The Screengrab : tribeca film festival

The Rep Report (April 22 -- April 29)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: An unnamed but prominent runner-up in our recent list of notably unexpected movie reunions, Luis Bunuel's Viridiana (1961) marked the director's homecoming to the country of his birth, Spain, from which he had exiled himself before beginning his movie career rather than live under the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Bunuel was invited to return and launch his first production made on Spanish soil at a time when Franco, or somebody, was apparently feeling sore about the Generalissimo's international reputation as a stifler of creativity who presided over a country that his regime had sucked dry of all life and spirit. The Spanish Film Board duly okayed the script and sent the finished product off to the Cannes Film Festival, cheerfully oblivious not just to its sacrilegious content but also to the possibility that there just might be a hint of a rebuke to Franco in such details as the title heroine's line, "The weeds have taken over the past 20 years... And beyond the second floor, the house is overrun with spiders."

The movie won the Palm d'Or at Cannes that year, but it was also denounced by the Vatican as an affront to the church. In response, Bunuel shrugged, "I didn’t deliberately set out to be blasphemous, but then Pope John XXIII is a better judge of such things than I am." Franco dismissed all the members of his Film Board and burned every print of the movie that he could get his hands on, and Bunuel had to get along as best he could, making his movies somewhere else on the planet, for the rest of his career. Viridiana wasn't shown again in Spain until 1977, two years after Franco's death, and if you'd been living there, you too would have wanted to give it a while to make sure that the silver bullets really worked. I saw it several years ago in New Orleans, in a theater that was full of Jesuit priests, and all the way through it, those guys laughed their heads off at stuff that I'm guessing I didn't have a thorough enough religious education to appreciate. Then the movie ended and the lights came on, and they scuttled out of there as if were afraid of being caught by their mothers at a porno flick. Starting this Friday, Film Forum brings Viridiana back for one week to see if it still has the power to spook the pious. Buneul's last word on the subject was to declare, famously, that he was "still an atheist, thank God"; Franco, his total life achievements accurately summed up in the words of Chevy Chase, is still dead.

For five days starting tonight, Anthology Film Archives hosts a retrospective of the work of Shirley Clarke, a maverick independent filmmaker whose work dates back to that moment when "independent cinema" in America seemed to be an offshoot of the Beat movement. Clarke's first film, the 1961 The Connection, was based on the Living Theater's production of Jack Gelber's New York play about junk and jazz, with a cast that includes Warren Finnerty, Carl Lee, Roscoe Lee Browne, and Garry Goodrow, as well as an onscreen musical combo that includes Jackie McLean. Clarke followed that up with the j.d. drama The Cool World (1964), doubly valuable today as a time capsule of Harlem, and the verite monologue documentary Portrait of Jason (1967). Anthology is showing them all, as well as some of her lesser-known work, including her final film, a 1985 portrait of Ornette Coleman.

The 8th annual Tribeca Film Festival runs from tonight through May 3. In its earliest years, Tribeca was a sprawling mix of international and indie films and big, glossy Hollywood fare that commanded a lot of attention but seemed in no immediate danger of developing its own coherent identity. Last year they scaled way back and were rewarded for it with a minor breakthrough: the top prize winner, Let the Right One In, emerged as a cult hit and counts as the closest that Tribeca has come to putting its stamp on a emerging success, which is seen by many as the mark of a major festival. This year Tribeca has scaled back even further, which people are hoping will result in a tighter focus. The opening night selection is Woody Allen's Whatever Works.

SAN FRANCICSO: The The San Francisco International Film Festival runs from April 23 to May 7.

Woody Allen Comes to Tribeca

Phil Nugent — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 16:00:00 GMT

The complete schedule for the Tribeca Film Festival, being held from April 22 through may 3, has been announced. The opening night attraction is Woody Allen's Whatever Works, which marks Allen's return to the city that figures so prominently in approximately 98.9% of his oeuvre, after a four-film tour of Europe. ""A lovely idea of showing my film in a film festival in my own city," gushed Allen. "It's very exciting." For longtime Allen watchers, much of the excitement comes from the news that, after seeing him try to palm younger actors ranging from John Cusack to Kenneth Branagh in what amounted to the Woody Allen role in some of his earlier pictures, he's using Larry David as the lead in this one. (Granted, it's set in a universe where David is married to Evan Rachel Wood.) Other notable features on the schedule include The Girlfriend Experience, Steven Soderbergh's new film starring the adult-film actress Sasha Grey; Serious Moonlight, directed by Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm co-star Cheryl Hines from a screenplay written by the late Adrienne Shelly; The Englishman in New York, in which John Hurt plays the aged Quentin Crisp, a role he played more than thirty years ago in The Naked Civil Servant; films that have already stirred up some buzz at this year's Sundance Film Festival, including Duncan Jones's sci-fi movie Moon, the political satire In the Loop, and the neo-blaxploitation thriller Black Dynamite; and Love of the Beast, Eric Bana's documentary about his car.

Tribeca made headlines last month when it was reported that Geoff Gilmore had agreed to come aboard as Chief Creative Officer of Tribeca Enterprises, the company that runs the festival, after nineteen years at the head of the Sundance Film Festival. Gilmore is generally credited with having helped to shape Sundance's distinctive identity over the years, so there's been plenty of speculation about what kind of impact his hiring may have on the future shape of Tribeca, which after seven years is still seen as a festival that is in search of a clear identity. This year's Festival includes 85 features and 46 short films, down from last year's lineup of 120 features. Last year's relatively concentrated lineup marked a deliberate effort to wrangle the festival into a manageable shape after the crosstown sprawl of earlier years. This year's further reduced slate reflects that plus the effects of the shattered economy. Tickets become available to the general public starting Monday, March 16.

Who Cries For The Film Nerds?

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 14:45:00 GMT

The economic crisis has been hard for everybody. Some of us have lost their homes; others have lost their savings or their retirement money. John McCain has probably lost the presidency. But, as usual, it's the film geeks who suffer the most, as word comes from Wyoming that the Jackson Hole Film Festival is no more.

We know what you're saying: "I didn't even know that there was a Jackson Hole Film Festival". Possibly you were also saying "I didn't know that there was such a place as Jackson Hole, Wyoming." A few of you were probably saying "Which one is Wyoming again? Is that the one that's totally square, or is that Utah?" I also think I heard a "Seriously? Jackson Hole? There's a place called Jackson Hole and they expected people to go see movies in it?" Okay, okay, settle down. That's enough jokes. The fact is, with the economy bad and getting worse, film festivals -- which once were sprouting like mushrooms -- are likely to become increasingly scarce, and that's not a good thing for movies in generally, and for independent film in particular.

Then again, Hollywood's so-called "Golden Age" began in the 1930s, when America was in the midst of the Great Depression. At a time of deep deprivation and misery, people wanted escape and entertainment more than ever, and the motion picture business thrived. So, what do you think, Screengrab readers? Will the economic collapse we're facing be the beginning of the end for cinema, or will it herald a new Golden Age?

Related Posts:

The Tribeca Film Festival Tightens Up

The 15th (and Final) New York Underground Film Festival

Trailer Review: Baghead

Paul Clark — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later: the first mumblecore horror movie. Even as someone who has never really had much use for the mumblecore movement, this one has me intrigued, in large part because the two elements seem so incongruous. The casual loosey-goosey feel of movies like Hannah Takes the Stairs and Mutual Appreciation just doesn’t seem to jive with the stylistic and storytelling conventions of the fright genre, which if nothing else makes it a noble effort by The Duplass Brothers to make it work. But how successful will it be? A few weeks ago, Screengrab’s own Phil Nugent saw the film at Tribeca, where he praised the comic aspects of the film but had little to say about the horror, which leads me to believe it’s not as much of a factor in the film as this trailer would lead you to believe. Still, I’m willing to give this a shot, which is more than I can say with many movies of its ilk.

Tribeca 2008 Wraps Up

Phil Nugent — Sun, 04 May 2008 23:00:00 GMT

The sixth annual Tribeca Film Festival wraps up tonight with the premiere of the Wachowski brothers' Speed Racer, which will soon be joining the festival's earlier glossy Hollywood premieres, Baby Mama with Tiny Fey and Amy Poehler and David Mamet's Redbelt, in general theatrical release. Most of the major festivals awards were handed out last Thursday. These included Tomas Alfredson's young-vampire story Let the Right One In, winner of the Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature; Hüseyin Karabey, winner of the Best New Narrative Filmmaker prize for his acted-documentary love story My Marlon and Brando; young Thomas Turgoose and Piotr Jagiello, who share the Best Actor honors for their teamwork in Shane Meadows's Somers Town; Eileen Walsh, winner of the Best Actress award for her work in Declan Recks's Eden; Gini Reticker's Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which won as the Best Documentary Feature; and Old Man Bebo, which earned its director, Carlos Carcas, a citation as Best New Documentary Filmmaker. The final prize, the Cadillac Award given to the "audience favorite" film based on ballots filled in by festivalgoers, was announced last night on the TV show Tribeca Presents: Best of the Festival. It went to C. Kareim Chrobog's documentary War Child, about the Sudanese heip-hop performer Emmanuel Jal, who fled civil war in his homeland and who, in the course of the filming, returned to Susan and was reunited with his family for the first time in eighteen years. (The effects of the African civil wars on the children of that region was something of an unplanned subtheme running through many of the best documentaries at Tribeca this year, from Pray the Devil Back to Hell to the ESPN film Kassim the Dream.) "Our audiences fell in love with Emmanuel Jal through Karim's film," said festival co-founder Jane Rosenthal. "I hope this movie not only serves to entertain people but is a call to action to help the millions of children in Africa in need of food, education, and love."

Tribeca is still a very young festival, one that has been both blessed and cursed by being bathed in a much denser concentration of publicity and critical scrutiny than, say, the Sundance or Toronto Film Festivals had to deal with at a comparable point in their development. Mention of last year's sprawling event, which was accused of overreaching, confusion, and inflated ticket prices, still inspires shudders in some of the people who worked on it and have the streak of white in their hair to prove it. This year things seemed to go much smoother, and in general the 2008 festival did pretty well by its self-made mandate to provide a forum for the art of film without giving a cold shoulder to the virtues of quality mass entertainment. Now that it's over, everyone who's spent the past dozen days in Tribeca can carry that mission forward by finally going to see Iron Man.

Introducing the Screengrab Highlight Reel

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 02 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Welcome to yet another new weekly feature here at the Screengrab. Hard as it is to believe, our research shows that there is actually some miniscule percentage of our reading public that misses the occasional post during the week. We can’t stand the thought of any of you being deprived of our wit and wisdom, so every Friday the Highlight Reel will round up the best of the week in Screengrab.

You like film festivals? We’ve got your film festivals covered! Phil “Tolstoy” Nugent has seen and written about seemingly every movie at the Tribeca Film Festival, while Andrew “Dropkick” Osborne has the Independent Film Festival of Boston covered.

While those guys are out loading up on art, I’ve been sitting home with the 100 worst movies of all time. You might say they’re Unwatchable.

Art schmart. What you really want to know is which movies will be the Top 5 Hits of Summer 2008 and which will be the Top 5 Bombs.

Why haven’t all you Objectivists come out of the woodwork to jump all over Leonard “Teflon” Pierce and his takedown of The Fountainhead?

Any Billy Jack fans out there?

How will you spend your weekend? With Grand Theft Auto IV or Iron Man?

And finally, Scarlett Johansson has large breasts. Er, a music video! I meant Scarlett Johansson has a music video!

Winnipeg is the New Cleveland: Guy Maddin's Hometown

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:30:00 GMT

As Tribeca kicks into high gear, New York filmgoers brace themselves for a spate of the strange and unsual, and they don't get much stranger than the fact that Guy Maddin, Canada's master of the bizarre, has apparently made a documentary.

Well, maybe that's going a bit too far -- in this brief interview with the Village Voice's Aaron Hillis, Maddin makes it clear that his new film debuting at the festival, My Winnipeg, isn't exactly a documentary so much as it is a "docu-fantasia", and that the idea of a documentary as little more than straight-up representation of the sort he says could easily be made with a security camera doesn't really appeal to him that much.

But Maddin (who here, as elsewhere, is a mighty fun interview) says that he jumped at the chance to immortalize his hometown on screen: "Canadians, especially Winnipeggers, are lousy self-mythologizers—pathologically so. I think it's because we're sitting next to a country that's so great at it," he says. "I decided, while I'm living here, I should try my best to bring Winnipeg at least up to speed with Cleveland on this sort of thing. "

Win Passes to the Tribeca Film Festival!

Paul Clark — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 23:36:00 GMT

Hey, you! Yeah, YOU! Want to go to the Tribeca Film Festival? If so, Nerve is giving away day passes to Tribeca to four lucky readers so you can hobnob with celebrities like Screengrab's own Phil Nugent. Not only that, but you don't even have to identify quotes to win.

So if you're interested in entering the drawing and you live in the Tri-State area, click this link for more details. So take a look. Don't cost nothin'.

The Rep Report (23--May 1)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: One of the strangest and most intriguing new filmmaking talents to emerge in recent years, the Korean writer-director Kim Ki-Duk gets his first complete U.S. retrosepctive, courtesy of the Museum of Modern art, running from April 23 to May 8. Originally typed as a bit of a sickie on the basis of his 2000 film The Isle, with its isolated, watery setting, creepy eroticized atmosphere, and creative use of fishhooks, Kim has continued to turn out deluxe midnight-movie fare (such as Samaritan Girl) while also revealing a more restrained, meditative side in such films as Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring and the weird, mute romance 3-Iron. The MOMA show will be of special interest to old fans eager to get a look at some of his movies that haven't gotten much play here before, including his 1996 debut picture Crocodile.

"Creatively Speaking" (April 25-27) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music is a series, curated by Michelle Materre and co-curated and produced by Neyda Martinez, that seeks to showcase "realistic, universal portrayals of people of color." It includes documentaries about the culture and political activism of South Africa, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, a concert honoring what would have been Bob Marley's sixtieth birthday, the African-American activist Robert F. Williams, and the roots and spread of hip hop culture, along with a number of dramatic short films. Each screening will be accompanied by a Q & A session afterwards.

FESTIVAL NEWS: In spring, the film geek's heart turns to thoughts of film festivals, where the hardcore faithful can seal themselves up in dark screening rooms to take refuge from all that sunshine and pollen. The Independent Film Festival of Boston, which was founded in 2003 and is already well-established as perhaps the city's premier yearly film event, kicks off on Wednesday, April 23, and runs through the 29th. This year's week-long bash includes new features from Guy Maddin (My Winnipeg, Harmony Korine (Mister Lonely), Werner Herzog (Encounters at the End of the World), and the Hoop Dreams, Steve James and Peter Gilbert (At the Death House Door), as well as documentaries on Joy Division, Harlan Ellison (Dreams with Sharp Teeth), and George W. Bush's home away from home, Crawford, Texas. From April 25 through May 8, Pacific Film Archive will be running standout attractions from the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival, including Ermanno Olmi's One Hundred Nails, Bela Tarr's The Man from London, Claude Chabrol's Girl Cut in Two, Roy Andersson's You, the Living, and Mock Up on Mu, the latest "pulp serial-cum-political tract" from Bay Area filmmaker and "culture jammer" Craig Baldwin. Across the border, Toronto's fifteenth annual Hot Docs Candaian International Documentary Film Festival begins on Thursday and spends eleven days showcasing the best in nonfiction filmmaking, including more than a hundred new pictures and retrospectives devoted to the work of Richard Leacock and Canada's own Jennifer Baichwal. And New York's youthful-and-still-growing counterweight to the city's fall festival, the Tribeca Film Festival, begins Wednesday and continues through May 4, with a handsome spread of independent and international films sandwiched in between the premieres of Baby Mama and Speed Racer. We'll have more to come on Tribeca as soon as it lands.

The Tribeca Film Festival Tightens Up

Phil Nugent — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The Tribeca Film Festival was founded in 2002 by a crew headed by Robert De Niro producer Jane Rosenthal. The first festival, thrown together after some four months of planning, was conceived in part as a response to the 9/11 attacks, an attempt to help revitalize and repair the economy and culture of lower Manhattan. In the years since, the Tribeca Festival has taken on its own identity as a sort of spring time counterpart to the New York Film Festival, with a more populist attitude towards celebrity glitter and commercial blockbusters. (That year, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones was among the premieres.) The festival has continued to develop its own identity, and a certain amount of sprawl has come to seem a part of that. Last year, there may have been a bit too much sprawl; the 160-feature program, which wandered outside the bounds of Manhattan, reminded some observers of the critic David Chute's line about another messy film festival that seemed to have been designed along the lines specified by Monty Python's Mr. Creosote, everything mixed together in a bucket with an egg on top. Jane Rosenthal wants prospective festival-goers to know that they have heard your pleas, and they are responding. She told S. James Snyder that "as a producer, you learn that whoever has a good idea about something, no matter where it comes from, you should listen to it. So this year, we’ve listened to what people had to say last year, and that’s really part of the maturation and curatorial process, as the event grows and learns about its audience...Clearly, a problem for our festivalgoers in the past has been that there’s too many pictures, and they haven’t been able to find the pictures in an easy way. After our first two years, we seemed to lose our hub, and this year we’ve restored that. We’ve made the festival easier to maneuver and slimmed down a slate that is still very large and diverse by any measure.” This year's festival program, which will stick tight to the Tribeca-East Village area, is down to a lean, mean 122 features, and the average ticket price, which rose to $18 last year, is down to a more crowd-pleasing $15, which late night and weekday matinee screenings down to $8. This year's Tribeca Film Festival begins April 23.