On Location at the Tribeca Film Festival

Written By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

May 5th:Out with a Bang

All good things must come to an end, of course, and so this past Saturday, the time had come for the Tribeca Film Festival. The screenings for the press actually ended on Thursday the 3rd, which is why you haven’t heard from me in a few days. I wanted to catch one last flick though, so I scoured the schedule of public screenings.

The one I chose was a short film program called Short Attention Span, part of the “Tribeca Family” program, and featuring shorts revolving around the lives of undoubtedly angst-filled teenagers. I always have a soft spot for stories focusing on those awkward years, and I always enjoy short films (apparently I have a Short Attention Span myself), so I gave it a shot.

There was also a devious alterior motive for my choice. One of the shorts in the program, entitled Thorndike, I had worked on as a production assistant last year, and the director and I are from the same hometown.

Luckily, Thorndike was the first film in the program, so instead of spending the entire afternoon anticipating my name appearing on the screen (buried deep in the credits), I got it over with quickly. So while this is biased, I can tell you that Thorndike is a remarkably sweet-natured story, directed with an assured turn by recent Columbia graduate Chris Teague. It tells the simple story of a teenage boy whose true love is moving away the next day, and his attempt to give her one last going away present. The present involves sneaking onto a golf course with his friends in the middle of the night, and at the Q&A session following the program, Teague mentioned that the story was “based on an actual prank my friends and I did in high school.”

The next film was Lines, directed by Sonja Jasansky, a funny story about a goth high school chick forced to stay after class and “write lines” for her over-the-top annoying teacher. I can’t even begin to describe what happens, except to say that the girl has magical powers and ultimately leaves the teacher a sobbing mess. I could make myself feel old and say the girl is almost as unlikable as the teacher, but I imagine any kid in high school would find her perfectly justified.

Dear Lemon Lima and Wooden Soul, directed by Suzi Yoonessi and Rehana Rose Khan, respectively, are both melancholy stories about young girls. Lima‘s heroine works at an ice cream stand and is constantly berated by her former boyfriend, a gigantic tool who’s hilarious in his utter despicability. Soul, meanwhile, features a girl in London who works tirelessly in her shop class making wooden tables while her father lies dying

in the hospital.

Look Both Ways, directed by Daniel Oron, is a story that starts out rather humorously – computer- and videogame-obsessed kids in a neighborhood are forced to go outside and play with each other after the power goes out. The ending, in which we find out the kids are more or less in a videogame of their own, is presumably meant to be an indictment against violence in videogames, but plays out in a bizarre (albeit risky) way. Exploding Buds, meanwhile, was by far the strangest film of the lot – directed by Petra Schroder, the German-language set film is a musical fantasy starring two fairy-like young girls and the guys to which they’re attracted. Involving bizarre hairdos, magical black splotches, gigantic bubbles and much more, it somehow makes its own kind of sense and offers an ending that made me happy, although I’ll be darned if I was able to sufficiently explain why.

Much less strange, but still involving a fantasy element, was the Spanish-language film You Can’t Take it With You, directed by Charly Braun. The final film in the program, it features a charismatic teenager who buys a VHS player that can fast-forward the network news. When the boy foresees the end of the world, he’s able to use the opportunity to snag the girl of his dreams.

It’s a charming and extremely entertaining story that is well-told and well-directed, which could describe the Short Attention Span program as a whole. Four of the directors – Teague, Yoonessi, Khan, and Braun – were present for the Q&A afterwards. When asked what their inspiraion was for each film, Braun quipped that “we wish the German director was here, so we could hear his inspiration.” Yoonessi revealed that she’s hoping to soon make a feature-length version of Lima, while Khan recounted how she was able to finance the film by not paying anyone. All of the young filmmakers had the usual financial difficulties financing the films – Teague mentioned that his was funded by one grant and “lots of credit cards” – but it’s encouraging to see the creativity that stems from the limitations.

Well, with that, my first experience covering Tribeca has come to a close. The list of actual winners among the films in competition, announced Thursday, can be found at Tribeca’s website here: http://www.tribecafilmfestival.org/news-2007winners-release.html.

If you want my own opinion (out of the relatively small number of films I saw), the best feature-length movie was The Bubble, directed by Eytan Fox. While it wasn’t perfect, it’s the one my mind keeps going back to again and again.

And finally, check out more of our Tribeca coverage with full reviews of Palo Alto (along with interviews with the cast and filmmakers), In the Land of Merry Misfits (coming shortly), and Descent.

Thanks

again for reading.

May 2nd:Subverting the Rom-Coms

Well, after a “day off” on Tuesday (I was working), I was able to catch Watching the Detectives bright and early Wednesday morning. It’s the film I mentioned in the last column, written and directed by Paul Soter, of Broken Lizard, the comedy group that gave us Super Troopers and Beerfest.

Despite a couple of cameos from his Broken Lizard friends, this is Soter’s baby, unrelated to those previous films. I knew that going in, but what I wasn’t prepared for was just how different it would be. The humor is on an entirely different plane. Watching the Detectives is a dialogue-driven comedy that plays like a subversion to the romantic comedy genre. It’s leisurely paced, doesn’t fall prey to the annoying rom-com cliches, and it looks like everybody’s having a good time.

Cillian Murphy stars as Neil, a film geek who owns a failing independent video store called Gumshoe Video – and at least in part thanks to my own video store clerk experience, I liked him immediately. One day a woman named Violet (Lucy Liu) enters his life, and they strike up a relationship. She’s one of those hyperactive charmers that males in the audience are meant to fall immediately in love with. Think Natalie Portman in Garden State, although Soter and Liu actually manage to make Violet feel more real than the heroine in Zach Braff‘s emofest.

See, Violet hates watching movies and TV, hates sitting around, hates inactivity in general, and likes to spice up her relationship with Neil by staging elaborate pranks on him straight out of noir films. She’s like an insane femme fatale but she’s always kidding. One day he walks into her place to find her tied up as a hostage to an insane bald ex-boyfriend. This, of course, is far, far, far outside of film geek Neil’s comfort zone.

It’s a better dynamic than most romantic leads usually have, and it has the benefit of being able to showcase Soter’s general love of film. He relishes staging ludicrously over-the-top noir scenes – a face-off at an underground casino; an interrogation by two cops who look like they stepped out of Double Indemnity.

One more note: Cillian Murphy, the Irish actor who first hit stardom in 28 Days Later, is a versatile guy. His skeletal good looks and offbeat charm can work in things as different as a big studio blockbuster (Batman Begins), a heavy Irish period piece (The Wind that Shakes the Barley), and now an independent comedy from one of the masterminds of Super Troopers. You should check this one out once it gets real distribution.

In other news, Dan has also been hard at work on the Tribeca scene; he saw

the flick Palo Alto recently and really dug it. It’s a movie about college-age friends who reunite in their hometown for their Thanksgiving break. (One of those is Ben Savage, a personal hero of mine from the Boy Meets World days.) We got a review of the film and a bunch of exclusive interviews, and you can check it all out here.

April 30th:The Air is a little thin
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Back into the work week means I was only able to catch one film on Monday. It was called The Air I Breathe: a high-profile drama with a great ensemble cast headed by Brendan Fraser, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Kevin Bacon, and recent Best Actor Oscar winner Forest Whitaker.

The concept of the movie is a bit out there and firmly in the independent-film realm, despite what looked like great production values. Based on an old Chinese proverb (at least according to the press materials; I’ve tried to find what it actually is, but I haven’t been able to), each of its leads star in overlapping segments and represent what are supposed to be the four cornerstone emotions of life: happiness, pleasure, sorrow and love. In fact, the film goes so far as to not give any of its main characters real names except for those attributes.

Whitaker plays Happiness in the film’s first section, as a bored businessman who finds himself freed from his mundane existence after he finds himself in major debt for betting on a horse race. The second segment stars Fraser as Pleasure, a man who has always been able to glimpse into the future but realizes for the first time that his visions can be wrong. Gellar represents Sorrow as a pop star who loses everything and goes into hiding from a crime kingpin, played by Andy Garcia. And finally, Bacon plays Love, racing to find someone with the same blood type as his true love, who’s dying from a snake bite.

All of the stories are interconnected in a Crash sort of way. The man to whom Whitaker’s character owes money? The crime boss played by Garcia – who also happens to be Fraser’s employer, and the guy searching for Gellar’s character. The only person with the same rare blood type as the woman Bacon’s trying to save? Gellar’s character. And so on.

Most of us have seen Crash, and if you haven’t, that wasn’t the first movie to use this formula, either. The structure relies on bizarre coincidences and the belief that everything is interconnected, but if it’s done well, it can be good. Unfortunately, a lot happens in The Air I Breathe that just plain doesn’t make any sense. Characters do things that no person would

ever do, and events happen that would just plain never happen. I’m not talking about coincidences here — those go with the territory. I’m talking about a complete lack of logic that gets annoying.

I’ll just give you one example. Gellar’s character has been hiding out from Andy Garcia in Brendan Fraser’s house for the past couple weeks, keeping quiet and staying away from the windows. One day Fraser’s gone and the phone rings. So she picks it up and says hello. The occasional lapse in logic for a film can be overlooked, but the complete lack of attention the screenwriters had — we need to get from A to B, so let’s just force it like crazy — is plain lazy.

Also, what exactly is the film trying to say? In Crash, if I may mention that again, the theme was clearly racism, and if some people thought it was too obviously hammered into our heads, at least there was one. What’s this movie trying to say? That we all have feelings? It’s a shame, because I liked many parts of it — Fraser’s story was especially intriguing — and all of the principle actors here do a really stand-up job. Whitaker completely sells an otherwise cliched I-want-to-break-free-of-monotony role, and Gellar is very strong as the pop star who hits rock bottom. But as a whole, the film ultimately just doesn’t work.

Well, I realize I’ve sort of written a full review here instead of the couple of paragraphs I’d planned on. It’s hard to stop once I get started, and for all its flaws, The Air I Breathe is indicative of most of the films here at Tribeca: they get you talking.

Coming up soon, hopefully I’ll be able to check out the comedy Watching the Detectives, written and directed by Paul Soter, one of the guys who gave us the absolutely brilliant cult film Super Troopers and the lesser-but-still-worthwhile Beerfest. I’m already excited.

April 29th:Hecklers and Rat Zombies
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After Saturday’s marathon of heavy foreign films, on Sunday I was in the mood for something a bit more simple. And it can’t really get much simpler than Jamie Kennedy whining about critics.

That’s right, the documentary Heckler is basically an hour-and-a-half rant by Kennedy and many other comedians and actors about how film critics, both amateur and professional, make them mad. I watched it, mind you, at a press screening, meaning the theater was basically populated entirely by people who review movies. Myself included.

At a recent interview for the film Kickin it Old Skool, Kennedy talked to TheCinemaSource about making the film. “It kind of breeds into what a heckler’s become on the internet, with bloggers, critics. It’s an ever-critical world, we live

in,” Kennedy said.

He got the idea after his own movie, Son of the Mask, tanked with critics. “I’d go on the web, and somebody’d be trashing me, or twenty other people, and I’d look at the website, and it’s like, Wafflemovie.com. And I’m like, what the f*ck is that?”

There’s no denying that the film is undeniably entertaining. It’s a bit all over the map — first they attack hecklers at comedy shows, then they segue into amateur internet criticism, then they move onto all movie criticism in general — but it’s funny and it raises some good points. Why is the response to most movies on internet fanboy sites so overwhelmingly negative to everything? How can a critic say a movie like The Benchwarmers isn’t funny when thousands of twelve-year-old boys will tell you differently? Are critics, as the cliche goes, really all just wannabe filmmakers?

We’ve all heard these discussions before, but that makes it no less interesting, especially since right now you’re reading this on an internet movie website that features reviews written by mostly amateur critics. Oddly enough, Jamie Kennedy himself doesn’t come off too great in the movie; while many other celebrities appear as talking heads, offering up plenty of witty commentary, his segments usually consist of a conversation between him and a critic who gave a movie of his (again, usually Son of the Mask) a bad review. All of these conversations go something like this:
Jamie Kennedy: “Okay, so in your review of Son of the Mask, you said ‘Jamie Kennedy stinks up the screen.’ Why do you hate me so much?”
Critic: “I don’t hate you. It was just a bad movie.”
Jamie Kennedy: “Oh.”
You think he’s going to pull some Michael Moore-type ambush, but he just sits there with a depressed look on his face. See, ultimately, even though the film is entertaining, it’s extremely tempting for me to say that it basically amounts to a lot of people — most of them comedians who make fun of people for a living — who can dish it out, but can’t take it. But hey, I might be a bit biased.

The other film I saw was Mulberry Street, which I was hoping lived up to what it was billed as: an entertaining, down-and-dirty B-movie about a virus outbreak on Manhattan, spread by rats, that turns people into snarling, rat-like subhumans.

It succeeds and it doesn’t. It got everything right except for the entertaining part — there’s unfortunately nothing here that we haven’t seen done better in either 28 Days Later or the Dawn of the Dead remake. The Manhattan setting is a nice change of pace, but they don’t push anything quite far enough. Sporadic attempts are made to make the

film alternately funny, gory, and scary, but none of its pushed far enough. A handful of pissed-off New Yorkers fighting their way through human rat zombies could be a lot of fun, and it’s just not.

I mentioned Sarah Michelle Gellar in my last post. This morning the Suburban Girl, starring her and Alec Baldwin, was screened, but I didn’t end up getting to go. It’s an adaptation of the best-seller The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing. However, coming up on Monday is the ensemble film The Air I Breathe, which she’s also featured in, so I’ll let you know how that is. Until then…

April 28th:The World from Inside a Bubble
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If yesterday’s rain perfectly complemented yesterday’s dark and gloomy film Descent, today presented quite the contrast. It was a beautiful sunny day, but the films I saw dealt with dark, upsetting international problems to which there are no simple solutions.

The first was the feature-length The Bubble (Ha-Buah), directed by Eytan Fox, and set in Tel Aviv, Israel. From the synopsis: “Three roommates treat their hip Tel Aviv neighborhood like their own chic paradise, relatively shletered from the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. But when an Israeli boy meets a Palestinian boy at a border checkpoint, this artificial bubble bursts.”

Considering all of the media we see of the Middle East treats the entire region like a terrorist-ravaged no-man’s land, its surprising and eye-opening to find a movie starring three twenty-something liberals who lead lives startlingly similar to those of us in the U.S. – waiting tables, going to raves, using Windows XP and listening to their iPods. Noam, played by Ohad Knoller, is the main character, who while on reserve duty for the Israeli army meets a Palestinian guy named Ashraf (Yousef “Joe” Sweid) at one of the border checkpoints. Ashraf later shows up at his apartment, and the two fall in love as Ashraf lives with Noam and his roommates, posing as an Israeli.

The three roommates – which also include Yelli (Alon Friedman) and Lulu (Daniela Virtzer) – initially treat their hiding of Ashraf as almost a game, another cause for progressive young people to take on, but, of course, their youthful naivete doesn’t last forever. The film grows increasingly more tragic near the end, with a final closing that manages to both retain its innocence and offer a sense of sad, sad hopelessness that the region’s conflict will probably never be resolved. Why, why, why must they continue to fight each other? I don’t exactly understand the decision that Ashraf makes at the end of the film – to me it seemed forced, a necessity of the screenplay rather than a logical progression of his character – but we here in America have been so conditioned to assume we

cannot understand the Israel/Palestine conflict, maybe I just didn’t get it.

Still, aside from that moment, I found it a warm and surprising film. Surprising because of the frank treatment of homosexuality (aside from Noam and Ashraf’s relationship, Yelli is also openly gay) – the lifestyle is more or less accepted in Tel Aviv, but even among Ashraf’s Palestinian family, he is met with no more prejudice than he would be in most parts of the United States. Surprising because of the sense of family among, and charm of, the young people in the film – especially from Daniela Virtzer, who gives a completely lovable performance as the whip-smart, fiery Lulu. And surprising because it manages to offer us a world that we haven’t seen before, but is also so sadly like our own – sad because despite being so similar, its end result always seems to inescapably tend toward tragedy.

The next film I saw, Invisibles, didn’t do much to cheer up the mood. The brainchild of producer Javier Bardem (an actor who was nominated for an Oscar for 2000′s Before Night Falls), it is a collection of five short films meant to educate the world on little-known crises in other countries.

As films, the shorts are wildly inconsistent and not always watchable; the first, Letters to Nora, directed by Isabel Coixet, essentially consists of shaky digital camera work of a woman walking around. Still, its cry for help concerning a disease ignored by pharmaceutical companies shouldn’t be ignored. Villainous pharmaceutical companies also come into play in Mariano Barroso‘s “Bianca’s Dream,” which features the president of one arguing with two aid lobbyists in an awkwardly acted fictional scene concerning Sleeping Sickness.

The best short of the lot by far is Fernando Leon de Aranoa‘s Buenas noches, Ouma. It presents us with the “night commuters” of Uganda, children who sleep in a large shelter center at nights to avoid potential abduction from rebel soldiers who hide “in the bush” as part of their 20-year-old fight against the government. We hear harrowing tales from both the adult workers who run the shelter and the children who sleep there. Some of the children are actually formerly kidnapped, since released, and the stories they tell of their soldier captors – for example, how they were forced to beat to death a fellow captive who was caught trying to escape, or how they’re forced to fight in battle for their captors or else be shot – are harrowing to say the least. Dead parents and siblings are the norm, but the way the children maintain their sense of humanity and morality, even while matter-of-factly recounting their horrific experiences, provokes a profound feeling of hope for the future.

Following today’s heavy fare, tomorrow should be decidedly lighter – the agenda may include Jamie Kennedy,

Sarah Michelle Gellar, and/or zombies.

April 27th:A Stormy Way to Begin

Hello New York! Sure, I already live here, but from April 26th until May 5th, the Tribeca Film Festival takes over town, and I’m here to give you one man’s guide to the party. I’ll be writing a series of small articles on this page detailing the films, celebrities, and events of this year’s festival.

Tribeca’s unique in that it’s already one of the top film festivals around while being only six years old. The brainchild of one Robert De Niro, it was created in 2002 to rejuvenate downtown Manhattan’s economy and culture after the events of September 11th, 2001. It worked: the first festival was only five days but boasted 1300 film submissions (140 were screened) and a whopping 150,000 attendees. And it’s just kept growing: last year saw 4100 film submissions (this time with over 800 screened) and 465,000 attendees – just under half a million people.

While Cannes is largely seen as the daddy of all film festivals, Toronto focuses on Oscar-bait films, and Sundance is the home of the indies, Tribeca is slowly carving out its own niche. There’s a wide array of foreign films (this year, 41 countries will have films in the festival). There and tons of documentaries. And you can even find the occasional big-star popcorn flick. But of course, Tribeca also sticks to its roots: New York City. There’s even a subcompetition featuring only stories set here.

While Tribeca began this past Thursday, Friday was the day I began covering it. The weather greeted my arrival none to pleasantly: I woke up to heavy rain, and it continued throughout much of the day. At nine o’clock in the morning I went to see the film Descent, which stars Rosario Dawson.

It’s a mighty strange film to see at nine in the morning. Of course, that’s not to say it wasn’t good. Dawson stars as Maya, a college student whose generally mundane existence spirals into darkness, promiscuity, and ultimately revenge after she is raped. The film is well shot and incredibly acted: Dawson is already too big a star for this to be her “breakout role,” but that’s what it feels like. And Chad Faust, as “Jared,” is fantastic: haunting and disgusting, hitting just the right notes to make him seem like a creep that girls might at first actually be attracted to.

A press conference followed the screening with, among others, Dawson, Faust, and director/co-writer Talia Lugacy attending. Lugacy and Dawson have been friends for years looking to do the right project together before settling on Descent. Much of the talk centered around the ending, a whopper of a climax which I, of course, cannot reveal. But Lugacy’s comment about the disturbing trend of

young women regressing into drugs and sex after a rape was unsettling.

One thing’s for sure: after seeing the film, no one will be confusing it with that horror flick from last year, The Descent.

That’s all for Friday. Saturday, being the weekend, I’ll be able to catch more films and will report on them ASAP the next day. See you then…