LAFF, week 2.

The Los Angeles Film Festival rolls on through Sunday. "[T]he Austin film community was out in force this year," notes Kyle Henry. In the Austin Chronicle, he specifically calls out Spencer Parsons's I'll Come Running (MySpace) and PJ Raval and Jay Hodges's Trinidad (site; exec-produced by Matt Dentler). "[I]n a few short years, LAFF has established itself as a viable launch alongside Sundance, SXSW, Toronto and Tribeca for North American features, and Austin filmmakers will now travel out each summer hoping to come away with a distribution deal or maybe some cash to begin their festival circuits."

Updated through 6/30.

IndieWIRE interviews Largo director Andrew van Baal, Dirty Hands: The Art & Crimes of David Choe director Harry Kim (site), Pressure Cooker directors Jennifer Grausman and Mark Becker, Loot director Darius Marder (site) and Prince of Broadway director Sean Baker (site). Plus, a few words from a batch of "emerging filmmakers."

Karina Longworth has lots of pix and captions at the SpoutBlog.

More from Film Threat's Mark Bell.

And Matt Dentler.

Earlier: "LAFF, week 1."

Updates, 6/28: "Written and directed by Ben Rodkin, Big Heart City consciously evokes the 'beautiful loser' cinema of the 1970s, from the unrepentantly conflicted nature of Frank's character down to the presence of longtime John Cassavetes collaborator [Seymour] Cassel." James Rocchi at Cinematical.

IndieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez listens to Sheila Nevins, president of HBO's documentary division, argue the case that docs belong on television.

Also, more interviews: Stefan Forbes (Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story), Sarah Friedland (Thing With No Name) and Morgan Dews (Must Read After My Death.

"Finishing Heaven, in its way, becomes a post-mortem on both romance and youthful romanticism, a bittersweet accounting of the havoc wrecked on fates by the passage of time," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog.

Online viewing tips. At Variety's Circuit, Guillermo del Toro talks about, among other things, Hellboy 2 and The Hobbit.

Updates, 6/29: At indieWIRE, Michael Lerman on Trinidad, Thing With No Name, Pressure Cooker, Loot and Boogie Man.

"Co-directed by Largo manager and co-owner Mark Flanagan and Andrew van Baal, Largo recreates the Largo experience; loose, smart, random and unique," writes James Rocchi at Cinematical. "Mixing concert musical performances with snippets of comedy, the final film makes you feel like you've been to Largo, even as the more elegant notes in the black-and-white composition and the vignettes of the club's rhythm and tempo between the acts make it abundantly clear you're watching a film that was constructed and not just a tape that was turned on."

Updates, 6/30: "Prince of Broadway [site], the latest feature by Sean Baker, won the Target Filmmaker Award, the top narrative feature prize at the 2008 Los Angeles Film Festival. Darius Marder's Loot [site] simultaneously won the Target Documentary Award as the Film Independent event came to a close in California on Sunday night." And indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez has more award-winners.

Eric Campos wraps the festival for Film Threat.

"Sarah Friedland and Esy Casey's Thing With No Name follows two women in sub-Saharan African villages as they controversially begin a program of anti-retroviral drugs after having been diagnosed with full-blown AIDS," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "Undeniably beautiful to look at and powerfully poetic in its depiction of a community of women stricken with poverty and sick with a virus that they don't fully understand, the film ironically and sadly fails at its propagandist mission when tragedies of timing and fate intervene. Meanwhile, Trinidad offers a portrait of the titular 'sex change capitol of the world,' a frontier town in Colorado where a male-to-female post-op transsexual rockstar surgeon named Marci is pioneering the art and science of genital reassignment surgery. In tone and content these films couldn't be more different, but they still constitute a sort of double feature of films about real people living lives impacted by scientific attempts to customize fate."

Stephen Saito rounds up a few highlights for the IFC.

"Captain Ahab [trailer] is lush and scenic," writes Doug Cummings of one of his LAFF favorites; "its measured pace, lyrical narration, and sense of irony (not to mention its misadventurous hero) could all be compared to Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, but it’s a more intimate film, emphasizing the life of a boy who never truly knows a home as he’s traded from hand to hand."

Posted by dwhudson at June 26, 2008 10:52 AM