Los Angeles Dispatch. 2.

Screening over 300 films from a reported 35 different countries between April 20 and 30, and with all its symposiums and parties, the Newport Beach Film Festival (NBFF) lived up to its tagline: "A Scene for Everyone." In light of the city's politically conservative bent, it was no surprise that the audience award for best feature film went to Dan Ireland's Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont. Joan Plowright plays a lonely widow who pretends a young writer (Rupert Friend) is her grandson in order to suppress rumors spreading among her eclectic neighbors at the Claremont Hotel. While seemingly harmless, the subtext of the film is an elegy to the past as intellectually vapid as any floated in the Reagan era at its most nostalgic.

Equally shameful was White Space. For all its never-before-seen snowboarding footage, directors Kip and Kern Konwiser have made a 27-minute commercial for a snowboarding company posing as a film.

Slightly better was Shirley Cheechoo's Johnnie Tootall. Set in Canada, this muddled, if sincere, effort finds a discharged veteran, Johnnie Tootall (Adam Beach), returning home at the beckoning of the wolf spirit. Bearing deep secrets from before and during the war, Johnnie gets caught up in logging, tribal and romantic issues that are incredulously intertwined, thanks to poor acting and an awful script by Cheecho and Andrew Genaille - all the more disappointing since films about indigenous people are so few and far between.

Another big disappointment was Terry Zwigoff's Art School Confidential. With a cast featuring the likes of Steve Buscemi, John Malkovich, Jim Broadbent and Anjelica Huston, the film follows an art student, Jerome (Max Minghella), and his rise to fame through luck, violence and implausible circumstance. Mildly funny in the beginning, the film slowly but increasingly takes a deplorably contemptuous turn toward art students, art professors, art dealers and art itself.

Slightly less disappointing is Larry Clark's Wassup Rockers. Still hung up on youth and sex, the director of Kids and Bully ventures to a working class neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles where his camera infatuatedly caresses Latino boys. Unlike their hip-hop and gangsta counterparts in the film, these boys wear their hair long, their clothes tight and move around town on skateboards. Girls dig them. Guys hate them (unless they're gay). A mixed bag of authentic moments and hyped-up drama, the film is at its strongest when Clark lets the kids formulate their ideas about their outsider identity and at its weakest when two adults die separate, freakish deaths.

In contrast to the grittiness of Wassup Rockers, Tom Collins's Dead Long Enough is a softcore melodrama from Ireland. A film about two seemingly different brothers (Michael Sheen and Jason Hughes) who harbor secrets and love for a woman they once knew, the weaknesses of the script are compensated by the actors' playfulness.

Speaking of grittiness, it is unlikely any film this year will be as downright gritty as John Hillcoat's The Proposition. Written by musician and novelist Nick Cave, the film is set in the brutal Australian outback of the 1880s where Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce) is told to murder his older brother, Arthur (Danny Huston), if he wants his younger brother, Mike (Richard Wilson), to live. Featuring Cave's excellent music score, supported by a cast including John Hurt, Emily Watson and thousands of flies, shot through with blood, sweat and spears, this very good film is not your grandparents' - Australian or American - idea of a western.

Last but certainly not the worst feature was Ham Tran's Journey from the Fall. Inspired by true events, the film follows the lives of a Vietnamese family who split apart after April 30, 1975. One member decides to stay in Vietnam while the rest flee for the United States. As bleak as any film in recent memory, this powerful effort by newcomer Tran reminds us that sometimes migrating across international waters in search of a better way of life is only slightly easier than remaining in a war-ravaged country where bitterness, propaganda and ideology run deeper than compassion for fellow human beings.

On the documentary side, NBFF screened three highly entertaining films with oh-so-charming titles. Joe Angio's How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (And Enjoy It) is a loving and sophisticated tribute to American counterculture icon Melvin Van Peebles. As a maverick filmmaker, an options trader on the American Stock Exchange, just to name two of his vocational adventures, Van Peebles has forged his own unique identity in an America that hasn't taken much notice - making this documentary all the more important.

Not as important, per se, as Agio's documentary, but certainly as amusing, is Steve Anderson's deconstruction of the F-word in his fucking funny documentary, Fuck. Chronicling the etymology of the word and its evolution (or devolution), Anderson talks to all sorts of thinkers, writers and artists about what the word means and has meant from time to time. In many ways, the doc is a welcome supplement to last year's The Aristocrats.

Taking a more somber tone than Angio and Anderson is director Ben Strout in his documentary, Fire and Ice: The Winter War of Finland and Russia. Proving once again that the will and skill to fight is ultimately more important than any amount of firepower, Strout's riveting documentary focuses on the little known fact that when little Finland stood up to the big bad USSR in November 1939, it would change the course of World War II on many fronts.

Finally, someone at NBFF needs to sort out the way shorts are projected. Because of their varying size, shorts frequently bled onto the curtain or walls during screenings. It is irritating enough for a festival attendee, but I can only imagine how livid the filmmakers - the ones who bothered to show up - would be to see their films marred and scarred by bad projection.

Posted by dwhudson at May 3, 2006 10:51 AM