Portland Dispatch. 1.

As a relative newcomer to these precincts, I kept wondering who or what is a Longbaugh. This mini-festival, executive director Joe Lesher tells me, "takes its name from Harry Longbaugh, the infamous outlaw from the Old West, better known as the Sundance Kid. When we chose the name for the fest, we saw it as the return of a film festival to champion independent cinema." The implication being that Park City in January has left that mission in the powdered snow. Of the movies I've caught up to this point, the DIY aesthetic runs through them all, for better or for worse.

Demented and exhilarating, Danny Leiner's The Great New Wonderful stands out as the best of these. By turns a comedy or a starkly serious film, with undertones of a thriller in either extremity, the movie interlaces five sets of characters in New York near the first anniversary of 9/11. No one speaks about the terrorist attack - they don't have to: it's there in the intimations of violence not far below the surface. Tony Shalhoub gives a brilliant, inspired comic performance as an almost gleefully incompetent psychiatrist who can never remember anyone's name. Maggie Gyllenhaal, customarily splendid, and Edie Falco, nervous and twitchy in her silver business suit, are something to behold as embittered rival designers of gourmet cakes. (The cakes, multi-tiered monstrosities frosted in shades of steel blue, are nearly as repellent as the women's attitudes.) The movie also sports a couple of prominent sugar addicts, Charlie (Billy Donner) and Sandie (Jim Gaffigan). And Olympia Dukakis, in a mostly silent role, is spot-on as a frustrated Coney Island hausfrau. The editor, Robert Frazen, is a master at cutting scenes to show how internalized tension builds outward.

There are so many spectacular little moments: a brief shot of Gyllenhaal's male assistant preening and pantomiming a cake presentation while her back is turned; a luxuriant cross-fade of Dukakis and a friend listening to opera on a waterfront balcony - the aria, "Una furtiva lagrima," continues as the scene shifts to young Charlie terrorizing his classmates; and a disturbing nighttime sequence of a yuppie mom observing her son in an oval mirror as he acts out his deranged fantasies via an alligator puppet and a gorilla mask. Structurally, it reminds me of 13 Conversations About One Thing, but Leiner's film is riskier and infinitely better. I've no idea whether The Great New Wonderful has a distribution deal. It should.

The documentary So Much So Fast, co-directed by Steven Ascher and Jeanne Jordan, traces, over the course of five years, the physical disintegration of a handsome stud who loses his upward mobility to ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease. Determined to have as normal a life as possible, Stephen Heywood marries his sweetheart Wendy and they have a fetchingly beautiful baby named Alexander. The best, most emotionally stirring scenes in the film belong to father and son. When Stephen holds infant Alex in his lap, one is nearly as helpless as the other. They make sounds and faces, and they gurgle at each other. In a later sequence, as Alex is growing and healthy, sporting a head of dark red hair and bright blue eyes, he lies on his parents' bed, learning, just barely, to crawl, and seated across the room from him at a short, yet impassable distance is his diurnally diminishing dad. I don't think I've seen this captured so well on film before: the uncanny, silent communiqués between parent and child, the sense of knowing and understanding that goes beyond speech or touch. Earlier, in a scene at church in which Alex and another newborn cousin are baptized together, Alex cries and cries as the water splashes on his head, and there is both great tenderness and a touch of cosmic absurdity here: the woman pastor officiating dabs the baby's head dry and she kisses him, as if to reassure - it's over now. In its own way, the moment addresses the discomfort and incomprehension with which we all scream through life.

Ascher tends to narrate too much, and I wish he and Jordan had pursued questions of class. The moneyed Heywoods can afford to fight an incurable illness, whereas most of us wouldn't be able to, and I cringed at the casual mention that "insurance covered" Stephen's $26,000 motorized wheelchair. Still, the filmmakers cleverly sidestep the usual ending to terminal disease movies: in their boldest move, they dare to leave the narrative threads we've been watching unresolved.

Tough-minded but never exploitative, Kekexili: Mountain Patrol depicts the fates in store for Tibetan volunteers who traverse remote wilderness to protect rare antelopes from poachers. The saviors on patrol are perfectly human. So are the villains - poor farmers who need the antelope skins to survive economically. Director Lu Chuan's movie is to be celebrated both for the harsh splendor of the wild it deftly captures, and for seeing the issue of poaching vs preservation from both sides, not in black and white. Duobuji is excellent as the head of the unpaid patrol who, confronted with the innate decency of the enemy, comes to wonder what he's fighting for. This thoughtful film has a true-to-life ambiguity that's sure to rattle the cages of animal rights activists.

Here's what I most responded to in Hank Rogerson's Shakespeare Behind Bars: the care that the director takes in shaping confessions to the camera. When the soft-spoken inmate Hal, who has the mellowest of personas, plus a sweeping blond mane and genteel Southern accent to match, makes his devastating revelation, you can feel the audience energy change. Hal, who's playing Prospero in a staging of The Tempest at a Kentucky prison, seems to be the most erudite person around - at first, I couldn't quite believe he was in jail. He pleads near the end of the film, "This can't be what my life is about." I've rarely heard so much disappointment packed into a single phrase.

Swiftly moving on, there's no a-business like Horror Business, like no business I know, and while I can't say that everything about it is appealing, Christopher Garetano's documentary about the gore-soaked auteurs of the DIY horror genre isn't altogether displeasing. Garetano would have a stronger film if he pushed past the obvious, jettisoned the old canards he's collected (i.e., Fangoria editor Tony Timpone's claim that graphically violent films are "therapeutic, because they're preparing us for the end") and focus more directly on the moviemakers he meets. The two most interesting people on-screen are David Stagnari and John Goras. Although Garetano makes the typical documentary mistake of cutting away from his subjects just as they've said something of note, he does take pains to frame them compellingly. The medium shots of Goras, as he sits next to a fireplace, making one engagingly cryptic pronouncement after another, are especially good. Goras is the director of an animated film called Ghost Tank wherein skeletons wage war on one another before going after George W Bush. Toward the end of Horror Business, Garetano pulls in closer to Goras for the first time, and we see that the blazing fire by his side has completely extinguished.

More importantly, Garetano introduces us to the work of Stagnari, who exhibits signs of being a major talent. Stagnari, born in 1966, has only a single short film, Catharsis, to his credit. In the first clip from it, there's a level of artistry and craftsmanship in evidence that's completely absent from the work of the other filmmakers profiled. The black and white Catharsis opens with a low angle tracking shot slowly creeping toward a man sitting alone, lost in thought, in a booth at a diner, apparently empty except for him, and on the soundtrack spins Mildred Bailey's sublime 1930s recording of "Rockin' Chair," one of the great pop masterpieces of self-pity.

Say, before we go on with the show, did you hear the one about the Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Kleptomaniacs? They were caught stealing more than that extra bow. Ba-dum-pum-pum-pa-chih!

And now for the bombs. Our troika of must-avoids this weekend consists of Lonesome Jim, Elephant Shoes, and (decidedly the worst of the bunch) Last Stop for Paul.

Nearly ten years ago, the wonderful actor Steve Buscemi (I've adored him ever since Parting Glances) directed a terrific, little slice of seedy life movie called Trees Lounge, which saw a tomboyish, pre-sexpot Chloë Sevigny convincingly portray angst-y wistfulness. A decade on, Buscemi returns to the director's chair with a terrible little movie, Lonesome Jim, which belongs to the same species of film as Garden State or Elizabethtown, that is to say the prolonged adolescence genre, though without the comparative gloss of those pictures. In this case, it's Casey Affleck as the affectless anti-hero of the title, who returns to his podunk hometown after a not-long-enough absence. The movie plays like a failed sitcom pilot in slow motion, and Buscemi's direction (more to the point, the lack thereof) renders even old pros such as Seymour Cassel and Mary Kay Place bland and colorless.

From Montreal hails Elephant Shoes, written, produced, and directed by the curiously monikered Christos Sourligas. This two-character movie (no best friends to provide welcome or unwelcome distractions) divides a one-night stand into various phases: flirtation, awkwardness, denial, romance, courtship, jealousy and so on.

Shoes stretches the limits of the meet-cute genre with long takes of a guy and a girl poised in the center of the frame, jabbering away. On the sidewalk outside his apartment comes The Girl: lost, American, and seeking her way, map in hand. Who should saunter up but The Guy: not lost, Canadian, and quite possibly literate to judge from the stack of books he carries in hand. Directions to the train station turn into an invite to his upstairs flat. And why not? Greg Shamie, as the swarthy-complexioned Manny, looks handsome in his red silk shirt, and Stacie Morgain Lewis, as Alex, is plain yet not unappealing in her hideous summer tourist clothes. They vow not to have sex. After a few establishing interior shots (the movie is well lit by cinematographer Luc Montpellier), the guy and girl banter uninterestingly while standing in his small kitchen, then they passionately kiss. Ere long, Manny takes Alex (anally, of course) as they continue to stand there.

Which begs the question: Don't straight couples have missionary position sex in the movies anymore? Doesn't anyone take it lying down? At least this bout of anal sex in the kitchen isn't accompanied by one of the participants simultaneously watching TV, a la the Barry Pepper-January Jones coupling in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. That, however, is all I can say for Elephant Shoes. By the time it reaches phases five, courtship, which takes place in bed as Manny and Alex bray bad pop tunes at each other (neither can sing), I had had quite enough of this overbearing, unbelievable, self-indulgent, unconvincing, and fantastically boring "romance."

Worst still, there's Last Stop for Paul, directed by and starring Neil Mandt as Charlie. No writer is credited in the press notes, although one need not wonder why for long. From the get-go, this rapidly cut, loudly over-narrated, handheld shot, Casio-scored travelogue comes across as some kind of implausible, international episode of The Real World. It begins as Charlie recounts a poorly planned excursion to Moscow, one that climaxes, if that is the word, in projectile urinating on Red Square. After that, the video follows a pair of buttoned-down cubicle buddies, their corporate haircuts perfectly moussed, who escape the office to travel 'round the world, taking with them the ashes of a dead best friend to scatter.

When the movie tries to be funny, it isn't. There's more to anarchic spirit than fast edits and crude jokes; it requires a certain alchemy, a sleight of hand, to make bad taste spin 'round in the brain like the bubbles in a glass of champagne. Mandt isn't a Farrelly, though I gather, from the projectile bleeding that issues from a dentist's chair, he'd certainly like to be. By contrast, at a funeral sequence, the "serious" dialogue sent me into high-pitched giggles. Here's a sample.

Grieving friend, looking at a photograph of the deceased: "Man, he sure loved life." Grieving dad: "Ya got that right!"

Mandt's incessant voice-over, delivered at the rat-a-tat pace of a machine gun, patters under every scene. He keeps coming at us like a salesman hawking his wares: he doesn't know when to stop telling stories that no sane person would want to hear, and his saga of globetrotting Ugly Americans is as morally offensive as it is amateurish.

And with that, I'm off to discover more films. Today and tomorrow at Longbaugh are jam-packed with the promise of new love, and I'm especially looking forward to Alex Karpovsky's highly acclaimed The Hole Story, about which Matt Zoller Seitz has raved, and to Julie Gustafson's New Orleans documentary, Desire.

Posted by dwhudson at April 9, 2006 1:24 PM