Tribeca Dispatch. 2.

Has the Tribeca Film Festival gone green? I'm not talking about the color of money (to drop a film allusion), the color of the American Express Card, but the green of environmentalism, of Al Gore, and of a campaign to broaden awareness about global warming.

Updated.

In New York, where the required garb is black, the farther downtown you go, there was more "green" last night at the opening of the festival than at the St Patrick's Day parade. This is a good thing, in an event that could otherwise reek of consumerism. Nothing (or almost nothing) is as seductive as a beautiful landscape. And there's almost nothing as gruesome as the sight of a landscape that's been ravaged and ruined. Short films by (among others) Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady from the SOS series that will accompany a series of fundraising concerts were shown, scrutinizing the wreck of the earth. A South African choir sang about being in this world "together." Jon Bon Jovi sang. And Al Gore spoke.

The festivities took off last night with the call to preserve the world - just as the landscape of Lower Manhattan has been preserved, festival officials said. Was this Sundance, which has always incorporated a world-saving rhetoric into its public cinema-saving utterances? There's another troubling parallel with Sundance. Tribeca has been remarkably effective in revitalizing its surrounding neighborhood downtown, where construction cranes are everywhere and prices (feared to fall after 9/11) are leaping skyward with the condos, hotels and office towers. Is this the way to save the rest of the world? I hope not. It certainly has not been the way to save Park City, Utah, which is one of the few places on the planet where prices are higher and real estate is more expensive than it is in Tribeca.

You can blame a lot of it on a film festival. It's now a Tiffany and traffic jam resort that few independent filmmakers can afford to visit. What a pity. What a greater pity that Sundance signed on to hold its festival there through the year 2018.

The cry of "noblesse oblige" will no doubt be raised about Tribeca's message last night. After all, Tribeca is later to the party on this one than either Sundance, or Town & Country, which had a green issue earlier this spring (you can find my piece on "green" film in that one) or Vanity Fair, which put Knut the polar bear cub of the Berlin Zoo, who was threatened with environmental euthanasia, on the front cover with Leonardo DiCaprio. In case you didn't know, the DC Environmental Film Festival has been leading the way for years, and ought to have more attention for that.

Better late than never for Tribeca, I would say, although I'm concerned about comparisons with the Live Aid concerts and movement - or non-movement. Does anyone remember anything about those efforts but the logo and the t-shirts? Look at Africa now. Did Live Aid accomplish anything? I'd love to hear that one defended.

Does anybody rent Silkwood these days? Just yesterday, a New York Times story by Stephen Labaton about the evisceration of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration examined the case of workers in a popcorn factory in Missouri who inhaled chemical so toxic that one of them has to have both of his lungs removed. Management blamed the workers for their injuries. OSHA under a Bush-appointed head who prepared for this by fighting union organizing in South Carolina, has not called for the inspection of all factories using the chemical in the US. Let's not forget that environmentalism begins with the home and the places where we work.

Al Gore gave a wooden speech last night, even for a politician, and even by his standards, in which he hauled out the usual clichés and praised artists for carrying the torch on the environment and for broadening public awareness. I think Gore was too generous, that he was giving the artists too much credit. It was thanks to politicians like Gore that the issue of global warming has been fore-grounded. Artists are following him on this one, as they should be. Will it amount to much? It will if Tribeca recognizes that the threat to the world is more than a marketing slogan. Perhaps the thing to do would be to run a two-minute film on threats to the environment before each feature film, and to have enough of those shorts so the audience isn't bored out of its mind. None of the shorts shown last night would be hurt a bit if it were shortened down to two minutes, even Rob Reiner's stupefyingly unfunny Spinal Tap sequel, in which the boys from the band ham it up for a reunion that will take place at one of the SOS concerts. Each was essentially an info-mercial for a good cause. No one wants to watch a commercial that's too long.

Time will tell if Tribeca's commitment is serious. I hope it is. Lou Lumenick in today's New York Post raised some legitimate concerns about Tribeca, and asked that Robert De Niro step down as head of an event that Lumenick called a "street bizarre." De Niro should stay, and prove the critics wrong - that is, if they are wrong, and I hope they are. Only someone from an oil company could possibly think that "green" films and "green" thinking will be any less urgently necessary next year.

-David D'Arcy

Aaron Hillis for Premiere: "Taxidermia is an intense, disgusting, and probably brilliant experience, its aesthetics as excessive as its themes. A word of warning: though you probably shouldn't see this one on a full stomach, you might also consider one last meal for fear of never wanting to eat again."

"Tribeca sometimes seems like the film-fest equivalent of the endlessly protean product in that old Saturday Night Live commercial, the one that was a floor wax and a dessert topping," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "This year's Tribeca event is a significant post-Sundance indie marketplace and a massive hype event for the release of Spider-Man 3 - and a rapid-fire showcase for numerous off-the-radar documentaries and foreign films as well.... Maybe a thoroughly obnoxious scale of ambition is the only one that makes sense for Tribeca. Why shouldn't New York, the world capital of obnoxious ambition, have the biggest, starfuckingest, most artistically ambitious and most expensive film festival in the world?... If that's the goal, I have three words of advice for [Jane] Rosenthal, De Niro, festival director Peter Scarlet, et al: Show better movies."

"With not a little irony Jia Zhangke staged the drama of his film The World at the amongst replicas of famous buildings from around the world, and the contrast between the World Park's simulated setting and the neo-realism of Jia shooting his latest film Still Life around the actual Three Gorges Dam, is stunning," writes Daniel Kasman. "It is a fresh, relieving change of course from the previous film's overwrought, allegorical setting."

More from Premiere's Glenn Kenny, who finds Still Life "beguiling and discreetly moving... a breathtaking cinematic experience."

Online viewing tips. It's early yet, but there are already Tribeca reports from LXTV and Reeler TV.

Posted by dwhudson at April 26, 2007 11:30 AM