To enter Gen Art, your name must be on a clipboard manned by a shining, feverish lady in black. If it is you feel lucky, chosen, special, because then you are permitted to taste what life should be like EVERY DAY: lo, there is free beer, free wine, free cookies and free popcorn. You eat, you drink, you look around. Are you in a singles bar? No – over there is a character actor whom you admire... there is another.... it's a film festival! Now another feverish black-clad lady is ushering you inside, and you obey her, because she must be obeyed.

Gen Art’s Film Festival (April 2-8) is just one part of the larger Gen Art mission to produce events celebrating every artistic enterprise, including art, fashion and music. The goal is to celebrate emerging talent, but sometimes it can feel like the focus is more on the event itself than the art within it. And by “event” I mean “party.” Fourteen teams of filmmakers and the army of energetic staff are probably still sleeping off their hangovers a week later. It's an affectionate, city-defined festival that encourages everyone in attendance to get drunk and kiss a stranger.

“This is an audience-driven festival,” says Vice President of Film Jeffrey Abramson. “And our audience are not, by and large, cinephiles who are heading to the arthouse every single weekend. But they’re social, and curious, and they have good taste.” Logos and shout outs to the program’s corporate sponsors are ubiquitous – witness the gleaming Acura planted in the middle of the opening night Diminished Capacity party - but it means an unlimited open bar, so no one seems to mind.

Doug Pray’s Surfwise (pictured above) won the audience award – it’s a crowd-pleaser about the 11-member Paskowitz family, “the first family of surfing,” who grew up living the peripatetic utopian vision of their father, waking up on a new beach every day. “[Subject & producer] John Paskowitz was just going around hugging everybody all night, saying he wanted to spoon people,” said Abramson, as smitten with Paskowitz as he is with every one of the 14 directors.
There is only one screening each night of Gen Art. Each is a New York premiere, though many have been gathering buzz on the festival circuit for months. About half come with distribution already in place, a balance that the programmers have chosen to maintain. The Take, starring John Leguizamo and Rosie Perez, closed the festival on Wednesday night and a few days later opened in New York and L.A. Surfwise was produced by the now-shuttered HDNet, and has distribution via its parents company Magnolia Films.

The family in David Pome’s Cook County runs a meth lab, although the screening and party weren’t any less joyful for it. You can watch theirs and everyone’s antics in the videos by David Jr., who could be seen circling the melee with his tiny Sony video camera at all times. David Jr. edited his pieces nightly, and Gen Art projected them on the big screen the following evening.

Frost, by Steve Clark, carries on a long narrative tradition of wealthy young men with the world at their feet and an existential crisis at their door. Frost was the film with a Gen Art home team advantage. New York-bred Clark shot in his own Tribeca apartment building, his parents’ townhouse, and a city court building lobby – not to mention his friends’ nightclubs. Its stylish cast of bright young things are already fixtures on the New York social scene. The ghost of George Plimpton apparently hung over the production, as Clark and co-writer were editors at the Paris Review before moving behind the camera.

Ultimately it was Jennifer Phang’s marvelous Half-Life, which won the Grand Jury Prize, not much of a surprise after juror Alan Cumming’s glowing preface to the announcement.

“Half-Life is not an easy film, but [our films] don’t have to be super digestible,” said Abramson. “We want films that will connect with our audience. Some speak directly to our audience like Frost or they’re something that’s unique and original, like Nightlife… we really want to showcase talent that we think is going somewhere, that has a future.” This promise of great things to come has been satisfied by alums like Azazel Jacobs, Ilya Chaiken, Brad Anderson, Craig Brewer, and many more.

Reached by phone on his way to the airport, Abramson and Gen Art are already gearing up for an upcoming film festival in Chicago, casting for Project Runway, an art exhibit of cellphone videos with Nokia and, to be sure, more parties.

# @ 4/14/2008 01:42:00 PM Comments (0)

The Miami International Film Festival’s (Feb. 28 - March 9) lack of public screenings before 4 p.m. makes sense only after you’ve plopped bare feet onto the beach and felt the sun on your face--unusual sensations for movie people, several of whom were seen sporting freshly burned skin in the fest’s first half. On Day 4, Henry Fonda flaunted his own deep, dark tan in Once Upon a Time in the West (1969), magnificently restored from the Techniscope negative by veteran Paramount archivist Barry Allen and screened to a small but ecstatic audience at the Gusman, Miami’s gorgeous, ’20s-era movie palace.

If the MIFF never again conjured such cinephilic magic as Once Upon a Time, we should blame the rare poetic genius of the late Sergio Leone and not the admirable efforts of the fest’s new director Patrick de Bokay, whose years as a Hollywood executive likely helped bring Demi Moore and her 25-member entourage to the Gusman for a screening of Michael Radford’s Flawless--a film not quite truthfully named, but worthy for settling almost half of the old art-and-commerce equation. (Would you believe that the star plays a thief?)

Among de Bokay’s other important achievements is having kept the Miami fest’s focus on Ibero-American fare, represented in this 25th anniversary edition by films in both dramatic and documentary categories (e.g., The Zone in the former and Stranded in the latter).

“The power of Miami is that it’s on U.S. soil, but it’s also multicultural,” says de Bokay, who’s multiculti himself--a Hungarian born and raised in Paris before moving to Los Angeles and now Miami.

“You can be a filmmaker from anywhere,” de Bokay says, “and your film has an audience here, in a real theater. So on the one hand, the purpose of [the MIFF] is to grow into a global entertainment event--following Sundance in January and Berlin in February--that showcases everything that can be done in this industry. Yet, on the other hand, the most important thing in Miami--the centerpiece of the festival--is the [awarded] competition. We try to find the best work of the moment and give it the proper recognition.”

At fest’s end, an Ibero-American jury split its award, recognizing both the Haitian/French Eat, For This is My Body and the Mexican Cochochi. The World Competition jury, which included actress Catalina Sandino Moreno (costar of Steven Soderbergh’s upcoming pair of Ché Guevara biopics), awarded its grand prize to the Polish Tricks (Sztuczki), with special mentions going to the Serbian It’s Hard to Be Nice and the violent Israeli drama Foul Gesture (Tnu'a Meguna) (pictured above).

Speaking of Foul Gesture (and in the spirit of full disclosure here): I served with Hungarian critic Géza Csákvári on the two-man FIPRESCI jury that considered the 15 films of the World Competition category and awarded the aforementioned Israeli movie, which plays like a political variation on the 1970s rash of urban American vigilante flicks--or like Spielberg’s Munich at half the length and twice the guts.

Tight as a drum, Foul Gesture is a movie in which every scene--nearly every line of dialogue, in fact--serves to support a handful of interwoven ideas about masculinity, parenthood, sexual frustration, downward mobility, writers’ block, terrorism, Jewishness, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to name a few. More broadly speaking, director Tzahi Grad’s insight into the stress-inducing details of modern life is acute enough to cause the nervous viewer some additional anxiety--as befits a movie that on some level means to point its middle finger at us. The film isn’t called Foul Gesture for nothing.

Though one senses this festival is still getting its bearings on an operational level, the best films--including the jury-feted docs Santa Fe Street (Calle Santa Fé) and Santiago--asserted the programmers’ taste for both significant subject matter and artful execution. And when, at some hours, there weren’t any films--good, bad, or ugly--to be seen at all, well, there was the beach.

# @ 3/19/2008 03:08:00 PM Comments (0)

In only four years the Dubai International Film Festival (DIFF) has taken on the Herculean task of establishing itself as a platform for Middle Eastern films to the Western world. And when there seems to be no limit to the amount of money the city will put into the fest (and itself: the tallest building in the world will soon be located in Dubai, its mall has the largest indoor amusement park and an indoor ski slope, and there’s the seven-star hotel, Burj Al Arab), it seems DIFF will only grow from here. But will the fest be a side note to the region’s abundance of wealth, exotic locale and gaudy architecture or become a legitimate contributor to the film community?

Unlike the Cairo, Marrakech (which ran at the same time this year as DIFF) and the one-year-old Abu Dhabi festivals in the Middle East, DIFF’s advantage is its deep pockets, which can tempt filmmakers with its over $300,000 in prize money for winners in the competition categories, very tempting for the extremely financially strapped Middle Eastern film community.

But DIFF this year (Dec. 9-16) also brought some of the best Western films to Emirati audiences who would never see these films as we do (UAE censorship laws make it impossible for any film with heavy violence or sexual content to be seen in its entirety, but those laws were lifted to films playing in the festival). The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Control, Gone Baby Gone, Bee Movie and No Country For Old Men were some of the films screening during the seven day fest. Though I stayed clear of most of these as they were already released in the U.S., I couldn’t resist seeing a Coens film in another country, and it was interesting to see how a sold out audience in another region of the world took to No Country; laughing or cringing at the same scenes audiences in America would.

Most of my time in theaters was watching what Eastern cinema had to offer. And for the most part I was pleased. My favorite film of the festival was one I learned I’d missed at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, Making Of (pictured above). Directed by Nouri Bouzid, and set in Tunisia during the fall of Baghdad to American forces, the film follows Bahta (Lotfi Abdelli), a slick-talking dancer, who is manipulated into a fundamentalist group. But Bouzid decides to begin discussions about the film’s subject matter before the final frame. In a clever move, scenes suddenly halt and the viewer is thruster behind the camera where director and actor begin heated discussions about the film’s message and the motivations of the Bahta character. Done with humor and respect to all cultures, Bouzid makes a thought-provoking film that’s one of the best I’ve seen about the war. And Abdelli (who won a best acting award at Tribeca) gives a tour-de-force performance. From China came Ning Cai’s Season of the Horse. In the vein of fellow Mongolian filmmaker Byambasuren Davaa’s Story of the Weeping Camel and The Cave of the Yellow Dog, this simple story follows a family of nomads who can’t cope with the progression going on around them, specifically the family’s patriarch, Wurgen (Cai), a stubborn farmer who reluctantly sells his horse so his boy can go to school but learns that the horse was the final link to his ancestors and slowly drifts into a mid-life crisis. Lastly, there’s another simple story about a farmer that stuck with me, Amor Hakkar’s The Yellow House. After learning that his son has been killed in the line of duty, the poor farmer must hop on his tractor and take The Straight Story-like journey to retrieve his body. Beautifully shot, the final five minutes of the film are heart wrenching to watch.

But like many young festivals DIFF has growing pains. Some are out of their hands and will improve as the city blossoms while others are so elementary it was puzzling why it was occurring. One of the biggest head scratchers was why the festival didn’t announce the films it was showing before it started. The only press releases before the fest brought notice to the opening night film Michael Clayton and even on their website they had no section that listed the films (thought it’s listed on the site now). Also, many screenings didn’t begin on time, especially the gala screenings that had red carpet arrivals. Another major problem is the progress of the city. Due to the huge amount of construction being done throughout Dubai, and little mass transit options, the three main roads in the city are constantly congested which made it difficult for many people to get from the Madinat Jumeirah, where the main box office and press conferences took place to the Emirates Mall where a majority of the films were screening. And for the press, a shuttle from the Habtoor Grand Resort, where many of us stayed, to the Madinat at times felt like an eternity (if the shuttle came at all). But the construction of monorail lines around Dubai should make things easier in a few years.

Talking to most filmmakers, press and industryites either located locally or abroad, most are fascinated by Dubai’s growth and believe the festival can become a great outlet for area filmmakers. Writer-producer Janet Dulin Jones, who was at the festival to network as her company Storyteller Films is planning to shoot a few films in Jordan, was taken by the stories she heard from filmmakers. “Many of them have had to leave their native lands due to war or other religious tensions,” she says via e-mail after the festival wrapped. “Yet they create, they are passionate and they want to bring their voices to the world.”

But with the fact that films are censored in the region and many Internet sites dealing with homosexuality, AIDS, or any other "taboo subject" are blocked, the region still has a long way to go before it can call itself progressive. There are signs of progress though. One short program in the fest called Emirati Voices highlighted the work of young student filmmakers from UAE that questioned everything from the war to the strict Muslim culture they were raised in. That the festival let these brave filmmakers express their feelings, beliefs and thoughts was inspiring as these people will hopefully be the foundation of a much stronger film community in the future.

# @ 1/06/2008 11:01:00 PM Comments (0)

Now in its second year, the spectacularly-funded new-kid-on-the-block Rome Film Fest (Oct. 18-27) exhibits the apparently ontologically inescapable teething pains that all toddlers must endure – disorganization, poor communication skills, a certain clumsiness, and a forward-looking sense of “anything’s possible.” Also, a tendency to imitate the mother’s facial expressions – in this case, the Venice Film Festival in particular and every other “big” film festival in general. What this often leads to is the empty husk of spectacle, or spectacle disassociated from its original purpose and adrift in the free-floating play of eternally recombinant signifiers that is contemporary culture.

Add to this a way-out-of-the-way location that typically took over an hour of travel time to get to, a state of the art audio-visual complex that was weirdly non-functional – for instance, seats in the balcony facing not towards the screen but at a 90 degree angle – and films that were supposed to be subtitled in English but weren’t, and voilà – the Rome Film Festival! But there were stars aplenty: Robert Redford! Tom Cruise! Sean Penn! Emile Hirsch! Sophia Loren! Bernardo Bertolucci! Gerard Depardieu! Jane Fonda! Martin Scorsese! Scratch that, Scorcese couldn’t make it. Ang Lee!

The festival’s most trumpeted achievement was the premiere Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth, his first film in ten years and his self-proclaimed return to his indie roots. Also included was a new documentary on Coppola titled Coda: Thirty Years After by his wife, Eleanor Coppola (Hearts of Darkness), followed by an on-stage interview with the man himself. And indeed, the presence of Coppola and his family seems the perfect objective correlative for what this festival was all about – star power, a rather dated notion of cinema, and a fuzzy-minded stab at Italian-ness.

A more courageous curatorial foray was the largest retrospective ever of the always brilliant but occasionally slapdash films of the astonishingly prolific Chilean Director Raul Ruiz, a filmmaker whose work is so original and challenging that a different approach was needed. It’s not enough just to quietly screen 40 Ruiz films in a festival of this size and scope. There needed to be discussions, lectures, special guests, and an on-stage interview. Instead, the Ruiz retrospective was relegated to the margins of the festival, with Ruiz receiving a lifetime achievement award at an award “ceremony” the time of which was never announced. Such oversights made the retrospective seem like someone’s half-hearted attempt to add another notch to their festival belt rather than a sincere and passionate expression of admiration for Ruiz’s prodigious opus.

The most memorable event of the festival, for me, was the in-person conversation with Terrence Malick. Malick, who is legendary for never appearing in public or granting interviews, made a rare and, as far as I know, unprecedented public appearance, with the stipulation that there would be no cameras and that he would only talk about his love of Italian cinema. Like most Malick-worshipping cinephiles, I attended the event with impossibly high expectations. But Malick did not disappoint. He was disarmingly gentle, shy, soft-spoken, humble, and sincere all at once. It struck me as remarkable that someone so obviously pure of heart and other-worldly could exist and function in the gaudy, tinsel-strewn, cut-throat world that is contemporary cinema.

# @ 11/28/2007 03:42:00 PM Comments (1)

Now in its 20th year under the firm stewardship of festival director and art-film connoisseur Alan Franey, the Vancouver International Film Festival (September 27 to October 12) remains the same as it ever was: committed to an intelligent mix of new movies from Asia and Canada (and new nonfiction from around the world), and admirably resistant to the market pressures that sometimes threaten to make its East Coast Canadian sibling, the Toronto International Film Festival, look like one big studio junket. Hardly a haven for awards strategists and sales agents, Vancouver is chiefly for filmmakers and viewers — a fact reiterated at almost every post screening discussion here, but particularly this year at the now legendary Q&A that followed the aptly named Operation Filmmaker.

If you haven't heard by now, documentarian Nina Davenport's politicization of the Project Greenlight formula — here the vaguely talented young hopeful hails from war-torn Baghdad — is a total knockout. But the blows delivered after one of three VIFF screenings are what accounts for the persistent buzz.

Among those who defended Davenport against audience accusations that she had exploited and otherwise unduly dissed twentysomething Iraqi playa Muthana Mohmed — a PA on lefty Liev Schreiber's Everything is Illuminated set — is the Boston Phoenix's Gerald Peary. After several viewer indictments of Davenport, who's seen in the film giving money and other support to the reluctantly self-sufficient Mohmed, Peary stood up and said, "Don't you people understand that this film is a comedy? In Toronto, people were rolling in the aisles! You're all so serious!"

Neither was knee-jerk political correctness on the agenda of another Davenport fan, Jim Finn, whose own VIFF film La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo (The Shining Trench of Chairman Gonzalo) [pictured above] — something of a Hi-8 La Chinoise — is a thoroughly fascinating, scrupulously provocative mock-doc about young female members of the Shining Path, the Peruvian Maoist revolutionary terrorist group, circa 1989.

"I'm an independent filmmaker," Finn announced when the Q&A for Operation was threatening to get bloody. "And I can tell you," he joked, "that we're all assholes, pretty much."

Speaking more seriously a few days later, Finn gave props to the VIFF for its programmers' enthusiastic support of indie filmmakers with something to say and limited means with which to do it. "You get here [to Vancouver]," Finn says, "and right away you can tell that the festival people have not only seen your film, but they know it well and they understand it. They really want you to be at the festival. And in my experience, that's pretty rare."

Like his staff members, including Cinema Scope editor-in-chief Mark Peranson, Franey is an unmistakably devoted cineaste. He still vividly remembers attending the original incarnation of the VIFF with his dad in the early '60s, when the great Michelangelo Antonioni came to town and critic Pauline Kael served on a jury. This year, Franey's fest drew a record 150,000 people and plenty of positive feedback, which encourages him to continue focusing on the fest's mission to serve not only artistically significant work, but that which, like Finn's film, could use a leg up.

"As much as we like seeing Pirates 3 and Shrek 3, et cetera," says Franey, "the truth is that for anyone who cares about cinema, the diversity of voices and the excellence of other forms of cinema is incredibly threatened. So that's why we stick to our guns. We're a nonprofit cultural institution. We don't think we should be paying Canadian taxpayers' money on promoting the latest Hollywood release."

The closest this year's edition came to routine stargazing was the ritzy French farce Priceless, with Amelie's Audrey Tautou as a Cote d'Azur golddigger whose latest "catch" turns out to tend bar. Screened on closing night, the movie served to prep the well-dressed crowd for an aptly swank afterparty at the Sheraton Wall Center. Maybe it even warned a few wealthy spouses with roving eyes not to mistake one of the Sheraton's expert cocktail-mixers for the next Mr. Moneybags.

But for this decidedly non-bourgie reviewer, Priceless wasn't worth a Canadian nickel past the first half-hour; indeed, the sight of Tautou and Gad Elmaleh's hardly suave martini man squirming in bed sent the sleepy critic straight back to the hotel, where clean sheets and a DVD of the VIFF's, um, Young People Fucking awaited.

Likewise more valuable than Priceless was the $25,000 cash-prize award — announced before the screening — to The Planet, one of nearly a dozen films in the fest's "Climate for Change" series, sponsored by the pro-Earth activists at Kyoto Planet. Not a Nobel Prize, perhaps, but a little green won't hurt The Planet — nor its three heretofore unknown Swedish directors (Michael Stenberg, Johan Soderberg, and Linus Torell).

Unlike Earth, the "ecosystem" that Franey mentions — that of Canadian festivals — isn't endangered in the least. "What we share [with the TIFF] is English Canada, and that's a small market about half the size of California," Franey says. "And yet we have two festivals less than two weeks apart. It works, because it's actually not a competitive relationship between the two [festivals]. As a matter of fact, Toronto — which does well at maintaining that very public, business, glamorous face — helps save us a bit of those commercial pressures. We've always operated as a complimentary opposite [to Toronto], and I see no reason to change that."

# @ 11/06/2007 10:28:00 AM Comments (0)

It's been noted that with Tribeca nipping at its heels and film fests sprouting like kudzu, the New York Film Festival might be losing its relevance and lustre. Well, to judge by the 45th edition, such concerns are premature. From Sept. 28 to Oct. 14 the NYFF — the 20th with Richard Peña at the helm — rolled out a wide-ranging lineup of mostly exhilarating films. If they reflect, in Pena's words, "the state of cinema," one piece of the cultural landscape is in rude good health.

The selection struck a happy balance between marquee names, art house auteurs, and lesser known talents. Included, too, were folks, such as Brian De Palma and John Landis, whom you might not expect to encounter in this venue. Absent but not missed was such trendy fluff as last year's Marie Antoinette from Sofia Coppola.

The fest flung open its doors to the embattled planet, and political consciousness loomed front and center (more than in the 44th edition, with the exception of Abderrahmane Sissako's Bamako.) The Axe in the Attic, a doc from Ed Pincus and Lucia Small, used cinema vérité to record the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, culling from the devastation harrowing stories of human survival and bureaucratic red tape. More resonant than the standard-issue hand-wringing, Axe voices the suspicion that bearing testimony with the best intentions may not be enough.

Brian De Palma's Redacted [pictured above] is a gut-punch that felt ripped from cable news. It's a fictionalized account of a 2006 atrocity committed against a teenaged girl and her family by American troops in Mahmoudiya. This portrait of a dazed, confused, and vengeful platoon, complete with resident video diarist, reveals with cold fury how a misguided war causes soldiers to lose, in the anemic phrase, their "moral compass," turning them into marauding beasts.

Harking back to his countercultural roots, De Palma marshalls his indictment of American policy with technical brio: a soldier is making a video about the war (hoping it will get him into film school), while another films him making the video; then the narrative is passed to a French doc; then to TV footage; then to a surveillance camera complete with running time, and so on. A collage of the ways we process information in the video age, yes - but also a vehicle to convey De Palma's rage, as if he were continually stepping back to refocus his lens in order to comprehend the horror.

Based on the graphic novel of the same name, Persepolis, co-directed by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, is a rara avis: a film that dares to tackle big topics — history! politics! Western imperialism! — but by canting the narrative through the POV of a feisty young girl named Marjane also becomes a crowd pleaser. Using groundbreaking animation, the film takes Marjane from childhood in Iran, through adolescence under the oppressive Khomeini regime, to expat life in Vienna. An added pleasure is Danielle Darrieux voicing Marjane's wise but outrageous grandmother (who needed toning down, Satrapi told me, to be credible). The filmmakers chose stark black and white animation instead of real life actors, they stated in the press conference, because the abstract nature of the drawings provided something that all people could easily relate to. Interwoven with Marjane's sentimental education, the critique of Anglo-American designs on mid Eastern oil goes down easy — and would delight Noam Chomsky.

Tales of family dysfunction arrived, not surprisingly, courtesy of the American contingent. Noah Baumbach feels almost like a project of the NYFF: his first film, Kicking and Screaming, was a selection, followed by painful/funny The Squid and the Whale. Margot at the Wedding is more lateral step than advance. When the toxic Margot (Nicole Kidman) arrives for the nuptials of her sister (Jennifer Jason-Leigh) to husky-size underachiever Jack Black, she acts as a catalyst that tips this shaky bark into the brink. Baumbach is a master of breathless editing that lends psychological drama the pace of an action movie. But Margot swims in a murky light that often obscures the actors' faces, a puzzling esthetic choice. Baumbach shines here as a writer, less as a filmmaker.

The Darjeeling Limited from Wes Anderson, another NYFF regular, was probably, on reflection, not a bad choice for opener. It offered marqee names to walk the red carpet; lightness and brevity; visual delights; armchair travel; contagious music (I still hear that catchy Peter Sarstedt song from the Darjeeling prelude, Hotel Chevalier). But I was not alone in finding this spiritual quest by three brothers jejeune, as well as culturally clueless. Yes, Anderson creates a unique world; you either like the vibe or you don't. For me the film played like Rich White Boys Do Rajasthan.

Set in the 1940s, Married Life by Ira Sachs is an impeccably acted roundelay about the pathologies of marriage, but never quite finds its tone. You could call Go Go Tales a family comedy, even if this gang inhabits the Paradise Lounge, a place of twirling tassels, pole dancing. and Asia Argento hilariously bouncing off walls en route to her act. Abel Ferrara's engaging sleaze fest follows the travails of club owner Willem Dafoe, who needs to win the lottery to pay his back rent and keep the joint rockin'. Tales features riotous cameos by landlady Sylvia Miles, threatening to sell to Bed, Bath and Beyond; Matthew Modine, in blonde bangs, as king of Staten Island beauty salons; a cook selling gourmet free range hot dogs. The thump of porn music fades in and out and everyone talks in phlegmy growls. Shot over 21 days in Cinecittà, the films builds to a comic delirium, playing like an extended single take.

A tragic family saga, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead from Sidney Lumet follows Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman as two brothers who hope to solve their money woes by robbing a mom-and-pop jewelry store owned by… their mom-and-pop. But the foolproof plan misfires horribly, creating a series of disasters that sweeps through the family like a rolling blackout. Lumet juggles time in intriguing fashion, revisiting earlier scenes to open fresh persepctives on the characters. But who are these people? They walk, talk, and wear suits, but seem some species of Neanderthal loose in the city. Especially despicable is Hoffman's opportunistic wife (Marisa Tomei), secretly having it on with his younger brother. What will resonate for more than a few viewers is the desperate need for cash that drives these losers. Ethan Hawke as the beleaguered younger brother only continues to grow as an actor, both onstage and in film.



A cluster of films dealt with existential crises in formally innovative ways. Paranoid Park by Gus Van Sant (who was awarded a special 60th anniversary prize at Cannes for his body of work) plumbs the ordeal of a teen skateboarder who has accidentally caused the death of a security guard near a skate park. Van Sant conveys the boy's turmoil through a severely fractured narrative, layering over it a soundtrack combining Nino Rota and musique concrete by the brilliant Leslie Schatz.

Alexander Sokurov's Alexandra is a flat-out masterpiece. During the fest it got picked up by Cinema Guild; let's hope they have the wherewithal to get the film before the public it deserves. Sadly, much of the public suffers from media-induced ADD and may not cotton to the stately elegaiac pace of Sokurov's tale of a Russian grandma who travels to a military camp near the Chechnyan border to visit her grandson. Offering a more conventional narrative arc than in his recent films, Alexandra is both a meditation on the futility of war, as well as a love story as big as the steppes.

In The Diving Bell and the Butterfly American painter-filmmaker Julian Schnabel weighed in with a French-language film about one-time Elle editor and bon vivan Jean-Dominique Bauby, who was leveled by a catastrophic stroke that locked him in the title's diving bell, leaving him to communicate with one eye-lid. A harrowing story, but the film converts one man's appalling fate into a visual tour-de-force, taking the viewer into the world according to Bauby.

The French presence included two tart, worldly-wise films from renowned auteurs. Claude Chabrol's A Girl Cut in Two continued his ongoing vivisection of the bourgeoisie through a nasty tale of a light-weight weather girl, who becomes the battleground for two male egos duking it out. Adapated from a novel by 19th century bad boy Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress expanded the fearless auteur's inquiry into female desire onto the larger canvas of a period piece. In its insistence on the primacy of desire over just about everything else, it's, well, the most romantic film I saw in the festival.

Finally, a couple of lovely surprises from left field. A hit in Cannes, The Orphanage from Juan Antonio Bayona eerily reworks the blurred lines between fantasy and the real in the manner of Henry James in The Turn of the Screw. What begins as a supernatural thriller veers into darker terrain about debts owed the dead by the living. It's also scream-out-loud scary. And after all the gravitas and angst and feel-bad ladled out by NYFF 45, what could be more welcome than a dollop of laughter. That was provided in spades by John Landis with his doc Mr Warmth: The Don Rickles Project, an overview of the insult comic's life and times. At 81, Rickles has lost none of his timing, or skill with equal-opportunity insults. Landis's film offers up not only a grand slice of Americana — it's also formally stunning. An artfully fragmented meditation on a life and period that interweaves Rickles' live performance with talking heads, raucous roasts, quiet backstage moments, managers in comb-overs and sharkskin suits — and visions of a flamboyant mob-run Las Vegas that's now the stuff of legend.

# @ 10/17/2007 05:48:00 PM Comments (0)

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.

# @ 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.

# @ 7/10/2007 11:15:00 AM Comments (0)

The Sarasota Film Festival's (April 13-22) director of programming Tom Hall, programmer Holly Herrick, executive director Jody Kielbasa and the rest of the staff and attending filmmakers are getting a reputation... for making the SFF quite possibly the most enjoyable regional film festival experience in the United States. Of course 10 days of sun, sand and sea doesn't hurt, but the real pleasure here is the feeling of artistic collaboration and celebration. One gets the feeling that the staff like working with each other and the attending filmmakers really like seeing each other's films and boy howdy do the local audiences love watching the films! In fact, on the ninth day of the fest, I overheard as an elderly couple (Sarasota's population skews towards the upper end of the age spectrum) made plans to attend their 37th film of the fest and were looking to break 40. That's impressive for a film professional, even more so for the general public.

Hall's programming philosophy is pretty simple: If it's good, it screens. He's been heavily quoted as saying that his M.O. is "one for them (the audience) and one for me," however this year's submissions were so good, according to Hall, that he didn't have to make such a distinction. The opening night film, David Sington's Apollo space program doc (and upcoming THINKFilm release) In the Shadow of the Moon was exactly the sort of rousing, thought-provoking, engrossing film that opening nights were made for. The event was all the more special by a post-screening Q&A with the director and Astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the 6th man to walk on the moon. And much of the talk at the lavish opening night party following was about not only the film itself, but the film's subjects. A perfect reaction to a documentary.

There's been much talk in the festival world lately about premiere status and claims of certain events strong-arming filmmakers into bypassing fests such as Sarasota and SXSW and Hall's got strong opinions on the subject: "Our mission is to bring the best cinema to festival audiences and also to discover new work. While I think premiere status matters from an industry perspective [in that] buyers want to attend markets where they can buy brand new films before their competitors, outside of one or two festivals in North America, I don't think it matters at all." In fact, Sarasota doesn't promote the premiere status of its films at all because they deem it irrelevant. "Our goal is to bring the best in cinema to our audiences and the industry. Period."

That practice has served them well, as SFF was stop number two on the "Great Mumblecore Road Trip of 2007." Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs [pictured above], Ry Russo-Young's Orphans, Aaron Katz's Quiet City and Michael Tully's Silver Jew were just a few of the films making the trip from Austin to the Gulf Coast along with their makers, which is one of the key things that elevates Sarasota above the rest of the pack. Not only do Hall and Herrick curate a fantastic event, but they do their best to bring in as many filmmakers as possible who, along with industry guests and an astonishingly high level of community support and involvement combine to make the SFF a special event. The 4 a.m. hotel pool skinny-dipping excursions don't hurt, either.

SFF also embraces the work of master filmmakers. This year's recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Filmmaking was Norman Jewison and the Sarasota audience was treated to screenings of Moonstruck, Fiddler on the Roof, ...And Justice For All, A Soldier's Story, The Russians Are Coming The Russians Are Coming!, and The Thomas Crown Affair, not to mention an "In Conversation With..." session between Jewison and Turner Classic Movies' Robert Osborne. There were similar conversations with actor-director Steve Buscemi, actors Joe Pantoliano & Marcia Gay Harden (in town with Canvas) as well as actor Edward Norton & writer Brian Koppelman.

An added treat at the fest is the music. And for me the soundtrack at this year’s SFF will be liberally sprinkled with songs by Athens, GA-based collective, Of Montreal, who played a rousing set at Sarasota's Minxx Nightclub. Hall is getting a reputation as not only a fantastic programmer but also as the deliverer of exceptional musical performances for the festival crowd. In his short three years at the artistic helm, the Sarasota crowd has been treated to gigs by former Husker Du/Sugar frontman Bob Mould, DeVotchKa, Ted Leo & the Pharmacists, Kiki & Herb, crooner Matt Dusk and Of Montreal.

"One of the most important things to remember when putting together an event," says Hall, "is that film doesn't exist in a vacuum, but is instead one medium among many, speaking to similar concerns and ideas. We wanted to bring musicians in to the festival because musical performance is a complimentary experience to the cinematic experience and we think it makes the festival more whole." In addition to the musical performances, programmer Holly Herrick put together a reception with local visual artists and filmmakers, with the hopes that it might inspire a conversation among artists working in diverse media and engage the local artistic community. "Movies are treated like disposable commodities in our culture," continues Hall, "and our goal is to reverse that trend in the minds of our festival-goers by properly contextualizing film as one among [many] visual arts."

All in all, the 9th annual Sarasota Film Festival was a wonderful experience for all involved. Embraced by the local community and filmmakers alike, the event's 10th anniversary should be one of the "can't miss" stops on the festival trail next year.

# @ 5/13/2007 07:15:00 PM Comments (0)

The tone of the 36th edition of New Directors/New Films (March 21-April 1) might be encapsulated in the words of a character from The Great World of Sound, a first feature by Craig Zobel: "Fuck 'fair.' Life ain't fair." In fact, if the miserabilist flavor of the festival is any indication, the world (hedge fund managers excepted) is not a happy place.

Many of the 26 films in the fest (a joint venture of the film department at the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center), featured the proverbial little guy ground down by poverty, war, incarceration, or just old age. This parade of misfortune threatened to become a downer. But a couple of standouts — Day Night Day Night [pictured above] by Julia Loktev and Red Road by Andrea Arnold — transformed their grim content, through accumulated detail and the musique concrete of everyday sounds, into riveting cinematic realism. Both films are marked by icy control and withholding of crucial information. Both induce paranoia: either we’re under surveillance or menaced by a bomb. Both work an intimate canvas, while opening a panorama on big issues.

Day Night Day Night — Loktev’s astonishing first feature which became a fest talking point — follows a polite 19-year-old girl of unstated origins and motives as she's prepped by her handlers to become a suicide bomber, and then deposited in Times Square. The first half, shot in a leached light, watches the girl ritualistically wash, depilate, brush teeth. She barely speaks; it’s that awful light that voices her state of mind. Moments of gallows humor surface as the girl "models" a series of teen uniforms and knapsacks; and makes a bomber's final video, the handlers blotting a shiny nose and fitting her out with a cartridge belt, as if for a graduation photo.

But it's in the second half in Times Square, shot in raucous color, that Loktev gets all cylinders firing, staging a battle between mundane life — munching a sticky candied apple, the proximity of overweight tourists slung with cameras — and the heavenly rewards envisaged by the girl. In a laugh out loud sequence (yes, even in this context) a bling-laden dude hits on the girl, saying “Why don’t you love me — I'm somebody," a plaint that echoes throughout the fest.

In Red Road from the U.K., Jackie (the superb Kate Dickie) works as a CCTV (closed circuit television) operator, scanning the mean streets around the Glasgow projects. One day she's jolted to discover a man from the past on her screen, apparently on parole from a 20-year prison sentence. Jackie stalks, then seduces him in a scheme to exact revenge for a crime revealed only in the third act.

If Loktev reels in the viewer with gallows humor, Arnold does so with a sex scene that had everyone talking in last year’s Cannes. That the woman is violating, in a sense, the man (for a change); that she’s both aroused and cratering with hate evokes a netherworld of eros seldom seen on screen. And by canting much of the story through CCTV, Arnold endows a tale of female rage with a larger resonance.

Though less powerful than Arnold's and Loktev's, other films in this internationalist lineup also documented “Life on the Margins.” What the Sun has Seen from Michal Rosa is an omnibus tale involving several down-and-outers scrounging for money in southern Poland, whose lives eventually intertwine. It also typifies the miserabilist film that remains as dreary as the pain it documents. More engaging is The Only One from Belgium's Geoffrey Enthoven, which indicts the ghetto that society erects for its aging population, extracting humor from the refusal of an ornery codger to be shunted into a nursing home, and his desire, at eighty, to kick up his heels.

Padre Nuestro (which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance) by talented Christopher Zalla plumbs the plight of Mexican illegals struggling to gain a foothold in the States. While getting trucked to New York, a wily teen steals another boy's money and letter of introduction to the father he's never seen, then passes himself off as the son. Though the plot is gimmicky, give Zalla credit for refusing to sentimentalize immigrant life, and exposing a subculture rife with mutual exploitation. He nails the feel of what it's like to be cast out, penniless and on the street. And his camera captures the gaunt whites and menacing shadows of neighborhoods where Hubert Selby's Tra La La (from Last Exit to Brooklyn) might have felt at home. Like Day Night Day Night, this film uses light to illuminate the heart of darkness.

All horrors pale, though, beside those unveiled in War/Dance by husband and wife team Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine. In Northern Uganda, a rebel group has shattered the lives of three children, who now live in a large refugee camp. The film is part straight-to-camera testimonials from the children (one was forced to become an assassin), all the more wrenching for being voiced in neutral tones; and part rehearsals for a National Music Competition held in Kampala. Paradoxically, from the worst circumstances, the filmmakers have spun an upbeat mood — but the pandering, "personal best" note violates the suffering of these children.

A subset of “Life on the Margins” might be dubbed “The Great American Underbelly.” In The Great World of Sound, a feature that plays like a doc, Craig Zobel casts a cold eye on hucksters looking to sucker amateur musicians out of $3,000 by promising to cut, then promote a CD. Martin and Clarence, the company's A-team, set up shop in cheesy motels across America to offer local "talent" a shot at the gold ring.

At the screening I attended, the audience laughed at the guys' ploys — "It's all about the song"; "Do me a favor and take a chance on your future" — to get singers to part with money they didn't have. I found the thing more appalling than funny. Zobel exposes a culture of workers so bummed by wretched jobs, they’re putty in the hands of scammers (who in turn get screwed). As in Padre Nuestro, bottom feeders target an even lower link in the food chain — which made me think of Herbert Marcuse’s claim that the ruling class is invested in keeping the underclass at each other’s throats.

Audience of One, a doc by Michael Jacobs, inspects another dubious pocket of America. Richard Gazowsky, a pentecostal pastor, claims he’s been mandated by God to film a sci-fi blockbuster called The Shadow of Joseph, with a projected budget of $50 million. Jacobs walks a fine line between mocking this spirited man’s aspirations — as well as a congregation with crosses tattooed on their hands, and the borderline types he casts in the film — and treating the pastor's endeavor with respect. Though it's windy in the way of many docs — just because it's real doesn't make it watchable — Gazowsky exemplifies the tenacity and, yes, insanity necessary for any creative person, religious or otherwise, struggling to get their dream out in the world.

So what about love? While last year’s ND/NF offered a slew of odd couples, this year l'amour was in short supply. Is the world of emerging filmmakers too embattled for such luxuries? An exception was Euphoria from Russian playwright Ivan Vyrypaev, the strangest, most gorgeous film of the series (though I heard it dismissed as "arty”).

From the opening scene of a motorcyclist zooming toward us with a mad grin, accordion music clanging (the guy never appears again, by the way) we're on unfamiliar ground. At the center is the adulterous passion of a couple, who wander the Russian steppes in some demented remake of Elvira Madigan. “Since they have never been taught to love and to be loved,” says the director, “they cannot cope with the euphoria that has seized them." In an instance of the film’s impudent tone, the lover says, "Don't worry about your husband, I'll kill him if necessary.” Unscrolling in some Wild West of the heart, Euphoria bears re-watching — in one haunting shot, the lover lies in a boat under the stars, gliding diagonally up the screen. And the desolate landscape, with its curving River Don and roads cut into the land like the "earth work" art of Walter de Maria, acts as a fourth character.

From Argentinian filmmaker Alexis Dos Santos comes Glue, which could be subtitled "Horndogs in Patagonia." Lyrical, hormone-addled, and largely improvised, the film turns digital video into a painter’s brush. In one scene, three teens sit around giggling, witless — a mobile hanging in the face of one — talking about absolutely nothing. Perfect! Never separated from his red knapsack with raccoon tail, Dos Santos charmed the audience at the festival’s public screenings, which include often revelatory Q&A’s with the artists.

Jean-Pascal Hattu based 7 Years on stories collected from women involved with men in the slammer. The erotic triangle formed by a woman, her husband, and a warden is not so much kinky as a desperate strategy to build bridges between a cruelly separated couple. The acting is impeccable; Hattu is a talent to watch. The much-touted Once, from Irish director John Carney, follows two broke musicians, who launch a career together and edge toward love. I found it enervating, but at least it didn't wrap up in the way viewers were primed to expect.

Not surprisingly, several films explored the search for roots and origins. In Cowboy Angels, a misfire by Kim Massee, a neglected boy launches a search for his dad, but the studio concept on an indie budget made an unhappy mix. Far more engaging was Congorama from Belgian Philippe Falardeau, about a man's search for his birth parents in francophone Canada. Demanding much of the viewer, this convoluted journey — that at moments has its head up its ass — deconstructs the whole notion of narrative. Catch it for the great Olivier Gourmet alone, whose myopic gaze suggests he's trying — vainly — to figure out why he was put on earth. The feature Stealth by Swiss Lionel Baier sends a young man named Lionel to Poland to unearth his origins. Part of the fun is figuring out which is the actual Baier and which is a screen persona.

A writer’s character comes to life, causing no end of trouble, in Paul Auster’s slumberous The Inner Life of Martin Frost, which kicked-off ND/NF. What likely worked as a print parable about the writer’s psyche got lost in translation to the screen. A zippier take on the writer’s life is Reprise from Norwegian Joachim Trier. When two young men launch careers as scribblers, one perseveres, the other goes bonkers. Rather than the story per se, what’s original is the cheeky form, flouting linear time, winging it with voiceovers, wandering off on hypothetical riffs, and generally thwarting expectation at every turn. Whew! Exhausting. That Trier is a former skate board champ helps explain the twisty momentum of this film.

# @ 4/23/2007 01:36:00 PM Comments (0)

The Palm Springs International Film Festival (January 4-15), with a budget around $2.8 million, advertises itself as the fest “where star power and the cinema come together.” The order is significant. On opening weekend, this 18th edition and the fourth under director Darryl Macdonald hosted a meretricious gala at the Convention Center — replete with a video-clip homage to emcee Mary Hart of Entertainment Tonight — saluting the canonized talents of the past year. These shining lights feasted with, and courted from the stage, 1,800 high-rollers — good PR for the studios as awards season commenced. Among the honorees were Kate Winslet, Jessica Biel, and the entire cast of Babel (Brad, too), including Cate Blanchett, who, at just 37, received a career achievement award. The festival invited the L.A. film press, nearly all of whom returned home by the next morning with their Tiffany swag.

The following eight days comprised most of “the cinema” portion of the formula. Once the “star power” waned, so did the overall energy. Yet attendance, much of it reflecting the area’s retiree demographic, was good at many screenings of the 254 features. The program is a mixed bag — too many bad French films, for one — although the Cine Latino and Eastern European selections were a cut above. Scattered throughout the gala screenings, New Voices/New Visions (its jury awarded Argentinian Verónica Chen’s Agua), Scandinavian sidebar, doc section True Stories, and World Cinema Now were many of the usual fest suspects, more than 20 LGBT features, and a plethora of so-sos.

What IS distinctive about Palm Springs is “Awards Buzz,” an Oscar preview section that includes 55 of the 61 submissions for Best Foreign Language Film — an opportunity to inspect some sort of barometer of last year’s worldwide production. Having viewed them as a juror, I couldn’t help but wonder how individual countries make their choices. Quality? Connections? Second-guessing the elderly Academy members who vote in this category? Better films were made last year in several of the represented nations.

Almost all of the movies that merited serious discussion had been discussed and validated during the past year (and were on the 9-film Academy shortlist announced mid-January), yet there were several fine films with less word-of-mouth: Romanian Catalin Mitulescu’s The Way I Spent the End of the World, Brazilian Marcelo Gomes’s Cinema, Aspirin and Vultures, Chilean Matias Bize’s In Bed, and Hungarian Szabolcs Hadju’s White Palms. The winner was, perhaps predictably, Guillermo del Toro’s Mexican entry Pan’s Labyrinth. Best Actor nod went to Mads Mikkelsen (Casino Royale) for Dane Susanne Bier’s marvelous After the Wedding, which IFC Films will release this spring, an astute, stunningly photographed study of an unusual ménage-à-trois set in Bombay and Denmark. Blanca Lewin took Best Actress for In Bed, a sizzling peep into a one-night stand shot in a single motel room.

As far as trends go, a number of the Oscar entries turned out to be about war, specifically war involving Muslims — not surprising in this post-9/11 era of global paranoia, terrorism, and American aggression. The value of Mohamed Al-Daradji’s Ahlaam, a mediocre Iraqi film that follows three inmates of a mental asylum before and during the U.S. invasion, lies in its graphic depiction of bombing, shooting, looting, and clueless American soldiers behaving insensitively toward locals. In a conventional movie about neighboring Afghanistan, Fyodor’s Bondarchuk’s disturbingly celebratory The 9th Company, Russia waxes nostalgic, in spite of the fact that it withdrew in defeat. The focus on the occupying soldiers’ solidarity and heroism fighting a faceless enemy is alarming.

Much more accomplished are Bosnian Jasmila Zbanic’s Grbavica: Land of My Dreams, which Strand opens in February, and Algerian Rachid Bouchareb’s Days of Glory, soon to be released by The Weinstein Company. Grbavica takes place in Sarajevo after the genocidal war by Bosnian Serbs against the Bosniaks (Muslims) over secession from Yugoslavia, yet that struggle is a hovering absence. Zbanic astutely observes the tense relationship between a single mother and the troubled 12-year-old daughter who is unaware that she is the product of her mother’s incarceration in a Serbian rape camp. Like Grbavica, Days of Glory is reality-based and addresses ethno-religious divisions. Bouchareb tells the story of a battalion of Algerian Arab soldiers who fought courageously in the Second World War to defend France, their “mère patrie.” French officers and the official bureaucracy treated them as second-class (non-) citizens. Worse still, the government later denied them their pensions. War is hell, but so is its aftermath.

# @ 2/13/2007 02:23:00 PM Comments (0)

This year’s Marrakech International Film Festival (Dec. 1-9) did not boast any breakthrough films spread within its exotic 22-country, 121-film slate, but the 6th year did lift the fest up another notch in the global circuit by importing an intriguing array of glitzy guests.

Roman Polanski, who had just come off of accepting a Lifetime Achievement trophy from the European Film Awards in Warsaw before the fest, was the jury president. Susan Sarandon was the main tribute, along with national treasure/Moroccan actor Mohamed Majd (who caused a diasporas ripple, as he was quoted in a local magazine stating, "It would be a mess if the organizers of the Marrakech film festival were Moroccans;” reflecting the fact that by and large the Arab-based festival is run by the French), Egyptian director Tewfik Salah, Indian actress Kajol Mukherjee-Devgan and her husband Ajay Devgan and Chinese director Jia Zhang-Ke, whose film Still Life won the Golden Lion at Venice in 2006. Martin Sheen was there to support his son Emilio Estevez’s film Bobby, last year’s jury president Martin Scorsese (whose film, The Departed was the festival’s opener) curated a section called The Italian Preference — a 40-plus film adventure through the history of Italian cinema. Even Morpheus himself, Laurence Fishburne, showed up to declare, “I love you,” to the crowd of 7,000 who were jammed into the awe-inspiring outdoor screening of the Matrix trilogy at Marrakech’s famous Jamaa El-Fna Square. On hand included Morocco's King Mohammed VI and his son His Royal Highness Prince Moulay Rachid.

Sarandon was in fine form at a press conference, teasing the reporters, answering questions about her long-time relationship with Tim Robbins, her enjoyment of working with first-time directors (“it is the film they are most passionate about”) and her time with Ridley Scott on the landmark Thelma & Louise. She gracefully pointed out, that although Scott was not by any means a feminist, one did not have to be best pals with the director to work within a creative collaboration. Polanski was calm and civil in his turn on the public skewer, despite the fact most of the questions asked surrounded his lack of financial and artistic success in America over the past few years. Not even his referencing the Academy Award winning The Pianist halted that particular blather.

Sifting through a competition slate which included Todd Field’s Little Children, Andrucha Waddington’s House of Sand, and Narjiss Nejjar’s Wake-Up Morocco, the jury, who was comprised of actors Sandrine Bonnaire, Jamel Debbouze, Paz Vega, David Wenham and directors Pan Nalin and Yousry Nasrallah, among others, gave their high marks to films with political content. Marrakech’s Golden Star was awarded to German director Dominik Graf’s uneven, but often very funny, The Red Cockatoo; a 1961-set, rock ‘n’ roll infused cold war drama (the Best Actor prize went to the film’s lead actor Max Riemelt). The Jury Prize went to Radu Muntean’s The Paper Will Be Blue; a gritty, also dark humored film that look at the chaotic aftermath in the wake of the fall of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Best Actress was handed out to Fatou N’diaye in Robert Favreau’s A Sunday In Kigali an account of the 100 days of genocide in Rwanda.

The festival finished off with the charming, relatively light comedy from France; Patrice Leconte’s My Best Friend, which casts Daniel Auteuil, who is sublime as a grumpy loner who has to fabricate himself a best buddy in order to win a bet.

# @ 1/18/2007 02:10:00 PM Comments (0)