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 Comments (0)

As the oldest film festival in North America, the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) celebrated its 50th anniversary April 26-May 10 with a variety of special screenings, events and awards. Following a period of inapt leadership under previous management, the second fest helmed by executive director Graham Leggat saw SFIFF beginning to regain its stride while facing increasing competition from a variety of high-profile festivals with rising influence on the U.S. circuit.

When the San Francisco Film Society launched the SFIFF in 1957, the domestic festival scene was wide-open. By contrast, this year’s calendar saw SFIFF running almost concurrently with the Tribeca Film Festival and closely followed by both CineVegas and the Los Angeles Film Festival. The three younger fests have gained increasing prominence in the last several years, challenging the perceived hegemony of more established festivals and successfully competing for film selections, premieres, guests and sponsorship. (Ironically, Tribeca and LAFF are both programmed by former SFIFF staffers.)

The heart of the International’s New Directors narrative section is the annual Skyy Prize juried competition for first-time feature filmmakers, which confers a $10,000 award. Among the 11 films selected this year, Joachim Trier’s Reprise delves into Oslo’s hip urban literary scene, focusing on the rising careers of several young Norwegian authors. The underdeveloped storyline falters in the early going with the mental breakdown of one of the principal characters and labors to recover momentum in later reels, but a lack of engaging drama and a bleak visual palette hamper the nonlinear narrative, leading to an unconvincing resolution.

A freewheeling Hong Kong mockumentary, The Heavenly Kings leverages the popularity of Asian-American actor and Canto-star Daniel Wu to create a full-blown fictional side project. Wu, who also directs, forms the band Alive with three buddies and despite their near-complete lack of musical ability, the group soon finds popularity in an amusingly faked send-up of Asia’s pop culture fixations. As Wu’s DV production charts the quartet’s fairly predictable ups and downs, some viewers may miss Kings’ clever central conceit, namely that the band’s entire concert tour was staged as an elaborate piece of performance art for the sake of the film.

Ultimately the Skyy Prize went to The Violin, Francisco Vargas Quevedo’s black and white period portrayal of peasant political unrest in 1970’s rural Mexico, which also took the best narrative feature audience award, while the audience prize for best documentary feature was given to A Walk to Beautiful, an account of impoverished Ethiopian women seeking scarce medical care for injuries suffered in childbirth.

Out of competition, the New Directors program continued with Eagle vs. Shark, Taika Waititi’s nerdy New Zealand romantic comedy about a pair of mismatched mid-20s lovers brought together by video gaming. Although not without occasional offbeat humor, the film’s mannered performances and deliberate quirkiness prove altogether too precious, overwhelming its genuine though understated charms. On Fire, a French drama from Claire Simon that initially portends a serious case of youthful romantic obsession, percolates nicely for the first hour and then sputters into melodramatic machinations after a teenage girl literally begins playing with fire in an attempt to fulfill her unrequited crush on a married, middle-aged firefighter.

Festival opener Golden Door [pictured above], Emanuele Crialese’s period saga of Italian immigrants journeying to America in the 1900’s that premiered at the 2006 Venice Film Festival, was prominent among the international cinema selections. While the choice may have appeared suitable given the title’s resonance with the fest’s 50th anniversary, critical response was noticeably mixed prior to Miramax’s late-May U.S. release.

Longtime fans of Irish music and film, San Francisco audiences received writer-director John Carney’s Once with two simultaneous sold-out screenings. A winsomely charming near-romance rich in character detail, Carney’s film grafts a minimal narrative about a Dublin street musician and the immigrant Czech pianist who unexpectedly walks into his disheartened life onto a selection of resonant folk-pop tunes, coaxing winning performances from its two non-pro leads. For many, the low-budget Once represents an authentic and increasingly scarce variety of top-quality filmmaking that relies primarily on the inspiration and skill of the creators and performers, rather than the infusion of mini-major resources.

SFIFF’s special event presentations centered on the Film Society Awards Night fundraiser, which featured an evening of tributes to filmmaking veterans Spike Lee (directing), Robin Williams (acting) and Peter Morgan (screenwriting). Multi-hyphenate George Lucas received the one-time Irving M. Levin Award, named after the festival’s founder, for his various roles promoting cinema arts.

Celebrity filmmakers were also prominently featured in one of the fest’s three world premieres, Gary Leva’s hagiographic Fog City Mavericks, a documentary focusing on the careers of Lucas and other prominent Bay Area filmmakers (among them Francis Ford Coppola, John Lasseter, Phil Kaufman, Walter Murch and Saul Zaentz), which drew a long list of industry luminaries to the Castro Theater screening, but only lukewarm response from critics.

SFIFF wrapped after 15 sprawling days with La Vie en Rose, Olivier Dahan’s indulgent period biopic of the French singer Edith Piaf. Throughout the 140-minute film, overstuffed with minor characters and digressive incidents, Marion Cotillard evinces a brave, intense performance as the emotionally wounded “little sparrow” that’s likely to be enthusiastically recalled come awards season.

While attendance hit approximately 84,000 this year, assuring SFIFF’s status as the preeminent Northern California regional festival, achieving a similar stature among other major city fests both domestically and internationally may remain an ongoing challenge.

Labels: Festivals

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 7/10/2007 11:15:00 AM Comments (0)