Quick comments on the winners
5/7/2006 2:16:06 PM
 | | The Play |
I didn’t see the two big narrative and doc winners --Blessed by Fire and War Tapes. I actually didn’t hear a thing about the former, but I did hear great buzz on the latter, as I noted in an earlier post.
I’m enormously pleased that Cats of Mirikitani won the Audience Award. Don’t be confused by the fact that that award pops up at the end of the winners list. It’s a big one, and it comes with a $25,000 prize. I didn’t review Cats here, but it’s a fascinating, at times emotionally devastating doc about an elderly homeless Japanese-American street painter, and the filmmaker’s journey back into the man’s past. (See my New York mag review here.)
I’m also really happy that two films I touted here and elsewhere, Oren Rudavsky’s The Treatment and Pelin Esmer’s The Play (Nerve reviews are here, and you can link to my NY Mag reviews from those if you so wish) also did well, winning Best Made in NY Narrative Feature and Best New Documentary Filmmaker, respectively.
Permalink : http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/tribeca2006.aspx?id=104e4608#4608 |
The Winnaz
5/7/2006 2:51:30 AM
 | | Blessed by Fire |
The winners are announced, and here they are. (Sans commentary, I'm afraid, for now.)
The Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature – Blessed By Fire (Iluminados por el Fuego), Directed by Tristán Bauer, Argentina, Spain.
Best Documentary Feature – War Tapes, Directed by Deborah Scranton, USA.
 | | The War Tapes |
Special Documentary Jury Prize – Voices of Bam, Directed by Aliona van der Horst and Maasja Ooms, Netherlands.
Outstanding achievement in documentary to Jesus Camp, directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, USA; Jonestown:The Life and Death of Peoples Temple , directed by Stanley Nelson, USA; MAQUILOPOLIS: city of factories, directed by Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre, USA/Mexico.
Best New Narrative Filmmaker – Marwan Hamed for The Yacoubian Building (Omaret Yacoubian), Egypt.
Best New Documentary Filmmaker – Pelin Esmer for The Play (Oyun), Turkey.
Best Actor in a Narrative Feature Film – Jürgen Vogel in The Free Will (Der Freie Wille), Germany.
Special mention to Adel Imam, The Yacoubian Building (Omaret Yacoubian), Egypt.
Best Actress in a Narrative Feature Film – Eva Holubovà in Holiday Makers (Ucastnici zájezdu), Czech Republic.
Special mention to the ensemble cast of Holiday Makers (Ucastnici zájezdu).
NY Loves Film Documentary – When I Came Home, Directed by Dan Lohaus, USA.
Honorable mention to Jack Smith and the Destruction Of Atlantis, Directed by Mary Jordan, USA and The Cats of Mirikitani, Directed by Linda Hattendorf, USA.
Best Made in New York Narrative Feature – The Treatment, Directed by Oren Rudavsky, USA.
Honorable mention to A Very Serious Person, Directed by Charles Busch, USA.
Best Narrative Short - The Shovel, Directed by Nick Childs, USA.
Special mention to Topor and Me (Topor et moi), Directed by Sylvia Kristel, Netherlands.
Best Documentary Short - Native New Yorker, Directed by Steve Bilich, USA.
Student Visionary Award – Dead End Job, Directed by Samantha Davidson Green, USA.
Audience Award - The Cats of Mirikitani, Directed by Linda Hattendorf, USA.
 | | The Cats of Mirikitani |
Permalink : http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/tribeca2006.aspx?id=104e4606#4606 |
How not to sell your horror flick, part deux
5/6/2006 8:30:00 PM
I wrote last week about the weird vibe that kicked off the midnight screening of Hatchet, which threatened to sour me on the film. Something similar happened last night, when I went to the midnight (oh, okay, 11:30) screening of Gravedancers. This time, it was a short, directed by the young actor Adrian Grenier (the main dude from Entourage), entitled Euthanasia.
The short begins with two teenage girls pulling out of a driveway in a car, totally psyched -- one of them just got her license and they’re screaming with joy. As they pull away, we also see the family cat run out the front door. Well, guess what happens. Sure enough, on an empty stretch of road, our heroes run over the cat. While trying to decide what to do about it, they realize the cat is still alive, barely, and they have to put it out of its misery. And that’s pretty much it.
I think I can sort of see what Grenier’s going for here. This is a loss-of-innocence narrative, a la Peter Weir’s (far, far superior) Picnic at Hanging Rock or Jean Renoir’s A Day in the Country. (Please kill me; I just compared Adrian Grenier to Peter Weir and Jean Renoir.) Two girls cheerily go off together and are confronted by some kind of unnerving, vaguely horrific event, and their lives will never be the same again.
What doesn’t work, and what irritated me so much, was the fact that after a certain point, the film begins to indulge in campily showing us the cat (a fake one, I’m relieved to note) falling apart, its leg falling off, its guts spilling out. It’s pretty ghastly, but not in an oh-my-god-I’m-so-disturbed kind of way, more in a why-the-fuck-am-I-being-subjected-to-this kind of way. Cruelty to animals, even fake ones, is one of those things that really bother me in films, mainly because it often feels like a fairly cheap filmmaker’s ploy. It takes a lot more narrative wherewithal to show cruelty being done to humans. When it happens to animals, however, it has an offhand quality that bugs me. I suppose it could be a response to the kind of don’t-forget-to-save-the-dog stuff we see in Hollywood fare like Independence Day, but I dunno, can’t we just leave the poor things out of it entirely?
It didn’t help that the film needs to be carried by its two female leads, and, I’m sorry to say, they’re not very good. The whole thing seems to be playing for laughs. I suppose some people will go for this (a few in the audience were giggling all the way through) but I’m going to go ahead and brand myself an unglamorous loser and state outright that I didn’t get it. Which is a shame, because I was eager to see Euthanasia -- I find Grenier to be a genuinely charismatic actor, and was wondering if his talent would show in his work as a director as well.
Why am I dwelling so much on a short? It’s because sometimes a short before a film just puts you in such a bad mood that you spend the first half of the feature just hating everything. I didn’t think Gravedancers was a great movie or anything (see below), but I wonder if I might have liked it more had I seen it cold. Sadly, I’ll never know.
Permalink : http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/tribeca2006.aspx?id=104e4605#4605 |
More goofy horror flicks
5/6/2006 4:07:31 PM
Gravedancers (dir. Mike Mendez)
Gravedancers opens with a standard-issue horror movie prologue in which an unknown character (a woman, in this case), breathing heavily, tries desperately to hide from something (or should that be Some Thing?), and, of course, fails to do so. Horror flicks like starting off with such scenes because their narratives tend to have long setups. Without something like this at the beginning, they'd feel deadly dull for the first 20-30 minutes; the genre demands that the bulk of the screaming and the fleeing and the dying come later.
Usually, however, a horror flick would also proceed to pay off this scene later by somehow relating it to the backstory being revealed in the film. Maybe we’d learn this woman was an acquaintance of one of the characters. Or we’d see some old newspaper clipping and learn that she did something that’s now affecting our characters. Nope. In Gravedancers, we never hear from, or about, this person ever again.
If I seem to be spending a bit too much time trashing this admittedly brief and apparently inconsequential opening scene, it's because it represents one of the key flaws of Mike Mendez's uneven film. Gravedancers isn’t necessarily bad, but it falters whenever it goes for convention. And it goes for convention a few too many times.
The idea, needless to say, is kind of silly. Three old friends (one of them is played by America's new dreamboat, Dominic Purcell, from Prison Break), after the funeral of one of their best buds, hang out at the gravesite at night to drink and reminisce. They discover a condolence note that includes a strange poem. The poem inspires them to dance around the gravestones. Soon, they begin to get haunted in strange ways: Small licks of flame appear, pianos begin randomly playing themselves, etc. Turns out that when you dance on someone’s grave, they’re allowed to come back and fuck with you for a month.
Mendez spends too much time indulging in cliché scare tactics – he uses non-diegetic screeching noises on the soundtrack as if he just discovered them – and it’s a shame, because Gravedancers, when it gets going, is plenty scary as it is. The film's middle-third is actually quite effective; alas, it’s sandwiched between a lame first act and an over-the-top finale. That said, Mendez does deserve some credit for taking such a goofy premise and getting real jolts out of it.
He also deserves credit for casting Tcheky Karyo as a French ghost hunter. Karyo, for all his talent, has this innate ability to take any movie he’s in and bring it to the level of camp. But here it actually sort of works, infusing just enough humor into the film without sending it straight into spoof territory. He’s able to poke fun without ever actually breaking. When Gravedancers is on his wavelength, it’s a genuinely entertaining little horror flick. Not enough to do the job, perhaps, but it's fun while it lasts.
Permalink : http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/tribeca2006.aspx?id=104e4604#4604 |
Full Grown Movie
5/5/2006 8:00:00 PM
Full Grown Men (dir. David Munro)
I caught the last screening of this lovely little film the other night, and I feel bad I didn’t get to it sooner. We’re all familiar with the concept of the Peter Pan complex, used to describe those adult men (30s and 40s, usually) who refuse to grow up, refuse to face up to their responsibilities, refuse to give up the things of their childhood, refuse to have mature, respectful relationships, desperately hanging on to the glory days of their youth. It’s not exactly the most novel idea. I feel like I see an article on it every other day, and most comedy movies can be boiled down to this anyway – see also The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Wedding Crashers, and anything starring John Cusack. Maybe that’s why I initially resisted seeing Full Grown Men.
But David Munro’s film, which was co-written with his wife Xandra Castleton, is quite distinct, working with a genuinely different and surprisingly compelling stylistic strategy. It begins with 35-year-old Alby Cutrera (Matt McGrath) angrily abandoning his wife and kid, a suitcase full of impeccably stored action figures in tow, and heading back to his mom’s house in Florida to curl up on the couch, watch kung-fu, and eat bowls of brightly colored cereal. While it is a comedy (and an often hilarious one at that), the film doesn’t try to sell us on Alby’s mindset: We’re not meant to think this guy’s life is awesome, a la Wedding Crahsers or countless other films of this genre. No, Alby’s life sucks right now. His marriage has broken apart, he clearly has no job, and his childhood, the best years of his life, are far behind him. His mom, now an invalid with some kind of unnamed disease causing memory loss, isn’t the woman she once was; in fact, she only remembers the past, but in a strangely catatonic way. In other words, Alby’s psychological condition is only slightly less pathological than his mother’s very real one.
 | | Full Grown Men director David Munro |
The bulk of the film concerns Alby’s road-trip with his old best friend Elias Guber (Judah Friedlander) to Diggityland, a kind of proto-Disneyland that was their favorite place to visit as kids. Elias, Alby’s punching bag and the butt of all his practical jokes as a boy, is now a special-ed teacher. He still loves his boyhood friend, but he clearly resents the treatment he got back in the day. Alby’s glory years, in other words, were not Elias’s glory years. At one point, he has to remind Alby that being a child, in fact, kinda sucked.
You may have noticed that this story actually sounds quite dark. But the film is shot through with a twinkly nostalgia that makes Alby’s innocent, primary-colored world quite enchanting. The warm, almost dreamlike atmosphere of the film expertly conveys his nostalgic yearning, while also giving it a slight hint of the surreal. (I was reminded of Blue Velvet more than once.) Because we know from the outset, however, that our hero must give up this world, the impression we get is almost a kind of farewell. This is Alby’s last trip back to his childhood, before leaving it for good. He may not realize that, but the audience does. That’s why Full Grown Men is, at times, such a heartbreaking little film. I hope more people will one day get the chance to see it.
Permalink : http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/tribeca2006.aspx?id=104e4600#4600 |
Sour Notes
5/5/2006 5:36:48 PM
Pittsburgh (dir., Chris Bradley and Kyle LaBrache)
Pittsburgh is an unclassifiable film, the love child of an unholy threesome between the doc movement, the mock-doc movement, and the DV revolution. I wish I could have liked it more.
The movie is basically about Jeff Goldblum’s decision to ignore all the advice of his agent and return to his hometown of Pittsburgh to appear in a two-week regional production of The Music Man. Goldblum is here as himself, as are Illeanna Douglas and Ed Begley, Jr. The production of The Music Man actually happened; when we see rehearsals in the film, those are real rehearsals. Goldblum’s reasons in the film for joining the production, which in the film have something to do with helping his Canadian girlfriend find employment so she can stay in the country, are apparently not altogether different from some of his reasons in real life. But the movie is largely fictional. It’s not a real documentary…except when it is.
It’s a crazy conceit – shooting a partly fictional story with real people occurring around a real event. (Robert Altman and Garrison Keillor do something mildly similar in the upcoming Prairie Home Companion, but the boundaries there between fiction and non-fiction are a lot clearer.) So I’m tempted to forgive its flaws, but they eventually overwhelm the film.
First, the good stuff. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen this much of Jeff Goldblum in a movie, even in The Fly. What I particularly love about his performance here (and, according to the filmmakers, this whole thing was Goldblum’s idea in the first place) is that it displays none of that smirking vanity one tends to associate with actors playing “themselves”. Goldblum isn’t trying to get us to understand him better, or to Peel Away The Layers Of His Persona And Reveal The Vulnerable Creature Beneath. The man is clearly the same onscreen as he is in person. And he’s such an engaging and charismatic presence that he almost manages to manhandle the film through its more difficult moments.
But he doesn’t. Pittsburgh’s conceit, unfortunately, is almost too good. It can’t deliver. We see montages of rehearsals for The Music Man, we see Goldblum getting chewed out by his director, but we get little sense of what’s actually happening in the show. Despite the sheer amount of footage from The Music Man there is here, I get very little sense of the performance. I know more about that musical version of A Streetcar Named Desire they did on The Simpsons than I do of this. And that’s pretty much the kiss of death, because as the film progresses, we’re supposed to get more and more involved in whether Goldblum will pull it off. The effect, however, is exactly the opposite. As Pittsburgh progresses, we become less and less interested in what’s going on. For such an obvious labor of love, that’s quite a shame.
Permalink : http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/tribeca2006.aspx?id=104e4599#4599 |
Prizes & connections
5/5/2006 11:41:32 AM
Some more awards were given out last night. Not to existing movies, though. The Tribeca All Access Connects (TAA) program, billed as fostering “relationships between U.S.-based filmmakers of color and film industry executives,” gave out the third annual Tribeca All Access Creative Promise Awards.
Narrative section prize went to Sterlin Harjo for his current screenplay, Before the Beast Returns.
Documentary section prize went to Lacey Schwartz for her documentary work-in-progress, Outside the Box.
Screenplay section prize went to Milton Liu for his screenplay, John Hughes Ruined My Life.
Honorable mentions:
Documentary – Shola Lynch for Free Angela & All Political Prisoners.
Screenplay – Ose Oyamendan for Resistance.
As far as awards go, it’s not bad: $10,000 for narrative and documentary and $5,000 for screenplay. $10k can go a long way in the doc world. That said, the connections they make thanks to the TAA awards are probably the more worthy part of the award for these folks.
Also, I have to say, I really like the title Before the Beast Returns (which, believe it or not, is not a horror flick). But John Hughes Ruined My Life is pretty much exactly what it sounds like.
Permalink : http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/tribeca2006.aspx?id=104e4583#4583 |
More quick hits
5/4/2006 5:14:28 PM
Slow festival day for me today. Work calls. That’s another thing about Tribeca – those of us who live and work in New York can’t really take two weeks off to exclusively cover the festival, as we can with, say, Sundance or Toronto or Telluride. And even if you do, sooner or later somebody is gonna realize you’re still around, cavorting around the city seeing movies.
Here’s some quick stuff, both fest-related and non-fest-related:
Tom Cruise spent yesterday jetting around town using different modes of transportation, to promote Mission: Impossible 3. He even had his own private subway train. I wonder if it caused any delays. I can imagine the announcement: “Due to a sick passenger in the train ahead of us, we are being held in the station by our dispatcher. We apologize for the delay. Oh, and respect the cock!”
Hey, look, another article about Fat Girls that starts off with the director’s age. I guess he turned 21 sometime between the finalization of the festival program and this article. So now he’s not even that young anymore. And he wants to make a movie about a kid in a wheelchair next.
Brian Newman of National Video Resources (NVR), an organization that provides some very generous grants to filmmakers, has a post up on his blog about the brave new world of online media, and how large corporations are starting to mess with it in ways that are truly alarming for the long run. Basically, if you’re a filmmaker and have any intention of ever putting anything online ever, you kinda have to read both Brian’s post and the Cory Doctorow blog post that prompted it.
The San Francisco Film Festival has given out its awards. BTW, Jonestown, the film that won the Bay Area Documentary award, is also at Tribeca. Expect a review from me presently.
Will post some drive-by reviews later tonight. I will say that I caught one excellent film, David Munro’s Fully Grown Men, at its final public screening the other night. I’ll post a review, but I can’t say I don’t feel bad about the fact that I’m getting to the film a bit late. In other words, my review won’t be able to encourage anyone to go see it. Cause it’s not playing anymore. Hopefully, though, some wise distributor will pick it up.
 | | The cast and crew of Full Grown Men at their last public screening |
Permalink : http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/tribeca2006.aspx?id=104e4576#4576 |
More stuff gets sold, but not much...
5/4/2006 2:22:08 PM
Variety reports that First Independent Pictures and HBO Video have teamed up to buy Nick Guthe's Mini's First Time, starring Nikki Reed, Alec Baldwin, Carrie-Ann Moss, and Luke Wilson, in "an orgy of transgression and law-breaking." (Gee, I wonder why this one got sold.)
I haven't seen it, but I do know it's Logan's pick for the worst film he's seen at Tribeca. Oh, well.
Then again, Nikki Reed plays "a sexy mess", according to the festival's website. Um, maybe I should try to catch this one before it leaves town.
Permalink : http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/tribeca2006.aspx?id=104e4573#4573 |
Scatter shots
5/4/2006 2:03:15 AM
Perhaps one of the reasons why it’s been so hard to pin down a real vibe for this year’s Tribeca fest is because the fest has been so spread out. From what I hear, while people are very happy with the screenings and the turnout, there is some belief that spreading the screenings and events all throughout Manhattan has resulted in less buzz, less of a sense of cohesion.
 | | Graham Winick of the Miami Beach film office, complete with redeye, at the "Apples & Oranges" party to celebrate Florida films premiering at Tribeca -- held at the QT hotel in midtown Manhattan. |
But it's also a bit silly to tell people that when they have a great resource like New York, they can't stray beyond a certain zipcode. If expanding outside the boundaries of Tribeca has meant more screenings at more times, more parties, more events, I say go crazy.
 | | Dapper New York publicity honcho Jeremy Walker, outside the 68th street screening venue. |
And there’s something to be said for making sure the films are screened in proper theaters. True, it might be a bit of a disconnect to be showing Tribeca films at the Loews Lincoln Square 68th Street multiplex, but it guarantees all the filmmakers decent screening venues. It also makes it a bit easier for the average person off the street to walk into one of the screenings, without having to know that there’s a movie being screened at Pace University or at Stuyvesant High School or some such place.
Permalink : http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/tribeca2006.aspx?id=104e4565#4565 |
Another great actor in a mediocre film
5/3/2006 8:00:00 PM
 | | Trainspotting |
Marvelous (dir. Siofra Campbell)
Ever since Trainspotting, I've looked forward to any movie with Ewen Bremner in it, even when he's had a marginal role. He had about thirty whole seconds of screen-time in Pearl Harbor, but that still helped pique my interest in that otherwise deplorable film. It was also a pleasant surprise to see the Scots actor pop up near the end of Woody Allen’s Match Point last year. Talk about a guy who should be working more. It would be nice not to have to go to Alien vs. Predator to see him perform.
Needless to say, I was heavily anticipating Siofra Campbell’s Marvelous, which has the good sense to cast Bremner in a lead part. He delivers, too – perfectly portraying a likable, ambitious buffoon who gets ideas in his head when his wife’s sister discovers she has supernatural healing powers.
Unfortunately, the film around his performance is something of a botch – a blunt, broad satire about celebrity culture that never quite hits its marks. As the woman with the powers, the usually-great Martha Plimpton is too hesitant and understated. This film needs size; it needs to be big and broad, a la Dr. Strangelove or The Producers (the first one, not the new one). Bremner gets that, but no one else seems to.
And yes, I realize this is essentially the same thing I said earlier about that Ralph Fiennes movie. But whacha gonna do?
(Slightly more detailed New York mag review here.)
Permalink : http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/tribeca2006.aspx?id=104e4561#4561 |
Meeting Withnail
5/3/2006 4:41:19 PM
I got to interview the wondrous Richard E. Grant today, whose directorial debut, Wah-Wah, is playing at Tribeca and will be opening in theatres next week. The film is a heartfelt, autobiographical account of his parents’ divorce in the late 60s, during the waning days of the British Empire in Swaziland, Southern Africa. He’s also got a supporting part in Brian Cook’s Color Me Kubrick, which I haven’t yet seen. (Say what you will about Tribeca, but it’s been a great place to see some amazing actors, among them Grant, the afore-canonized Ralph Fiennes, John Malkovich, Jeff Goldblum, etc.)
Not everyone will recognize the name Richard E. Grant, but they’ll know him when they see him: The man has one of the most recognizable faces in film. He’s shown up in supporting parts in everything from Hudson Hawk and The Player (where he did a dead-on impression of a pretentious British filmmaker who wanted to make a film about an innocent woman getting the electric chair, constantly intoning, “That’s…the reality) to The Age of Innocence and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Hell, he was even in Spice World.
His most beloved part, of course, is as the struggling, spiteful young actor Withnail in Bruce Robinson’s momentous Withnail & I, which is a cult-classic in England the way Spinal Tap is here. For my money, though, his best film is actually the second one he did with Robinson, How to Get Ahead in Advertising, a masterpiece of consumer-culture satire that was merely incisive in the 80s and is mind-blowingly prescient today. In it, Grant plays the most reptilian advertising exec ever, a true savant who, as he comes up with promo copy, actually shivers with orgasmic glee. That is, until he starts growing a giant boil on his neck, which soon becomes a human head, prompting a crisis of conscience. Trust me, it’s fantastic.
 | | Withnail & I |
One of the reasons I was eager to talk with Grant was because I consider his book With Nails: The Film Diaries of Richard E. Grant, published in 1996, to be one of the greatest, certainly the most entertaining, showbiz books I’ve ever read. So I was glad to hear that he’s got something of a follow-up, The Wah-Wah Diaries. Alas, it’s only out in the UK, but you can get it on Amazon.com. Apparently he pulls no punches in this one as well. (He mentioned during our interview that he probably won’t ever get to make film with Joel Silver again, thanks to the portrait he draws of the demented producer in With Nails.)
Something that struck me about Grant during our interview was how composed he seemed. The man has a very elegant and proper way of speaking – almost aristocratic, in a way. It feels like a less extreme version of some of his characters. Perhaps that’s why he was so successful as Withnail – there was a curious nobility to the impoverished, struggling character that made his bizarre sense of entitlement charming, when it could have been merely irritating. Maybe that’s why he connected with so many viewers. On the page, Withnail feels like a figure of ridicule. Grant’s performance gave him the air of an exiled prince.
Permalink : http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/tribeca2006.aspx?id=104e4559#4559 |
This just in: One-eyed man still apparently king, in the...
5/3/2006 3:10:16 AM
Land of the Blind (dir. Robert Edwards)
At the risk of completely discrediting myself as a critic, I should confess that I was not a big fan of Ralph Fiennes when he first burst onto the scene. I found him more irritating than evil in Schindler’s List, too imposing for Quiz Show, and I just plain hated everything about The English Patient. (I should also admit, however, to liking Fiennes’s earlier performances in Wuthering Heights and The Baby of Macon, but I saw those much later.)
Somewhere along the way, though, something changed. Around 1999, with his performances in Sunshine, Onegin, and The End of the Affair, Fiennes began to win me over. My tastes may well have changed, but I think Fiennes’ acting also gained a certain lightness. He stopped underlining things. Even in a film as full of pain as The End of the Affair, the tortured emotions of his character felt organic, not ostentatious. Since then, he’s become one of my favorite actors. I’ll see the dude in anything. I went to see Maid in Manhattan just because Fiennes was in it. Even in a film as disposably inept as Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, his brief scene at the end was downright electric – under all that make-up, the man could still emit magnetism, a star quality sorely missing from that star-studded film.
This is all a really long-winded way of saying that I was really looking forward to Robert Edwards’s Land of the Blind, in which Fiennes plays a conflicted soldier in a futuristic totalitarian state, tasked with guarding a jailed revolutionary playwright (Donald Sutherland, another actor I look forward to seeing). Our man is characteristically solid here. (Conflicted soldier? He is so there!) But the movie fails him, on almost all levels. We get Tom Hollander as a spoiled, vain, comical dictator who spends all his time trying to make movies (a la Kim Jong Il, I suppose) while political prisoners rot in his prisons. The tone unconvincingly flies back and forth between satire and dystopian nightmare.
That combination has obviously worked in the past (Orwell, duh) but it’s not really a combination here: It’s more as if we’re watching two separate movies. Perhaps that’s the point, but it also results in a hodgepodge of targets, as if Edwards just took Authoritarianism’s Greatest Hits and turned it all into one big ball of fascist insanity. Similarly, there doesn’t seem to be any political point to the futuristic monarchy in Land of the Blind: We get lots of faux-historic newsreel footage, but we still can’t really understand how a government like this came into being. (Remember, Orwell laid out a whole history in 1984.) It throws a lot of stuff at us, but underneath it all, the whole thing feels awfully facile.
Perhaps more significantly, the film isn’t funny enough when it wants to be funny, and it isn’t dark enough when it wants to be dark. An atmosphere of been-there-seen-that pervades the proceedings. But playing the tortured human apparatus of the state at the center of it all, Ralph Fiennes plucks about with energy and confidence, unaware that the film he’s in is crumbing around him.
Permalink : http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/tribeca2006.aspx?id=104e4550#4550 |
Linkage
5/2/2006 6:50:43 PM
First off, three docs getting some attention at Tribeca:
I’ve heard great things about The War Tapes made from footage shot by three US soldiers in Iraq. People have been buzzing about it since its premiere. Iraq docs tend to be a hard sell, so hopefully this one will parlay that goodwill into increased exposure.
I’ve also heard good things about Shadow of Afghanistan. Jennifer Merrin of the New York Press interviews Suzanne Bauman, one of its directors. Brief, but eye-opening.
Scott Macaulay’s review of Mary Jordan’s doc Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, about the legendary experimental filmmaker, got me really excited to see it. Smith, best known for the still-controversial avant-garde epic Flaming Creatures was one of the oddest artists who ever lived, and it sounds like Jordan’s film has remained true to that both in discourse and form. It’s nice to see Smith getting the kind of movie he deserves.
And now, more links:
Anthony Kaufman over at Variety takes a look at the buzz titles that are still up for sale. Also from Kaufman: A probing piece about the political nature of many of the films at the fest.
The Reeler discovers a couple of “secret” Tribeca screenings this weekend. One of them is a film I’m keen to see, Abel Ferrara’s religious opus, Mary. I think Ferrara’s utterly deranged, but he’s also never not interesting. That said, I’ll wait till this one gets released to see it. The rest of you, knock yourselves out. (Credit where it’s due: Filmmaker Magazine’s blog noted these screenings last week.)
Only tangentially related to Tribeca, but Jeff Wells over at Hollywood Confidential is speculating that Poseidon might turn out to be a flop, even though he personally likes the film. I’m not sure I agree, but he makes a decent case for his prediction. As a huge Wolfgang Petersen fan, I hope to god he’s wrong.
That’s all for now. My updates today have been lame. Sorry buds. I’ll post some bona-fide reviews later tonight.
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Forget it, Jake. It's Tribeca.
5/2/2006 2:24:55 PM
I’ve got a little essay up today at New York magazine’s website about how difficult it is to pin down the character of the Tribeca fest: So many premieres, the vast majority of them from people you’ve never heard of, arriving without any kind of buzz attached. It’s overwhelming and perplexing.
 | | Actual photo of the Tribeca Film Festival program |
It’s also a bold decision for the festival’s programmers, to be sure. When you have a festival of the stature of Sundance, a giant machine begins to whirr to life as soon as the selection is made. Filmmakers get calls from agents, producer’s reps, distributors, all asking to meet with them and see their films. By the time the January event rolls around, you’ve got titles that are being hyped and murmured about, “hotly tipped” films that nobody has yet seen. Tribeca may one day hold that kind of sway in the industry, but everyone acknowledges that it doesn’t right now. That’s why I’m both bewildered and impressed that the programming committee went for so many feature premieres this year – 90 world premieres, up significantly from previous years. Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of terrific movies out there – but it’s also kind of a crapshoot.
I’ve had some conversations about this issue with a couple of other critics. One of them, explaining why he wasn’t writing much about Tribeca, described his position thusly: “I wouldn't know what to say. ‘Here's a zillion unknown films being shown in New York this week. Go crazy.’” I’ve reviewed a whole mess of Tribeca movies already and even I feel that way sometimes.
At the same time, I feel the need to embrace Tribeca’s utter unpredictability. Critics love to bemoan the fact that fests like Sundance have gone corporate and that the films they’re screening are paint-by-numbers Indiewood product. Or that their first-time directors are often simply well-known actors making their filmmaking debuts. Or that the festival prefers a lame film starring a well-known actress over a great film starring a nobody. All that may be true. And maybe there is too much buzz involved in that whole process. But that’s Sundance’s way of organizing itself –that’s why anyone arriving at Park City usually has a few titles floating around in their head before the festival starts.
Maybe it all just boils down to the fact that this isn’t Park City (duh). It’s hard enough staying on top of what movies are playing, what’s good, and what’s not, on an average day in New York. Perhaps it’s just inevitable that there isn’t an easier way to make sense of a monster like Tribeca.
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Drive-in: No cars allowed
5/2/2006 2:55:47 AM
Will from A Test of Will has got some pics of the Tribeca Drive-In up. What exactly is the Tribeca Drive-in? Why, it’s the festival’s outdoor screening venue, located in lower Manhattan, near the water. What it most decidedly is not, however, is a drive-in movie theater. For starters, vehicles aren’t allowed. And while it has chairs, they’re only there temporarily. What have they been showing there? Short films from the Tropfest contest, and family films. As opposed to, say, typical drive-in fare, like Satan’s Cheerleaders and Student Bodies.
In other words, this thing isn’t a drive-in theater in any way, shape, or form. It cannot be driven into. It is not really a theater. It does not even show the kinds of films drive-ins used to show. Aargh! Why call it a drive-in? I don’t get it. New York City actually has several outdoor screening venues. Movies screen all through the Summer at Bryant Park. They also occasionally show in Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. None of these are called drive-ins.
I don’t know why I’m so obsessed, but this drive-in thing has been bugging the shit out of me ever since I heard of it. I’m curious to find out what others think. The few people I asked didn’t seem too bothered by it, so now I’m feeling like some kind of space alien. And I guess it’s just another example of the anything-goes nature of this fest. But am I crazy for suggesting that calling this thing a “drive-in” just feels horribly wrong?
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How (not) to sell your horror flick...
5/1/2006 2:00:00 PM
 | | These are not the dudes I am talking about |
As we arrived at the midnight screening of Hatchet the other night, we were greeted by a bunch of cheesy dudes dressed up as zombies and monsters and whatnot running up and down the aisles screaming in our faces. (I tried to take a picture, but my camera crapped out; hence the stock image above.) Clearly a ploy by the filmmakers to get the crowd revved up for the show, and, in that sense, I can say it worked. (Not that the crowd needed any more revving up – one guy was yelling “Kill some people!” at the top of his lungs every fifteen minutes.)
But it got me thinking. As I noted in my review, Hatchet is billing itself as some kind of throwback to down-and-dirty Seventies horror. So why all the running around in goofy costumes? This little masque might have worked to get the crowd ready, but what kind of world have we entered when people are setting their movies up as camp experiences even before they have their world premieres? I’m just not entirely sure this is the message I wanted to hear right before the screening started; it even kind of turned me off to the film, making me think I was about to see a joke. (As I also noted in my review, the film is actually a comedy…but it wants to be a horror movie, and that seems to be the problem.)
I don’t want to make too much of this; after all, it was just a bunch of guys having fun with what turned out to be a not very serious movie. But I can’t help but think that these crowded film festivals have created an anything-goes atmosphere with respect to marketing your film – whatever gets you noticed, basically. As far as I can see, Tribeca films have been fairly subdued about dorky publicity stunts. But anyone who’s had to spend more than a day at Sundance should have some idea what I’m talking about.
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Some non-Tribeca stuff, for now
5/1/2006 10:00:00 AM
Variety spotlights a growing Cannes trend – screening 20-30 minutes from upcoming major titles in the interests of building steam among the press and the cognoscenti-types. I can vouch for the fact that this ploy worked ridiculously well for Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring back in 2001. (I wasn’t at Cannes, nor am I a cognoscenti-type, but I saw the segments soon thereafter.) We’ll see if it works as well this year, when Oliver Stone’s 9/11 movie and Bill Condon’s Dreamgirls will be trying to build up the buzz.
I’ve heard great things about the Buenos Aires International Festival over the years. Dave Kehr, one of our better critics, traveled there for the first time this year and is posting some remarkably thorough impressions about it on his blog.
Jeffrey Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere is at the Houston Worldfest this week. I can’t stop reading the guy’s site, but in true Jeff Wells fashion, he starts complaining about the place the second his plane touches down.
Sukhdev Sandhu, chief film critic for the UK’s Daily Telegraph newspaper and a recent winner of the Brit award for criticism, has been keeping a fascinating little nocturnal online journal, Night Haunts, detailing his excursions into the London night. It’s downright hypnotic -- the writing here is both reportorial and ruminative, poetic and irreverent. It kicks off with a philosophical discussion of what night once meant and what it now is, and then proceeds to enter this modern-day wonderland with a discerning eye for its strangest spots. There’s even an accompanying soundtrack.
Finally, a sad note: Matt Zoller Seitz has been my favorite working American critic for some years now. He’s also made a terrific little feature film called Home, which was released earlier this year. Tragically, his wife Jennifer Dawson, only 35, suddenly passed away last week, due to unknown causes. There’s a touching tribute to her over on Matt’s blog.
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