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May 05, 2006
Screening Gotham--Farewell Tribeca Edition: May 5-7, 2006
A few of this weekend's worthwhile cinematic happenings wrapping up the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival:
--While Reeler HQ was seemingly deluged with one powerful, exacting documentary after another, this year's NY, NY narrative features on the whole left my eyes burning and my ass flat and sore. One of the rare exceptions was Choking Man, Steve Barron's magical-realist spectacle about a shy dishwasher (Octavio Gómez Berríos, right) trapped in a multi-ethnic swirl of dreamers and damned in Jamaica, Queens. Famed music video auteur Barron might play the class card a little too eagerly in his writing-directing debut, but he also takes continually fascinating visual risks while commanding terrific, haunted performances from an ensemble including Mandy Patinkin and Eugenia Yuan (the daughter of Hong Kong action-film heroine Cheng Pei Pei). Added NY, NY bonus: The New York of Choking Man--fractured urban communities; immigrant alienation; slow, deafening elevated trains--makes festival competition such as New York Waiting and Metro look like garish postcards. If Barron's film does not win a prize, then Tribeca should stop awarding one.
--Carrying its considerable Sundance momentum and goodwill over to Tribeca, Patrick Creadon's crossword-cult documentary Wordplay screens twice this weekend--including Sunday afternoon at 1:30. You know what this must mean: Free clues to the Sunday Times puzzle! (Or at least a few hints from the other crypto-philes who are sure to pack the joint.) At any rate, I just plain adore this movie and could not recommend it highly enough; it is one of the few great movies screening at this year's festival.
--If you want to get an idea of what passes for "the market" in 2006, the only two films to sell to distributors thus far are screening within an hour of each other this afternoon. So what's the catch? Emmanuelle Bercot's Backstage wraps up in Battery Park City only an hour before Nick Guth's Mini's First Time fires up on 68th Street. But as Peter Scarlet says, this is a "retail" festival--in other words, quit your bitching and get a cab. I'll see you next week.
Posted by stvanairsdale at May 5, 2006 08:11 AM
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