April 23, 2008
Tribeca, Week 1.
The Tribeca Film Festival opens tonight with Baby Mama and closes on May 4 with Speed Racer, "but in between, there are some pretty outstanding finds that won't be enjoying a studio ad blitz any time soon," notes a collective Voice, laying out 13 picks and posting four warning signs.
Updated through 4/29.
Also, Vadim Rizov talks with John Gianvito about Profit motive and the whispering wind, "an avant-garde response to Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, with static frames taking in the grave sites and memorials of left-wing heroes, labor strikes, et al."
And Michelle Orange: "Arranged as a kind of Middle Eastern tasting menu, several Tribeca offerings begin not only to complement but to converse with one another."
Plus: Aaron Hillis talks with Guy Maddin about his "time-out-of-mind "docu-fantasia" about his provincial hometown," My Winnipeg.
Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun: "By combining with Renew Media (which began as National Video Resources), the Tribeca Film Institute not only acquired deeper pockets for funding film, video, and new-media artists, but drafted a leader in [Brian] Newman who possesses a unique perspective on both the nonprofit and for-profit media playing fields."
The Film Panel Notetaker introduces an interview: "She Stares Longingly at What She Has Lost is the title of Phillip Van's segment of Little Minx, a new web film series produced by Rhea Scott and based on the French parlor game of the same name where the last line of the previous film's script starts the first line of the next film's script.... He also talks about his new feature-length screenplay Darkland that is in the Tribeca All-Access program at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival."
"Toby Dammit has always been a curiosity amongst Federico Fellini's already curious ouerve," writes Cullen Gallagher in the L Magazine.
Also, Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha is "a zany picaresque narrated on-camera by the 75-year-old [Melvin] van Peebles. As a storyteller, van Peebles seemingly invites the entire audience upon his colossal knee to hear the story of grandpa's life (though not necessarily his life) - from his childhood in Chicago to his first visit to New York City and around the world several times over - with all the juicy bits mom and dad wouldn't want you to hear told with extra gusto."
And S James Snyder talks with Harmony Korine about Mister Lonely.
Earlier: "The run-up to Tribeca."
Updates: IndieWIRE interviews An Omar Broadway Film co-director Douglas Tirola.
"[O]ver the last half-dozen years, as Tribeca grew into a glitzy stopover on the film festival circuit that includes Sundance, Berlin, Cannes, Toronto and it's uptown neighbor, the New York Film Festival, the event has come to seem too small and too big at once, a perpetual kid," writes the New York Observer's Sara Vilkomerson, who talks with the producers and programmers about where the festival's been, is and will be.
The Hollywood Reporter's Steven Zeitchik and Gregg Goldstein pick out a few highlights.
Brandon Harris talks with Waiting for Hockney director Julie Checkoway for Filmmaker. More from Stephen Saito for the IFC.
"After Film Geek, I made a mental note to follow what the filmmakers do next," writes Noah Forrest, introducing two interviews at Movie City News. "The director, James Westby, and the star, Melik Malkasian, have teamed up once again for a film called The Auteur which is playing at this year's Tribeca Film Festival. This is another movie about movies, but in this case it follows the 'world's greatest living porn director' named Arturo Domingo."
Jürgen Fauth and Marcy Dermansky pick their top ten.
Another interview for Filmmaker from Brandon Harris: The Wackness director Jonathan Levine.
"Baghdad High combines the video diaries of four Iraqi teen boys during their 2006-07 senior year in the violence-fraught capital." Bill Weber in Slant.
VF Daily has lots of pix from the opening night gala.
Variety's got a special section going.
Brandon Harris, at it again, this time with Yonkers Joe director Robert Celestino.
More from VF Daily: parties!
Updates, 4/24: In the New York Times, David Carr talks with Blair Witch Project co-director Daniel Myrick, about his new film, The Objective, "a military-horror-thriller-buddy movie set in Afghanistan that suggests that Osama bin Laden is not the only seemingly supernatural force haunting the mountains there."
"Tribeca's honchos have embarked on an extended quest to join Berlin, Cannes, Venice and Toronto at the top rank of destination festivals," notes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "I don't know about that, frankly. I don't know whether it's a goal worth pursuing and I don't know whether it's ever going to happen. But here's the good news: Tribeca has mellowed out, at least a little, in 2008." And he lists his picks.
Eugene Hernandez and Brian Brooks cover the opening at indieWIRE; also, interviews with Kief Davidson (Kassim the Dream) and Michael Christofersen (Milosevic on Trial).
The IFC opens its special section.
"[B]y blending obscure titles with the work of proven talent, Tribeca provides a resolutely solid collage of the film community's modern state," argues Eric Kohn in the New York Press.
"I can't really tell you about all the great movies, due to Tribeca's embargo on reviews of all world premieres before the films screen publicly for the first time," writes Michael Lerman at the SpoutBlog. "So, here we are now with nothing to cover but the program itself (and the embargo, of course). And instead of reviewing the quality of the films in the midnight program, I'm just gonna review the section as its own entity."
Cinematical's Erik Davis picks seven films he's looking forward to.
Aaron Dobbs: "I want to share with you a really special program that we're introducing this year at Tribeca - two actually that are a bit similar called Conversations in Cinema and Behind the Screens."
"Skeptics may continue to see the zanier surfaces of My Winnipeg as a sort of whimsy with an attitude, given its juxtapositions of rear projection and gauzy black and white with unhinged sight gags, nudity, and Canadian pop songs like 'Moody Manitoba Morning,'" writes Bill Weber in Slant. "But it has the feel of a personal accommodation, possibly one the real-life Guy Maddin has already made, with ambivalence and the way the march of time can seem married to the ascendancy of mediocrity."
VF Daily's recommendations for 4/24.
More indieWIRE interviews: Paul H-O and Tom Donahue (Guest of Cindy Sherman) and Gini Reticker (Pray the Devil Back to Hell).
Brandon Harris, Filmmaker: Justin Meeks (The Wild Man of the Navidad).
Via Shawn Levy, John Del Signore Gothamist interview with Bill Plympton (Idiots and Angels).
"Fermat's Room is sort of Saw for arithmetic dorks," writes the IFC's Matt Singer.
"It's a thrill to be able to see some of the titles in Tribeca's lineup, but I do think that, as always, some institutional accountability is in order before we delve into the individual movies themselves," begins Howard Feinstein at indieWIRE:
What keeps Tribeca from being merely a magnet for future productions and a random hodgepodge of films, some of which are connected to the founding fathers and mother professionally, are some of the programmers, who, in spite of the pablum that takes up a majority of the available slots, find some fabulous works, the kind of art that causes you to exit the cinema in a different state of mind than you were in upon entering....
These programmers are the people whose contributions and taste keep "festivalness" in the mix of this overproduced, Howard Rubensteinesque, well, vanity production. Spin is as cultivated and valorized as it is at Hillary headquarters, and some journalists are complicit in its transmission. (Just read last Friday's New York Times piece on the event for a, um, blow-by-blow.) No wonder so many of the small, low-budget Amerindie selections end up being represented by celebrity PR agencies like 42 West. Ethical boundaries are blurred. I was horrified to see the entry for one of Tribeca's films in the festival catalog signed by one of the selectors who is listed on the print as executive producer. Fine if it were merely a synopsis, but "a visually saturated and incendiary film" is a critical evaluation and just plain inappropriate. I do not think that would fly at the Film Society, Moma, BAM, or AMMI.
Updates, 4/26: "Tribeca has announced the winners of the All Access Creative Promise Awards, their program to bring together filmmakers with the industry." Michael Jones has the list. Also: "Check out our dynamic Tribeca schedule and rate the films - even if you've seen them before! Tell people what's good, what ain't good and why."
At Slant, Bill Weber on Baghead: "This second feature by the Duplass brothers, with co-writer/lead actor Jay from The Puffy Chair now sharing directing credit with Mark, soon becomes a kind of mumblecorish spin on The Blair Witch Project... As a hybrid, it's destined to disappoint horror fiends who take its predator-in-the-woods moves at face value, but it delivers on its premise that the shameless scheming of a friend can be a scarier phenomenon than a boogeyman with a knife." But a "lackadaisical focus eventually proves debilitating," argues Nick Schager, "with the end result of its myriad intentions – character study, relationship drama, scary movie, meta-scary movie – being that Baghead spreads itself thin to the point of flimsiness."
Back to Bill Weber, who's with Profit motive and the whispering wind right up until its "concluding misstep... Far less successful at going in one era and out the other is Hidden in Plain Sight, a quasi-diaristic attempt by New Yorker Mark Street to glean commonalities of life and distant history in his travels to Santiago, Dakar, Hanoi, and Marseille."
"Who better to sympathize with during the lonely alienation common to adolescence than the equally forlorn existence of a teenage vampire?" Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook on Let the Right One In.
Phil Nugent at ScreenGrab on Savage Grace, The Secret of the Grain, Simple Things, Lou Reed's Berlin, Seven Days Sunday, War, Inc, Waiting for Hockney and Somers Town.
S James Snyder's latest in the New York Sun covers An Omar Broadway Film, Theater of War and The Zen of Bobby V. Also, Bruce Bennett's "12-film sampling culled from among Tribeca's nearly 80 short offerings."
At Cinematical: Erik Davis on Trucker and Bart Got a Room ("easily my personal favorite so far"); and Scott Weinberg on The Wild Man of the Navidad and The Objective.
At the SpoutBlog: Karina Longworth on The Wackness.
"Playing is composed entirely of interviews conducted on a bare stage, monologues of women's stories in tall type, of heartbreak, of faith, of children lost or estranged, of departed lovers, of missed parents and their stand-ins," writes Alison Willmore. "[Eduardo] Coutinho's twist is that half of the women we see aren't the owners of the stories they tell. They're actresses interpreting the accounts, some of whom, like Central Station's Marília Pêra, might be recognizable to audiences here."
Steve Erickson's overview in Gay City News: Lou Reed's Berlin, Baghdad High, Katyn and Man on Wire.
At Zoom In Online: Jim Rohner on Bigger, Stronger, Faster and Man on Wire.
For his own blog this time, Brandon Harris talks with Tom Kalin (Savage Grace. Then, for Filmmaker, Ivan O'Mahoney (Baghdad High).
More indieWIRE interviews: Huseyin Karabey (My Marlon and Brando), Dan Castle (Newcastle), Alfonso Pineda-Ulloa (Love, Pain & Vice Versa) and Mohamed Al-Daradji (War, Love, God & Madness).
Cinematical's Erik Davis talks with Bart Got a Room director Brian Hecker.
"Lana Veenker, the Portland casting director, reports in from New York City, where she attended last night's world premiere of James Westby's latest comedy, The Auteur."
Updates, 27: For the IFC, Stephen Saito talks with the legendary Robert Drew, now 84, about A President to Remember: In the Company of John F Kennedy - and about the current campaign: "From my standpoint, politics now are impossible to cover. That is, the network nightly news or CNN are about as good as you can get because none of the candidates have the confidence that Kennedy had to make their own decisions and let things happen. Everything is planned and plotted, and for somebody who wants to make candid films about what's really happening, that's impossible. You've got people looking over your shoulder when you shoot, people looking over your shoulder when you edit, and I would rather bow out than jump into it."
Michael Jones notes that Cindy Sherman has publicly and unequivocally disavowed Guest of Cindy Sherman.
"After her debut Demi-tarif, and even after the first 30 minutes of her second feature Charly, it wasn't clear to me that Isild Le Besco was going to find a way to integrate the sensual immediacy of her film style into a larger structure," writes Dan Sallitt. "But I think everything is going to be all right with her."
In the NYT, Anthony Ramirez reports on Tribeca Film Fellows: "The fellowship program, which began in 2004, is intended to start young people on careers in film through mentorships with filmmakers, workshops, panel discussions and the filming of a collaborative documentary titled CityScapes."
"Clocking in at a brisk 37 minutes, Toby Dammit, Fellini’s contribution to the 1968 omnibus film Spirits of the Dead, is a minor epic and a major source of cult and critical affection," writes Simon Abrams at Twitch.
Peter Knegt's not only enjoyed Squeezebox! but also the party afterwards "with extreme debauchery rampant and a slew of performers, including Mistress Formika, Justin Bond, John Cameron Mitchell, Karen Black and Debbie Harry. It was the most worth-it hangover I ever had."
While The Auteur "definitely sags just a bit in the middle section," notes Scott Weinberg at Cinematical, "it's really, really funny."
A "punchline with a sprinkling of gore do not a midnight movie classic make." Phil Nugent in ScreenGrab on The Objective.
"James Mottern's Trucker is a throwback, the kind of low-budget, low-impact drama about grubby, ordinary people that used to be as plentiful at film festivals as fleas on a sheepdog in summertime," writes Phil Nugent in ScreenGrab.
For Scott Weinberg, Eden is "one of the most honest, touching, and quietly insightful "people stories" I've seen in quite some time."
IndieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez, Brian Brooks and Peter Knegt post another big roundup.
For Chelsea Now, Rania Richardson talks with Christina Clausen about making The Universe of Keith Haring.
"The eye-opening documentary Lioness, directed by Meg McLagan and Daria Sommers, deals with one of the least-covered aspects of the Iraq war: the role of American women in combat." Phil Nugent, ScreenGrab.
"Savage Grace is only special for [Julianne] Moore's delicious performance, though this great actress does not settle for facile vamping, conveying a chilling combativeness and tragic sense of emotional resignation with nearly every gesture, whether she is exhaling a sinister plume of cigarette smoke or chomping on an olive, bringing glints of life to [director Tom] Kalin's comatose artistry," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant.
"Killer Movie is a well-acted, enjoyable popcorn movie," writes Joel Keller at Cinematical. "But its flaws sink it to the level of 'wait until it's on DVD.'"
Updates, 4/29: Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook on Bill Plympton's Idiots and Angels: "[W]hile the action in conception treads ground that is uninspired, often unfunny, and sometimes awfully limited in generosity, Plympton's execution and imagination of the script is always exciting to behold."
More from Eric Kohn at Stream, where he also reviews Bart Got a Room, The Objective and Sita Sings the Blues (site), which "might be one of the most startlingly original feature-length explorations of familial discordance since Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation."
"I saw six films at Tribeca this weekend, and five of them were completely blown off the map by Somers Town, Shane Meadows's practically perfect follow-up to his 2007 triumph, This is England," announces Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog.
And Alison Willmore finds it "a scruffy and stupendously warm story of life in an unpretty part of the city with no lessons to teach or morals to impart."
Salon's Andrew O'Hehir has longish takes on Man on Wire, Redbelt and Theater of War.
In the first entry in his "Critic's Notebook" for Premiere, Aaron Hillis recommends Profit motive and the whispering wind and The Secret of the Grain.
Howard Feinstein's second entry in his "Critics' Notebook" for indieWIRE focuses on docs. Also, Peter Knegt profiles Guy Maddin (My Winnipeg).
At Slant: Nick Schager on Before the Rains and The Wackness.
In the New York Sun, S James Snyder presents "a survey of 10 not-to-be-missed events scheduled for this week" and an overview of films made in and about New York City.
Fresh podcast at the IFC: Matt Singer and Alison Willmore. Also, Matt on Bigger, Stronger, Faster and Stephen Saito talks with Dori Berinstein about Gotta Dance.
At Cinematical:
Posted by dwhudson at April 23, 2008 7:39 AM
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