SARASOTA '09: Films of the Week

DVD of the week? New York theatrical release of the week? Eesh, sorry folks. How do these overextended journalists do it? (Ms. Longworth, do tell.) On the road earlier this week at AFI Dallas, and now here at the Sarasota Film Festival, it's been a chore just trying to find both the internet access and the time to write in between screenings and panels, meals and parties—and for those of us who aren't 22 anymore, get in a few hours of sleep a night. Is it worth it? Does coverage of these smaller festivals that aren't on the Croisette, whose suns don't dance, hold interest for the out-of-town cineastes? If the film schedule's solid, hell yes (or so says me). It takes word of mouth and whatever buzz can be mustered in this distracted world to raise the indies and smaller foreign films up, and the Sarasota Film Festival emerges as one of the better programmed regional U.S. fests out there (see also: IFF Boston, Cucalorus, Sidewalk, Nashville, and obviously SXSW). Not that I wouldn't still be having a smashing time on booze cruises and singing karaoke (the ever-present film scenester's late-night hobby of choice) and attending fancy luncheons with Jon Voight and festival honoree Bill Paxton. Hey, the festival treats their visitors like royalty; I couldn't complain if I tried.

Among the films playing at Sarasota, I've already seen and would heartily recommend St. Nick, Sugar, Treeless Mountain, Goodbye Solo, the short film Glory at Sea!, Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be the Same, The Gates, Moon, We Live in Public, Sita Sings the Blues, Somers Town, Tony Manero and Tulpan, but I had a chance to catch up with a couple more films that really impressed me:

As a big fan of director Sean Baker's work on last year's microbudget miracle Take Out, I had been itching to finally see Prince of Broadway, both of which were nominated for the same Indie Spirit Award (for best feature made for less than $500,000) in February. Like the Manhattan-set B-side to Take Out, which concerned a particularly stressful day in the life of a Chinese immigrant hustling as an Upper West Side delivery boy, Prince heads downtown to the Garment District, where charming hustler and illegal Ghanaian immigrant Lucky (Prince Adu) lures customers into a clothing store's secret backroom to hawk counterfeit handbags and sneakers. On the job one un-Lucky day, his ex-girlfriend Linda (Kat Sanchez) shows up with an 18-month-old baby, claims him to be the baby-daddy, and lackadaisically says she'll be back in two weeks to pick him up because she has other things to do. What's a struggling, neo-realist protagonist in duress to do? Though the words "shaky" and "handheld" have become rote in describing the doc-style camerawork in many an American-made indie, it's the appropriately kinetic, rough-and-tumble approach for a story that's both naturalistically scripted and believably improvised, if more choppily edited than Take Out. Maybe poverty-stricken social realism is currently en-vogue, but Baker and co-writer/producer Darren Dean have sculpted the street hustle, the dealings with the law and forced fatherhood, and a dual-immigration tale into something exceptional: a film that's heartbreaking, uncomplicatedly funny and coolly street-wise, sometimes within the same scene. It made me long to get back to my home in New York to love and hate it as I do.

Writer-director (and occasional actor) Alex Karpovsky toyed with the blurred line between fiction and documentary in two hybrid films, The Hole Story and Woodpecker, but Trust Us, This Is All Made Up proves his first straight-forward doc; it's a quasi-concert movie, in fact. Chicago Second City alumni and improv specialists T.J. Jagodowski and David Pasquesi, better known as "T.J. and Dave," seem to share the same brain. For the last half-decade, the two have staged performances where, like the title says, they truly don't know what they'll be doing for each night's audience. They aren't exactly comedians, though what they do is clearly funny, and it all starts with three chairs on an otherwise empty stage. After introducing themselves to the crowd, they size each other up, read each other's postures and tics, then concoct a nearly hour-long play with multiple characters. In the film's first 20 minutes, the two dissect their methodology, their symbiotic relationship both on-stage and off, the nature of improvisation and creativity, and then they're off: at the Barrow Street Theater in NYC, Karpovsky films one full routine via multiple cameras, plus the wrap-up backstage talk where the two discuss the night's highlights, weaknesses and character flaws as if these personas they've created are real people they've only channeled. It's one hell of a gut-buster for sure, and as Karpovsky smartly told me during the post-screening Q&A, the reason he chose to only give us one of the five performances he filmed (instead of, as I had originally hoped, an intercut sampling of their diversity) was so that we, too, could see how their wits worked, or in one wonderfully rare moment, misfired. Had the film not been bumpered with the set-up and wind-down, it may have been a failure, but trust me about Trust Us, this is all mesmerizing and wholly original in this medium.

And now back to more movies. In honor of Sarasota's full retrospective of director Hal Ashby's work, check back later this weekend for a podcast with journalist Nick Dawson—author of a new biography entitled "Being Hal Ashby: Mind of a Hollywood Rebel"—and, hopefully, an Ashby-related mystery guest. Next week, it'll be business as usual once again. Or at least, until the Tribeca Film Festival takes over my life. (Help!)

Posted by ahillis at April 3, 2009 3:06 PM