reels deprived of narrative momentum.
Other moderately scaled character dramas included
Owl and the Sparrow [pictured above], Stephane Gauger’s appealing Saigon-set first feature about a ten-year-old orphan girl who abandons a life of drudgery working for her stern uncle and heads for the big city, where she struggles to survive by befriending a lonely flight attendant and a broken-hearted zookeeper in a touching attempt to form a makeshift family. Shooting handheld with the bustling Saigon streets as an atmospheric backdrop, Gauger coaxes winning performances from his small cast, crafting a universal story that won the festival Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature.
The narrative feature competition jury presented the $50,000 Target Filmmaker Award to
August Evening, writer-director Chris Eska’s drama centering on a young immigrant Mexican widow’s relationship with her father-in-law and his attempts to help her begin a new life as he struggles with failing health.
Evening’s meandering pace and bucolic visuals of the Texas countryside cast a pleasant spell, but at 135 minutes, the film runs overlong.
Evening’s ensemble cast also won the juried Narrative Acting Award.
The 11 selections in the documentary competition demonstrated the ongoing popularity of non-fiction films for specialty audiences, with titles covering the spectrum from the creative to the peculiar. Filmmaker Ondi Timoner followed up her rock band doc
DiG! with
Join Us, focusing on a group of defectors from a Christian cult. Despite the provocative subject matter and extensive interviews with a variety of alleged victims and experts on religious cults, the film lacks sufficient cogency and urgency regarding the proliferation of these groups.
Athletic fervor is at the heart of
JUMP!, as documentary producer Helen Hood Scheer discovered when she took up the camera to direct this film about the world of competitive jump roping. A global sport involving 400,000 boys, girls and teens worldwide in local, regional and national events, the sport combines jumping, tumbling and break dancing to choreograph astounding speed and freestyle routines. Scheer tracks six teams over the course of a year, following young competitors from practice sessions through the nationals and on to the world championships with in-depth personal interviews and dynamic sequences of the kids demonstrating their impressive skills in this lively and inspiring doc.
Billy the Kid, Jennifer Venditti’s portrait of an offbeat Maine adolescent, ultimately took the $50,000 jury prize for Best Documentary Feature, while festivalgoers voted
Resolved, Greg Whiteley’s (
New York Doll) incisive examination of high school debaters, the Audience Award winner for Best Documentary Feature.
High school debate also figures centrally in writer-director Jeffrey Blitz’s Sundance award-winning debut feature
Rocket Science, which finds a chronic young stutterer recruited for the high school debate team by a senior rhetorician. Her unlikely mentorship inspires her recruit to attack his speech problem head-on while developing a strategy to both succeed at debate and win the girl’s heart. Leveraging a wry perspective on youthful competition from his experience directing the documentary
Spellbound, Blitz creates a nicely nuanced narrative, even if some plausibility-stretching plot points occasionally compromise the otherwise piquant humor.
Young@Heart, a documentary from Emmy-winning British director Stephen Walker about a plucky chorus of singing seniors, led an impressive selection of international titles, winning the Audience Award for Best International Feature. Walker visits Young@Heart’s hometown of Northampton, MA, where he tracks the members’ preparation for a major concert featuring their trademark off-the-wall contemporary music selections, including Sonic Youth's “Schizophrenia,” the Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime” and James Brown's “I Feel Good.” Despite Walker’s sometimes intrusive interview style, the endearing profiles of chorus members (who range in age up to 93), rehearsal footage leading up to the big show and specially staged music videos contribute to a charismatically uplifting doc that will travel on to theaters following acquisition by Fox Searchlight at fest-end.
Labels: Festivals
# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 7/26/2007 10:23:00 AM
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