The Reeler

June 13, 2006

Fiennes, Edwards Lead the 'Blind' Once More in Tribeca

As I have mentioned before, the Tribeca Film Festival never really ends so much as it meanders for 355 days before exploding through the city over the other 10. Case in point: Last night at Tribeca Cinemas, senior programmer David Kwok showed up to introduce a screening of the 2006 TFF selection Land of the Blind, which opens Friday in New York. Actually, he introduced the film's writer/director Robert Edwards, who in turn introduced the capacity crowd to his star, Ralph Fiennes, who finally joined Edwards for a Q&A after the film. It felt like late April all over again: Hormones and hype to spare, but without the publicists, street-corner popcorn or the glut of shitty films.

Deja vu all over again: Land of the Blind director Robert Edwards (left) returns to Tribeca, this time with star Ralph Fiennes (Photo: STV)

"I won't say too much about the film, because I think it should speak for itself," Edwards told the crowd before the film. "This was my first fiction film, because I came out of documentary. And the only reason it got made was because of Ralph. He was the first actor we sent it to. When I signed with CAA, they said, 'Who do you want to be in your film?' I said, 'Wish list? Or realistically?' They said, 'Wish list. Anybody in the world.' And I said, 'How about Ralph Fiennes? ' And they said 'OK,' and they sent him the script.

"He read it and we met. He agreed to do it, and that is the only reason this film got made. And more than that, he stuck with it through three years of roller-coaster attempts to get it financed--false starts and dashed hopes. He didn't have to do that, and he didn't have to make this film. And he didn't have to do all the things that we made him do onscreen."

Like what, you ask? Oh, you know, just the typical actor abuse things: Shaved head, staged torture, bloody prosthetics... the list goes on. But what Fiennes did have to do for the film to have any chance theatrically was to excel, and he manages that as well. As Joe, a prison sentry guarding a playwright-turned-dissident (Donald Sutherland) in some anonymous fascistic state, Fiennes represents the sturdy moral order that long ago fled his nation's political crisis. Joe befriends Thorne over several years, gleaning a sense of patriotic duty more urgent and authentic than that of the despot (Tom Hollander) whose security detail he is eventually assigned to oversee.

After Thorne's release from prison, Joe opens the door (literally) for a coup d'etat that launches the insurgent to power. In the nightmare scenario that follows, however, the revolution erodes into another totalitarian ruse, and Joe faces his own violent stretch of prison for daring to resist. The themes here are nothing especially ground-breaking; you could choose to spot Marx, Castro or both in Sutherland's shaggy, demystified revolutionary, and despite Edwards's authorship of Land of the Blind before 9/11, viewers will no doubt equate the president's infantile bloodlust (he murders his father to ascend to the throne, natch) to a certain American analogue.

Edwards shares a moment on the Land of the Blind set with the new-look Donald Sutherland (Photo: Nick Wall)

Moreover, the film's wheedling attempts at satire strain and die in the shadows of its excellent lead performances. Fiennes and Sutherland share a half-dozen fine scenes here that make Land of the Blind easy to endorse, and Edwards's intense close-ups capture the nuance of each power transfer and each idea exchange that compose the bulk of Joe and Thorne's relationship. "I was I awe of Donald," Fiennes said after the film. "I really looked forward to working with him. They were wonderfully written scenes; they were a gift to actors, I think, and the relationship between them was great on the page. We seemed to find a rhythm together quite quickly, and we sparked off each other. ... As you can see, he has this extraordinary kind of fierce intelligence and latent energy in him, and he's very compelling to be in the room with. So the relationship fed itself, I think."

But a little too much of the director's other exposition occurs through unfunny newscasts pairing government platitudes with sitcom endorsements, or bizarre presidential advising sessions taking place everywhere from a bathroom to a minstrel show. That said, the film's flaws reflect its spectacular ambition as much as any of its technical attributes, from cinematographer Emmanuel Kadosh's saturated imagery to Ferne Perlestein's canny editing down to the costume and makeup design that elevates Lara Flynn Boyle to a spellbinding archetype resembling Cruella DeVille as first lady.

Even more impressively for an allegory (and documentary veteran Edwards's narrative film debut), Land of the Blind manages to get inside viewers' heads without inspiring von Trierian levels of self-loathing. That is not to say it will solve anything, but that is not its job. "Joe opens the door and allows a political assassination to happen, trying to do the right thing," Fiennes said. "What is the right thing? I mean, I think I ask that question of myself all the time, every newspaper I read: What is my role as a citizen in the world today? Do I just sit back and think, 'Oh, that's all happening over there? Do I get angry about Iraq? Do I get angry about Israel and Palestine? What do I do? I don't have any answers. I suppose a film like this might keep provoking the questions in all of us, and incrementally, we might make better choices."

Posted by stvanairsdale at 10:54 AM | TrackBack

May 08, 2006

Willing and Abel: Surreal Sketches From Ferrara's Late-Night Tribeca Hoedown

As desperately as I tried to drag Ma and Pa Reeler to the New York premiere of Abel Ferrara's Mary, my vacationing parents just were not going for the midnight-in-Tribeca vibe I was selling. But that is where my readers come in--at least that is where this reader comes in, one of the few who seem to have braved the late-night allegorical waters at Tribeca's "secret screening" as Saturday (and the festival itself) bled to death into Sunday:

Last night was nothing if not memorable. There was an appropriate mania to the whole affair, not without the frustrations of chaotic experience- but nonetheless amusing. ... (T)he screening (took place) in one of the theaters to the soundtrack of an impromptu party on the other side of Tribeca Clubhouse. ... How often do you get to see Abel Ferrara haphazardly lapping the room to the beat of 80s bubblegum? All this before you are unleashed to claim an intimate seat in a compromised theater, knowing that it may be your only chance to see Mary in any venue other than your living room. How many directors interrupt the introduction to their film by pacing through the unfilled seats screaming about the Catholic church's boycott of The DaVinci Code? And when was the last time your trepidation towards a film was completely undone upon viewing it?

Despite the distractions of circumstance, I actually enjoyed the film. ... I guess I'm a sucker for meta; it's satisfying to see one filmmaker so brazenly approach another's controversy. Also to watch "La Binoche" playing with the idea of a saintly actress or Matthew Modine channeling Ferrera (original choice Vincent Gallo would probably have been better but...). Whitaker is hammy, but in a cool kind of way, while support from French chameleon Marion Cotillard is a nice touch. And shockingly, I actually thought Heather Graham wasn't an embarrassing addition to the ensemble. Another shock: the film's academic inflections; Elaine Pagels delivers more exposition than any of the actors.

I don't mean to sound reverential here--I just mean to express that the movie's weaknesses are no match for its surprises. ... The only bigger surprise than the fact that I really like Mary is that Abel Ferrara is still alive. ... I found him to be cartoonish, confounding, and charming. I do not feel that the myspace secret screening, squeezed into Tribeca, was what he or the film deserved.

Seriously, I cannot imagine how even the most self-referential, poorly attended abortion of a film could sink the tragicomedy of "Abel Ferrara haphazardly lapping the room to the beat of 80s bubblegum," but that probably just proves the limits of my imagination. That said, I think we all owe this valiant soul a round of applause for taking one for the team and for jamming a period at the end of this particular death sentence. I am now looking forward to revisiting what really matters: Old-school NYC classics like the austere critic Roger Friedman inaccurately attributing Twister to Wolfgang Petersen.

See? We are back to normal already.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 09:11 AM | TrackBack

May 07, 2006

'Treatment,' 'When I Came Home' Make City Proud as Tribeca Wraps Up

Well, that was fast: Tribeca '06 handed out its hardware last night, and the festival ends today with three theaters devoting their entire days to the chosen few films. Blessed by Fire, The War Tapes and Voices of Bam claimed the top international prizes, while The Treatment (narrative), When I Came Home (doc) and Native New Yorker (short) won big among the NY, NY selections. Linda Hattendorf's excellent The Cats of Mirikitani (right) took the Audience Award back home to Soho.

For the full list of winners and a schedule of today's award-winner screenings, follow the jump. Meanwhile, I am playing tour guide for my entire family this week in New York, so excuse the next few days of sporadic posting. I should have a Summer Preview Review in place by Wednesday; judging from the looks of what I have read so far, you may need it.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend, and thanks for following Tribeca with me!

The Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature – Blessed By Fire (Iluminados por el Fuego), Directed by Tristán Bauer, Argentina, Spain.

Best Documentary Feature – War Tapes, Directed by Deborah Scranton, USA.

Special Documentary Jury Prize – Voices of Bam, Directed by Aliona van der Horst and Maasja Ooms, Netherlands.

Outstanding achievement in documentary to Jesus Camp, directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, USA; Jonestown:The Life and Death of Peoples Temple , directed by Stanley Nelson, USA; MAQUILOPOLIS: city of factories, directed by Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre, USA/Mexico.

Best New Narrative Filmmaker – Marwan Hamed for The Yacoubian Building (Omaret Yacoubian), Egypt.

Best New Documentary Filmmaker – Pelin Esmer for The Play (Oyun), Turkey.

Best Actor in a Narrative Feature Film – Jürgen Vogel in The Free Will (Der Freie Wille), Germany. Special mention to Adel Imam, The Yacoubian Building (Omaret Yacoubian), Egypt.

Best Actress in a Narrative Feature Film – Eva Holubovà in Holiday Makers (Ucastnici zájezdu), Czech Republic. Special mention to the ensemble cast of Holiday Makers (Ucastnici zájezdu).

NY Loves Film Documentary – When I Came Home, Directed by Dan Lohaus, USA. Honorable mention to Jack Smith and the Destruction Of Atlantis, Directed by Mary Jordan, USA and The Cats of Mirikitani, Directed by Linda Hattendorf, USA.

Best Made in New York Narrative Feature – The Treatment, Directed by Oren Rudavsky, USA. Honorable mention to A Very Serious Person, Directed by Charles Busch, USA.

Best Narrative Short - The Shovel, Directed by Nick Childs, USA. Special mention to Topor and Me (Topor et moi), Directed by Sylvia Kristel, Netherlands.

Best Documentary Short - Native New Yorker, Directed by Steve Bilich, USA.

Student Visionary Award – Dead End Job, Directed by Samantha Davidson Green, USA.

Audience Award - The Cats of Mirikitani, Directed by Linda Hattendorf, USA.

Tribeca Film Institute/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Screenplay Development Winners –Signature series: The Starry Messenger, Screenwriter Kenneth Lonergan. Main program: Project Mustard, Screenwriter Ban Zeff & Producer Andrew Bendel and Challenger, Screenwriter Nicole Perlman.

Tribeca All Access Creative Promise Award for Narrative Feature – "Before the Beast Returns" by Sterlin Harjo.

Tribeca All Access Creative Promise Award for Documentary Feature– "Outside the Box" by Lacey Schwartz. Honorable mention – Free Angela & All Political Prisoners by Shola Lynch.

Tribeca All Access Creative Promise Award for Screenwriting – Milton Liu for "John Hughes Ruined My Life". Honorable mention - Ose Oyamendan for Resistance.

SCREENING SCHEDULE FOR AWARD-WINNERS:

Regal Cinemas Battery Park: (Theater 5) When I Came Home, 1 p.m.; Blessed By Fire, 4 p.m.; (Theater 11) The Yacoubian Building, 11 a.m.; The Treatment, 2 p.m.; The Cats of Mirikitani, 5 p.m.

Tribeca Cinemas 1: The Play (Oyun), 10 a.m., 4 p.m.; The War Tapes, 1 p.m.; 7 p.m.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 09:44 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 05, 2006

Tribeca Gets 'Animated' With Bill Plympton

The Reeler grabbed a few minutes Thursday with Bill Plympton, the estimable filmmaker behind the Tribeca Film Festival's first-ever Animated NY program. And by "a few," I mean "roughly seven"--about all the friendly-but-busy animation pioneer had to spare before jamming off to another packed screening at the AMC 34th Street.

Not surprisingly, considering the pedigree, the accolades have developed into something of a trend.

"The opening night was on Monday at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, which is impossible to get to because it's all surrounded by construction," Plympton told me. "And we had to turn away 30 people. It was nice in that regard, but bad for the people who wanted to see the film. And they had to bring in chairs from the basement so that everybody who got in could get a seat. And they were rapturous--the applause never ended. It was really a fun experience. And then yesterday, we had a noon show, which I thought was bad programming since it's adult animation. It should have been a midnight show. And we almost filled that house, too. So it's been a pleasant surprise. I don't know if it's the program that's so good, or if it's Tribeca that's such a powerful force. Maybe it's the two together."

The New York-based Plympton had witnessed at least a hint of Tribeca's pull after last year's event, when he had screened his Oscar-nominated short Guard Dog to similar festival acclaim. Months later, while chatting with TFF executive director (and Plympton fan) Peter Scarlet, the filmmaker proposed a full collection of short films comprising work by other independent New York animators. "It's kind of been neglected by all the media looking for superstars and actors and directors and things like that," Plympton said. "And [Scarlet] thought that was a great idea. So I started screening a lot of films that came out of New York."

He came up with nearly a dozen shorts from local peers, from Nina Paley's sharply geometric Indian melodrama-meets-American jazz saga Sita to Signe Baumane's deceptively simple, stomach-churning dark comedy Dentist. Plympton had a few basic ground rules in programming the set: For starters, he sought a mix of different animation techniques as well as a blend of comedy and more "artsy" films. No film in the program was made before 2001, and most are newer films introduced either last year or making their debuts at Tribeca. To wit, Christy Karacas's epic Barfight and PES's cheeky, stop-motion Roof Sex emerge from the early part of this decade, while Plympton's brand-new Guide Dog enjoyed its world premiere Monday night.

"It's a wide variety of not only techniques but of filmmakers," he told me. "There are a couple of students in there. There are a lot of professionals like me. There are people who do commercials, people who do stop motion, but they're all New Yorkers, and they're all films made in New York, which I think is the real beauty of this show. It shows that New York City is probably the world's center of independent animation."

And trust me--Bill Plympton would know. Anyway, the final screening of Plympton's Animated NY program unspools Sunday at 10:15 a.m. at the AMC Lincoln Square. NB: Sure, it is a morning show, but Plympton's admonition stands: You should probably leave the kids at home--at least if you ever want them to visit a dentist again.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 08:09 AM | TrackBack

May 04, 2006

'Fifty Pills': Pucci, Bell and Youth Appeal to Spare

"It's strange," said Theo Avgerinos, the 27-year-old director of the Tribeca comedy Fifty Pills. "It was Feb. 28. We had a distribution screening set up in L.A. to go straight to distributors for the film. We had also sent it to Tribeca. So the timing kind of merges. The screening was set up for Tuesday, but on Monday morning I get a phone call saying, 'We're going to forward you an e-mail you pretty soon; you're going to the Tribeca Film Festival.' I was like, 'What?'

"So we yanked the entire distribution screening, of course, to open the film here," he continued. "And instead of having a screening and wrap party afterward, it just became a celebration party for getting into Tribeca. Some of the most fun parts are being back on the very streets where we shot."

Indeed, Fifty Pills (which screens tonight at 11:45 and Saturday at 1 p.m) is all over New York, mostly around the NYU area as college freshman Darren (Lou Taylor Pucci) faces expulsion for egregioulsy decadent parties he and and his roommate (John Hensley) host in their dorm room. For what it is worth to him, Darren stays enrolled but loses his financial aid; his drug-dealing roommate proposes he can sell 50 of his ecstasy pills to make up what he owes the university. Along the way, Darren finds a love interest (Kristen Bell), a succession of quirky clients (a dual-personality dominatrix, a Diff'rent Strokes obsessive) and a pair of formidable drug-trade foes (including a deliciously scenery-chewing Michael Peña).

As comedies go, Matthew Perniciaro's script leaves a little to be desired; it lurches heavily in the territory between raunchy teen films and wrong-man comedies like After Hours. But as young casts go, Fifty Pills offers a group that viewers are likely to see onscreen for years. Bell's popular TV sleuth Veronica Mars has almost made her a household name among teenagers, while Peña, Hensley, Eddie Kaye Thomas (who is in three--count them--Tribeca films) and Brick's Nora Zehetner all elevate the material to something better than what it is. And Pucci is typically strong, following his triumph as the New York-bound student of Thumbsucker as the New York-arrived student of Avgerinos's film. In narrative terms, the movies connect almost seamlessly; in structural terms, not so much.

"I've never been in a movie that was purposely funny--that was a real comedy," Pucci told The Reeler during a chat last week at Tribeca Cinemas. "I really wanted to do that whether I was going to be playing the straight man or the comedian or what. I wanted to do something new. I just kind of felt like the beginning of a career in acting is kind of like a big movie. You kind of have to show all the different tones that your going to use in a move in the beginning so that they're not surprised in the middle. I want to try all these different things to begin with so I can kind of go anywhere."

As least in literal terms, Pucci plans a trip to Cannes, where his two latest films--Southland Tales and Fast Food Nation--are featured as premieres. NYC native Avgerinos, meanwhile, is headed back to Los Angeles as Fifty Pills plays the distribution field. He told me he has another project in the works for this summer, but added that shooting in New York was an experience he hoped to repeat.

"The mayor's office was unbelievably supportive from the beginning," he told me. "It was one of the great incentives for us to do the films and use New York, because they say, 'Sure. Grab a block. Grab ten blocks. It's yours. Shoot. Take the permits.' By having that flexibility, we could kind of run around. And being back in Washington Square Park and in some of these places where I've shot before, I just kind of felt we're back doing a bigger version of an old student film--with a much bigger premise and concept. ... At the end of the day, you could put the camera anywhere in the city and you could get a great photograph."

Posted by stvanairsdale at 12:12 PM | TrackBack

'Toots': The Consummate New Yorker Still Packs Them In

The Reeler had the extraordinary good fortune of getting into yesterday's standing-room-only screening of Toots, Kristi Jacobson's excellent new documentary about her grandfather, the legendary New York saloon owner Toots Shor. This is one I have been trying to catch since last Thursday night, when the wait-list ticket line outside Pace University virtually wrapped around the block. And while I would want a peek either way on the basis of its NYC-centricity, the unanimously positive word-of-mouth made finding a seat in the bursting theater a matter of necessity.

Jacobson's portrait follows Shor from his humble childhood in Philadelphia to his move north to New York in 1930. While gangsters cornered the Prohibition-era market on nightlife, Shor became a bouncer and got to know boldface names from all over the legitimacy spectrum. But he was more than "just a guy standing around outside with a 46-inch neck," as interviewee Nicholas Pileggi tells Jacobson; Shor was a gregarious networker, raconteur, drinker and general social touchstone. Without a dime in his pocket (literally--and there is even a great story for that), he eventually his own eponymous club and restaurant on West 51st Street. He counted Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and some of the city's most beloved sports stars among his closest friends.

And the odds are that any who lived into 2005 are featured in Toots; former Giants running back/wide receiver Frank Gifford features prominently (as does Yankees pitcher Whitey Ford), with culture gurus Pileggi, Pete Hamill and Mike Wallace joining Shor's daughter to piece together an oral history of sorts. Almost 20 years after his death (and 30 years after Shor's), Gleason's stories still outsize almost every alcohol-soaked anecdote surrounding them, but the surplus of myth carried over to Wednesday's screening in a way you just had to know would occur sooner or later.

"One short story," said Charles Reilly, another friend of Shor's whom Jacobson features in her documentary. "The night that I was born in Philadelphia, Toots and my uncle were very cllsoe buddies--21, 22 year old kids. And my grandfather was a guy name Bart McHugh, who started the Mummer's Day Parade in Phaladelphia. So he was pretty well known in Philadelphia. Now Toots and my uncle were in St. Agnes's hopsital. My mother was slow in deliviernin the baby--ME--so those two got skyrocketed, and the nuns were all upset because my grandfather Mr. McHugh is a big guy in the town with the cardinal and all this kind of stuff. So they put Toots and my Uncle Bart in a private room in the maternity ward.

"But I'll tell you one thing: He never forgot Philadelphia. He loved New York, but he never forgot Philadelphia. My mother would come to New York; she was four-foot-ten, and Toots would pick her up and kiss her square on the mouth. 'Catherine, it's so great to see you!' And she'd say, 'Toots, don't kiss me on the mouth.' But he was a great guy. He was bigger than that screen."

Tonight is your last chance to check out Toots at the Tribeca Film Festival; the film screens at 8:15 at the AMC Lincoln Square at Broadway and 68th. Bring a book, a snack and camp out early; it will fill up fast.

(Photo of Kristi Jacobson: STV)

Posted by stvanairsdale at 09:33 AM | TrackBack

May 03, 2006

Prince of the Shitty: Cruise Launches Manhattan 'Mission'

You may or may not care to know that the Tribeca starfucker in me who wanted to chase Tom Cruise through the streets of Manhattan during today's Mission: Impossible III publicity whirlwind has been smothered to death by the movie lover in me, who would rather crash this afternoon's Toots screening before running off to the opening night of MoMA's Lech Majewski retrospective. But you are in good hands: Live with Regis and Kelly has already successfully swallowed the Cruise load (above), and the demi-hero is now off to prepare for his multi-platform, multi-ethnic, media-saturated day on the town before skidding onto the red carpet tonight at the Ziegfeld.

Feel free to send tips and photos my way, assuming you have not yet fled town in abject, wild-eyed terror.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 12:23 PM | TrackBack

The Pixies Have Left the Building: 'loudQUIETloud' Makes NYC Debut

True story: While waiting to get into last night's New York premiere of Steven Cantor and Matthew Galkin's Pixies documentary loudQUIETloud, my mind wandered to a practical place where I tried to guess how the filmmakers would plunge into their subject. Despite the success of the band's 2004 reunion tour--chronicled in quotidian detail by Cantor and Galkin (right)--the Pixies have more and more of a cult following every day, and I figured that Kurt Cobain's semi-famous quote about Nirvana aspiring to "rip off the Pixies" would make a good epigram, one that immediately establishes the subjects' magnitude for the general public. Then I thought, "No--that would be way, way too obvious," knowing such instincts are why I would make an average (at best) filmmaker myself.

Alas, loudQUIETloud does start with Cobain's quote, the first of many predictable if diverting fragments comprised in this half-concert film/half-tour record. Having caught one of the dodgy "warm-up" shows that preceded the Pixies' more burnished European and North American odysseys, I was prepared for the portrait of a genuinely great band basically going through the motions. And for all the unpretentious identity the film works to confirm, it indeed finishes the demystification job the Pixies undertook when they reconvened for the 2004 Coachella Music Festival. As charmed as one might be by the band's overwhelming normalness--camera crews catch bassist Kim Deal embroidering, while leader Charles Thompson (a k a Black Francis, a k a Frank Black) spends days off on family jaunts to cornfields and aquariums--nothing is more normal than the quartet needing to make a few bucks, brushing off its own legend and going back on the road as though commuting to a day job.

Certainly, nobody could begrudge them that, but such pragmatism does not jell with loudQUIETloud's canonizing tone. Cantor and Galkin follow their epigram with a shot of stage doors, behind which the thrum of an adoring crowd establishes the Pixies' contemporary appeal. Later sequences involve Deal's interludes with smitten fans (and the eerie comedown of realizing the scale of some fans' obsessions), and the fawning of one A-list music journalist after another burdens Thompson. Drummer David Lovering basks in a redemptive spotlight even as he flirts with drugged-out self-destruction, while guitarist Joey Santiago stays above it all, corresponding with his family via iChat while trying to complete a soundtrack assignment. One gets the feeling that the band's off-stage routine is supposed to provide sort of an inglorious counterpoint (their earliest rehearsals require Deal to consult her iPod for the bass part to "Hey"), but I felt as though the directors' love for their subjects overruled the more obvious reality that one of rock's most influential ensembles is totally boring--just like the rest of us.

"We definitely had days where all four Pixies were in their hotel rooms and not coming out," Cantor told the audience in a Q&A following the screening, which was also attended by Lovering and Santiago. " 'What should we do?' Meanwhile, we're spending our own money for travel and crew, and that was adding up. One day Matt had the wherewithal to go to the venue in Chicago where they were about to play that night and there was that girl Carla sitting outside 12 hours before the show started. He shot with her for a day."

Cinematographers Jonathan Furmanski and Paul Dokuchitz had slightly more dramatic recollections from the shoot. "As we went thorugh the months and months of filming, the trust level--which was two-directional--went a lot higher," Furmanski said. "There were times we gave them cameras, to just have them shoot themselves. And there is the moment when Charles pushes a camera down, so they definitely got sick of it at times, but no one ever expressed anything like 'Get out of my face.' I never had that experience."

"Well," Dokuchitz said, "Kim had a problem where if she was was playing her bass and we were standing right down there in her eyeline with her (instrument), she literally would go to the edge of the stage and say, 'Get the f--- out of there.' And I was like, 'Oh, cool, I just got yelled at by Kim Deal.' But Charles came to Iceland and there's this place called Blue Lagoon, which is like these hot springs. We had all gone, and when he got there a few days later, we told him, 'We're going to go to the Blue Lagoon.' And he said, 'Yeah, I'm gonna go.' And we said, 'We're gonna go with you!' He jumps in a van and ran off really fast--he didn't want any cameras around because you're in your swim trunks."

Eventually, the obese Thompson's exhibitionist side does peek out, most notably in a sequence during which he wedges into his tour-bus bunk and recites self-help bromides like, "I am a good person. ... I am cute." The performance footage is anything but earth-shattering; "Gouge Away" and the classic show-stopper "Vamos" reveal flashes of invigoration, while Lovering's meltdown on "Something Against You" fuels six or seven minutes of moderate drama. And although loudQUIETloud's structure bears uncanny similarities to Matthew Buzzell's far superior Luna documentary Tell Me Do You Love Me (down to the minutiae of a band reading its own press and the mini-existential crises that somehow occur between every tour stop), Cantor and Galkin's work reflects the Pixies' inconsistencies the way Buzzell's film reflects Luna's flickering, world-weary character.

I do not doubt loudQUIETloud has a long life ahead of it on DVD, and the doc's glimpse at the Pixies is quite rewarding in a where-are-they-now sort of sense. But like any reintroduction to loves lost and found, loudQUIETloud harvests success only in making the good old days that much better. You know what is coming today, so be warned: It can cost you your memories.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 11:38 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 02, 2006

Ferrara's 'Mary' Gets 'Secret' Tribeca Premiere

An alert Tribeca publicist reader recently sent along word of the festival's little-known MySpace page, in the deepest, darkest reaches of which you can find an invitation to attend a pair of "secret screenings" that will help wind down the festival this weekend. In all honesty, you can do better than Mandy Stein's boring and soulless Ramones tribute Too Tough to Die, but you are definitely in luck with the screening of Abel Ferrara's latest film, Mary. After all, this is essentially a New York premiere, and it is totally free and open to the public.

Naturally, there's a catch: You must print out the invitation and take it down to the Tribeca Box Office at 13-17 Laight St. (adjacent to Tribeca Cinemas) to get your ducats. Worse yet, the screening begins at midnight, but at least you can grab Murdoch-subsidized drinks at the cinema's bar before the film. It is a small joint, so consider grabbing tickets pronto.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 01:48 PM | TrackBack

The Reeler Presents: Tribeca in (Totally Random) Pictures

Random shit you catch when you carry a camera around:

Where is that man's hard hat? And would it not be easier to just change the letters?

North, meet South: The Loews/AMC 34th Street Theater on Tribeca's opening night

Mascots from A Flock of Dodos represent at Tropfest@Tribeca. "They cost us a fucking fortune," a producer told me

Posted by stvanairsdale at 12:18 PM | TrackBack

Soderbergh, Wagner Wrangle With MPAA on Tribeca Panel

Attendees expecting a steel-cage match between new media upstarts and old Hollywood grease were sorely disappointed Monday, when the Steven Soderbergh-Todd Wagner-Dan Glickman panel "Downloading at a Screen Near You" lost MPAA chairman Glickman to an unforeseen cancellation. His colleague Dean Garfield took over, which went well enough under the circumstances but nevertheless left the audience lamenting the blinding, bloody conflagration that could have been.

Download lowdown: (L-R) The Hollywood Reporter's Georg Szalai keeps an eye on panelists Steven Soderbergh, Ashwin Navin, Todd Wagner and Dean Garfield (Photo: STV)

Moderated by The Hollywood Reporter's New York bureau chief Georg Szalai and also featuring BitTorrent co-founder Ashwin Navin, the mostly civil 90-minute discussion revealed little we do not already know about its participants. That said, because part of that knowledge includes recognizing the group's articulate intelligence, the crowd had a surfeit of Big Questions to chew on: How will video downloading impact the film industry in the future? Will studios and exhibitors ever accept day-and-date releases? When will the industry revise its business model to acknowledge the advantages of digital media? And how much is Wagner and his producing parter Mark Cuban willing to push their revolution past the tipping point?

"It's important to understand that a lot of things happened before we woke up one day," said Wagner, who along with Cuban sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo! for $5.7 billion in 2000. "We didn't just say, 'Oh my god, the movie industry. We just need to do this, because this will really piss everybody off.' It's just not true. It was because we needed to rethink the business model to have a chance to survive in an industry that's, frankly, run by a few very large studios."

Of course, Soderbergh's six-picture deal with Wagner and Cuban's 2929 Entertainment--which commenced earlier this year with the release of his micro-budget bomb Bubble near simultaneously in theaters and on DVD and cable--will live and die by that model. And that is just fine by the Oscar-winning director.

"Cinema is a language," Soderbergh said. "It's a language that you use to make a movie. I've seen 30-second commercials that have it, and I've seen two-and-a-half hour Academy Award-winning films that don't. So I don't care where they see it, because I know the language I used to make it is intact. So I'm not precious about that. And as I said, in this case, I saw an opening to be able to do some work that was going to expand my language as a filmmaker. And I jumped at it."

Follow the jump for more of Soderbergh's "language"--in particular, a fun squabble about the ruination of theatergoing.

Bubble represented a recurring subject in the panel discussion, often stifling the more relevant issue of how studios plan to address Web downloads as an avenue of distribution. The troublesome subject of piracy barely came up at all, despite Navin's joke that he was grateful to not have to wear a flak jacket in Garfield's presence. "Distribution of film online is coming sooner than you think," he said. "It's not far off. Feature-length films will be distributed online as well. Certainly, from a user experience, we think the independent community is going to lead the way I terms of creating a lot of (opportunities) for consumers online, and the majors aren't far behind. I think they're seeing what happened to the music industry and the influence of Napster and other mechanisms, and they don’t want to suffer that same thing."

Soderbergh also called attention to immense up-front fees for A-list talent, going so far as to propose a salary cap for productions and their actors. The evening's most jagged debate occurred when the filmmaker condemned a deteriorating theatrical experience polluted by commercials, which he said studios make necessary based on splits that send up to 95 percent of ticket revenues back to distributors.

"Our attitude is, look, " Soderbergh said. "If the whole Bubble release at least got some discussion going on the part of the theater owners about how to make the theater experience more special and more unique, then that alone is worth doing it for. Because I don't know about you, but I'll go to a movie here in Manhattan... more often than not, not a great experience. Just not a great experience."

"Just to be clear--" Garfield said.

"You've had a good experience?" Soderbergh interrupted, tongue only somewhat in cheek.

"I'm not going to try to be defensive," Garfield said. "The studio heads aren't all walking around in the dark bumping into each other saying what are we going to do now. I think people are actually, seriously sitting down and studying the situation and trying to figure out solutions. And one of the things that's clear to us is that we're not going to reach solutions by throwing stones at each other. I think both Steve and Todd have overstated the influence of the studios over the exhibitors."

"Oh, really?" Soderbergh said. "No, honestly."

"Because the antitrust laws prevent us from going into the exhibiton business," Garfield said, provoking a mild groan from the Tribeca crowd. "That's been the case since the 1940s."

"What's the percentage of profits that they provide?" Soderbergh asked. "It's gotta be 90-something."

Dean smiled. "Right."

"So they're generating the movies that generate the kind of profits that the exhibitors need," Soderbergh said.

"Yeah, but the studios don't limit the exhibitors from getting into all sort of ancillary revenues," Garfield said. "There is no limit placed on theaters selling all sorts of stuff beyond popcorn and juice."

Wagner leapt in. "Not to pick on you, but--"

"Let me finish, Todd--"

"The exhibitors, if they have that kind of influence, wouldn't they not have done things like the 90-10 split and the 95-5 splits?" Wagner asked.

"Frankly, if I wasn't in the room..." Garfield replied. "One of the things we've learned from the Internet and from panels is that you shouldn't take everything people say at face value. I wasn't in the room. That could very well be fact-based fiction. I don't know. What I do know is that we are working aggressively to deepen our relationship with the exhibitors to get to the bottom of exactly what's going on with the cultural shifts in our country. What do people want to experience when they go to a movie? What's the value they place on the theatrical experience? How are the new media platforms changing how people view the movie and the moviegoing experience? Dan Glickman at ShoWest talked about the research that we're doing, and in conducting that research, and before we started our research, we reached out to NATO (the National Association of Theater Owners, the exhibitors' trade organization) about ways that we could work together and develop a research methodology that would get us some answers. ...

"I don't think people are in denial about the fact that producing movies is getting more and more expensive," Garfield continued. "In fact, over the last three years, those costs have been declining, and the studios are working aggressively to try to bring them into control."

In the end, Wagner agreed that the distribution game is a two-way street. But he added his perception that exhibitors "feel like they have been stepped on for a long time" and that an industry consensus needed to be reached sooner than later. Mostly, he said, 2929's experiments shifted cinema's emphasis back to the cinemagoer.

"There was never a discussion about how to focus on the customer," he said. "Instead it all came down to closing windows. That's really unfortunate, I think, because it's an opportunity to rethink about the customer, and regardless of where windows end up, right? They've gone from six months to four months over the last ten years--your crystal ball is as good as mine about where it ends up. Its an opportunity to me in the fact that we're in a different place now, and now they can rethink how they want to do the industry."

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May 01, 2006

Travolta, Malkovich and 'The Bridge': The Weekend in Tribeca Press Conferences

The first weekend of the Tribeca Film Festival closed out with an army of film journalists sleepwalking through the motions--primarily at the Tribeca Grand Hotel, where The Reeler caught up with the press corps covering popular titles like The Bridge, Lonely Hearts and Colour Me Kubrick.

The Bridge director Eric Steel (L) with documentary interviewee Richard Waters and editor Sabine Krayenbuehl (Photos: STV)

Filmmaker Eric Steel made his way to the dais Saturday afternoon to chat about The Bridge, his mightily controversial documentary about the lives and deaths of people who committed suicide by leaping from the Golden Gate Bridge. Without hesitation, I would say that Steel's film reflects the poetry of San Francisco's landscape as beautifully as any film I have ever seen; his images of falling men and women (as well as at least one matter-of-fact rescue) haunt and enthrall even as they terrify with their gravity. That said, you have heard or even lived these stories before; their highs and lows belong to many of us or those close to us. Only the singularity of their actions stands out, and after about 30 minutes of bearing witness to it, I frankly stopped caring. Suicide bored me.

Others have raised more pointed arguments against The Bridge--namely that Steel's year-long filming routine and subsequent film crosses the line into exploitation. Steel disagreed, saying he alerted authorities when it appeared somebody he was filming might be of a mind to jump. "I don’t think I was really worried about it being exploitative," Steel said. "I knew myself well enough before I started. That was really never the goal. I think I'm a pretty sensitive person and a pretty empathetic person. I think I understand the dimesnions of loss well enough to know that it's difficult for people to share their stories, and it's difficult to put them on film. You really have to be careful and be very sensitive. I guess if there was something I was afraid of, it was that word would get out in the public about what we were doing, and that someone who was unwell or not thinking clearly would--if they knew what was going on out there--choose to go to the bridge and jump off in order to be immortalized on film. And I think there's a very big difference between being a witness and bearing witness to things at the bridge and being an agent of provocation."

Things got considerably lighter following a screening of Todd Robinson's film Lonely Hearts, which features a scowling John Travolta as a homicide detective on the trail of the 1940s' notorious "Lonely Hearts Killers," Ray Fernandez (Jared Leto) and Martha Beck (Salma Hayek). The film marked another beautiful aesthetic exercise with little redemptive dramatic value; the problems start with the woefully miscast Leto and Hayek, then trickle down from there as nearly every scene in Robinson's script disintegrates in a whirlwind of melodrama and cornball dialogue. Travolta does what he can, as does James Gandolfini, who portrays the detective sidekick who conveniently narrates the less sensical sections of the film with all the inflection of a C-grade noir.

The Lonely Hearts Trio: Writer/director Todd Robinson with James Gandolfini and John Travolta

Gandolfini and Travolta appeared with Robinson after the film, with the latter actor framing a sort of psychic backstory that predated the three films he has made with Gandolfini since 1995's Get Shorty. "Jim's dad used to buy tires from my father in New Jersey at Travolta Tire Exchange," Travolta said. "When James would come to the store, I guess he would see a picture of me from some movie. What was it? Saturday Night Fever? Welcome Back Kotter?"

"I think it was Saturday Night Fever," Gandolfini said.

Travolta nodded, continuing, "And he decided that if I could do well at it, then maybe he could too. Therefore, there was a history. And then when we met, it was love at first sight. I've been truly fond of James form the moment I met him, and having that history was just an added bonus."

Gandolfini corroborated the events in a little less homoerotic terms. "When I saw that poster," he said, "I was pretty amazed that was his father, because both of our fathers were these smaller wiry guys. I did think that if he could do it, I could do it. And then when this came along, this kind of part was kind of a sidekick to him, and it's kind of what I felt like for a long time--kind of in his shadow, and you know just looking up at him. And I think it worked for me in the film. It helped me a lot."

Tribeca Film Festival executive director Peter Scarlet (L) joins John Malkovich and producer Michael Fitzgerald to discuss Colour Me Kubrick

Finally, Colour Me Kubrick chameleon John Malkovich joined producer Michael Fitzgerald on Sunday to chat about Alan Conway, the infamous impostor at the center of their delightful biopic (check my write-up here for a bit more background). I asked Malkovich about the research that prepared him for such a messy, marvelous role. "There was a lot of it in the script," he said, "because Tony Frewin, who wrote it, of course, had been Stanley Kubrick's assistant for 25 years and had been sort of charged with handling this and sort of dealing with it and reacting to it and spinning it and blah blah blah. So he knew quite a bit about it, and there was a lot more in the original script. But also, there were several articles written about him, and as I said, the English did a TV show on him, which he starred in."

Fitzgerald jumped in. "Because he, of course, became a celebrity after this, and lived at the public expense in great style," he said. "But also, many of the actors who were in the film had encountered him. Jim Davidson, who plays his love interest, so to speak, the end of the film, had encountered him and had thought him Stanley Kubrick. This guy had really gotten around."

Another journalist followed up by asking if Davidson actually fell for Conway's act. "Of course!" Fitzgerald replied. "Of course. Everybody believed him. Stanely Kubrick's wife Christiane still now gets letters from the parents of young men who were..." Fitzgerald paused, smiled and turned to Malkovich. "What's the word?"

"Buggered," Malkovich said.

"(The letters started) by sort of regretting his death," Fitzgerald continued, "but saying that he had done unspeakable thing to their children or one thing or another. And this was all Alan Conway. The repercussions of his life in her life were somewhat dire."

Posted by stvanairsdale at 10:52 AM | TrackBack

Saturday Night Fever: On the Town with 'Air Guitar Nation' and 'Brother's Shadow'

The Reeler continued its peripatetic Tribeca Film Festival campaign last weekend, taking in a handful of films around town before slipping into a few related parties to see what else there was to see. None were more devastatingly cool than the whole atmosphere surrounding Air Guitar Nation, Alexandra Lipsitz's documentary about the charming people (and pathologies) inhabiting the world of competitive air guitar. The doc claimed South by Southwest's Audience Award in March before moving on to Tribeca, where a sold-out room enjoyed its New York premiere Friday at midnight.

Bjorn Turoque wows the Air Guitar Nation premiere party crowd; filmmaker Alexandra Lipsitz further cements his legend (Photo: STV)

The film follows the rise of air guitar in the United States in 2003, when a small group of New Yorkers banded together to send an American competitor to Finland's world championships. Where any decent documentary by its nature confers an elevated sense of legitimacy to even its most aberrant subjects, Air Guitar Nation exalts whiff-riff kingpins like David "C-Diddy" Jung and Dan "Bjorn Turoque" Crane as folk heros. Their tilts through New York's regionals and then the US finals in Los Angeles are as pioneering as they are outrageous, and the American air guitar culture that emerges from their efforts represents one of recent memory's more ironic, outlandish triumphs of performance art.

Alas for Crane, a New York writer who penned his alter ego's memoirs for publication later this year, "triumph" may be a more abstract term. "I've given up competition," he told the disappointed crowd following Friday's premiere. "It's true. I've competed in 10 competitions since we've started all this. I've come in second place five times. So I've kind of learned a lesson at a certain point. But I can't get away from air guitar. Where would I go? I thnk the fighting spirit will always be there, but I defintely have been experiencing signs of aging: arthritis, a little deafness."

The audience groaned again. "I know, I know," Crane said. "I look good, but the warrior inside has taken some tolls."

You wouldn't know it from Turoque's performance the next night at Rare on West 14th Street, where Air Guitar Nation hosted its premiere party with a balls-out session of "Aireoke." Brooklyn resident (and 2003 world champ) C-Diddy also performed while Lipsitz kept her camera rolling. "Watching people like C-Diddy--just meeting him--such amazing, rich human beings get involved in there," she told me. "You think, 'Oh, air guitar, probably a bunch of idiots.' ... But if you do something, and you really enjoy it, then you know you're doing the right thing. And everybody else says, 'That's really fun,' and it explodes. And this is something that everybody does on a primal level."

Across town at the premiere party for the NY, NY competition film Brother's Shadow, people were mingling on a primal level; the packed bar at Public on Elizabeth Street demanded a lot of bellowing conversation and more than a few close encounters as attendees diffused from one end of the room to the other. "You just came from where?" one shouted to me from about five inches away.

"The Air Guitar Nation party," I shouted.

"Why did you leave?"

Oh, come on. Why should I have stayed when I was virtually guaranteed an audience with the one and only Judd Hirsch? "One day I'm just doing nothing," he told me, recalling how the film's leading man (and former Numbers co-star) Scott Cohen roped him into Brother's Shadow. "I'm riding a train. I'm taking my little boy--he likes trains--I'm taking him up the Hudson River. I get off in this little town, walking along the Hudson River--right at the river, this dopey little park--and I get a cell phone call from Scott Cohen, who said, 'Will you play my father?' 'Why not? So what is it? Describe it to me.' That whole day, he's describing this movie to me and why he wants to do it. And I say, 'Hands-down, yes, of course. I will play your father.' I said, 'What kind of a relationship do we have?' He said, 'Bad.' I said, 'Kind of like we did on that television show?' He said, 'Worse.' "

Indeed, Jake Groden (Cohen) and his father Leo (Hirsch) could be on better terms when the film begins; as a parolee burning one last chance after another, Jake returns home to Brooklyn prodigal son-style only to find that his twin brother--a renowned furniture maker--has died. His widow (Susan Floyd) plans to sell the family shop over Leo's protests, while his son (Elliot Korte, above with Cohen) withdraws into a mournful resentment. Meltdowns and healing ensue; you can probably figure out where the story goes from there.

But despite the dramatic formulas and bizarre woodworking montages at hand (not to mention a cloying score by Duncan Sheik that instantly lapses into indie cliché), director Todd Yellin achieves one of the best-looking--and thus thoroughly watchable--New York films screening at Tribeca. "I so connected to living in Brooklyn," said Yellin, who spent six years in Carroll Gardens during the 1990s. "And Brooklyn inspired me from a visual perspective. ... What's really hip is the shaky, hand-held, gritty stuff; I wanted to make something more polished, even though it's low-budget. I wanted to show the grace of New York. I talked to the DP, Kip Bogdahn, and said, 'Give me a $20 milion look for a low-budget film.' "

You can appraise the result for yourself, but Yellin is also fortunate to have newcomer Korte in front of the camera. As 14-year-old Adam, he stalks through the film with an ambivalent, world-weary slouch that graciously balances out his castmates' hamminess. On the few occasions he does overdo it, you get the immediate sense that it is first-time filmmaker Yellin whose earnestness might be to blame.

Anyway, Hirsch was not going to let that get me down, instead regaling me with the lure of shooting back in Brooklyn. "It gives me an opportunity to go back to a place that I never really knew well enough," said the Bronx native. "I saw how people lived all the time I lived in New York. I was born here. I heaerd about all these places. I lived in Coney Island--in its heyday! And if you do a movie about Coney island, I'm in it. I'm in it. If it's bad, I don't want it. But I hope its good. Do a movie about the history of Coney Island--a movie, not a documentary. The documentary has already been done."

And just like that, I had Judd Hirsch attached to my movie. Now who is knocking me for checking out of an air guitar concert early?

Posted by stvanairsdale at 09:34 AM | TrackBack

April 30, 2006

Let's Take This Outside: The Reeler Crashes Tropfest@Tribeca

In keeping with the robust sense of community that the Tribeca Film Festival has established this week in New York, I pretty much invited myself to Friday night's Tropfest@Tribeca reception at the Tribeca Grand Hotel. And sure--I admit to being a little cynical about Tropfest when it was announced last fall. But the fact of the matter is that the short film program--adapted from the wildly popular Australian series of the same name--was easily one of the festival's best events so far.

The lights go down on the Tribeca's outdoor screening venue on the Hudson (Photos: STV)

More than 5,000 people attended Friday's free outdoor screening at the World Financial Center, where the films were well-made and as long as you brought a blanket, the riverside atmosphere was hard to beat. The Daily Show's Ed Helms hosted (prompting a quiet chorus of, "He's so much funnier on TV" among the crowd), while celebrity judges including Naomi Watts, Matt Dillon, Darren Aronofsky and Famke Janssen (whom I am proud to have recognized this time around) handed out the first-place hardware to Matthew Bonifacio's drama The Watering Hole.

The judges met up at the Tribeca Grand reception beforehand, joined by Watts's boyfriend Liev Schreiber (below), Melvin Van Peebles and Tropfest founder John Polson, who started the festival in 1993 when he needed a means of exhibiting his own short film. He has since established himself in Hollywood (he directed Tribeca co-founder Robert De Niro in Hide and Seek); moreover, he has parlayed the event's success into an Australian cultural touchstone--in 2006, upwards of 150,000 people attended Tropfest screenings in six cities around the country.

"There's a lot of talent out there that we don't know about," Polson told me. "Just a lot of people with a lot of ideas and a lot of raw talent. And the great thing about Tropfest in Australia--and I hope here--is that it's a level playing field. You can spend $50 on your movie or $150,000. It really doesn't matter to us. It's not going to get in or not get in based on that. It's really about, 'How good is your idea?' and, 'How well did you execute it?' We've got a lot of examples of films that cost $500 winning and people going on and getting careers out of it. It's really a backlash, I suppose, in some ways, against film schools and institutions. It's a way of saying: Look, sure those those places have a place, but sometimes breaking the rules is a good thing, too. And sometimes coming from a lot of backgrounds or taking a different route to being a filmmaker can be a great thing."

I asked Watts and fellow Aussie actress Gia Carides about their own experiences with Tropfest. "Gia was at the very first one, weren't you?'

"Yeah, I was," Carides said. "I was a judge."

"It was at a little café in Sydney called the Tropicana," Watts continued, "where we would all frequently go for our coffees and focaccias. John Polson made a short film, and how many others were there?"

"Half a dozen, maybe?" Carides said.

"About half a dozen of his mates," Watts said. "He had friends and locals; he said, 'Let's all make a short film.' And so they had a coffee shop that was less than a third of the size of this room. He had the first one and everyone loved it. And it was in the spirit of, 'Let's share our work.' A couple of hundred people attended at this tiny café in a groovy, sort of hip part of Sydney." Watts paused, then slumped a bit. "I didn't see that one; in fact, I'm embarrassed to say that this is my first Tropfest ever.

"Are you serious?" Carides asked, stunned.

Watts shrugged. "I'm serious!"

I would have told Watts to join the crowd, but 30 minutes later, she did. And hopefully there are more where this one came from.

For a little more... conventional Tropfest coverage, check out my other recap over on The Huffington Post.

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April 28, 2006

'Stadium Story' Survives Bumpy, Brilliant Ride on West Side

I know I have been a little scarce around these parts; the day the subway offers wi-fi will be the day my productivity soars while theater-hopping around Manhattan. That said, I thought I'd refer you back over to The Huffington Post, where I've documented A Stadium Story's Tribeca premiere (at the AMC Theaters on 34th Street, natch) in all of its loud, turbulent glory.

To wit:

Viewers applauded anti-stadium leader John Raskin's first appearance and hissed at the introduction of deputy mayor and pro-stadium godhead Dan Doctoroff. Union boss (Jim) Mahoney greeted at least one of Raskin's allegations -- that union protestors were paid to lobby Albany the day of the deciding vote -- with a throaty cry of "Bullshit!"

Consider this link your jump to the rest of the piece.

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The Doc is In As Tribeca Heads Into First Weekend

Two full days into the Tribeca Film Festival, my gut instinct (and the word on the street) tells me that this year's documentaries are going to outrank their narrative peers by at least a couple of weight classes. I have yet to even check out buzz-hoarding titles like The Bridge and The War Tapes, but when I find myself recommending docs on something like a four-to-zero basis, my bad knee says that is a sign.

Jonestown director Stanley Nelson at his film's April 26 premiere (Photo: STV)

But most people seem to agree it is a good sign. "This festival, I gotta say, this thing has come of age," said director Marc Levin, whose own docs have earned festival accolades for years and who sits on a decidedly formidable International Documentary Competition jury. "It's fantastic that documentaries have risen to a place at major festivals where they are a major focus of discussion, and people want to be involved in it. It's great that they have such a high-powered jury. I've certainly looked at the list of films; I thought United 93 would be, 'OK, if I can survive that…' But I looked at the list and there's Jonestown and The Bridge--there's some amazing stuff."

Indeed. In the meantime, NY, NY Documentary Competition juror (and esteemed New York Magazine film critic) David Edelstein sends word that the one doc he's seen so far--Kristi Jacobson's Toots--is delightful. "It's all a wondrous new adventure to me," he said this morning in an e-mail to The Reeler. "I look forward to arm-wrestling Rosie Perez in the jury room, though." And while I have made my case previously for both American Cannibal: The Road to Reality and A Stadium Story, here are a few more winners from The Reeler's preliminary Tribeca documentary survey:

--Jonestown: The Life and Death of People's Temple: Unapologetically direct in its retelling of the suicide/massacre that claimed more than 900 lives, Stanley Nelson's documentary explores more than just the unqualified psychosis we have seen in God knows how many A&E chronicles of Jim Jones's religious sect--it illuminates the vulnerability that sank Jones and all of his followers. Nelson exquisitely intercuts survivor interviews with stock photo and video footage of the dead, reconstructing a human tragedy whose scale, devastation and avoidability has no contemporary analogue. Anyone with a heart should bring Kleenex.

--Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos: Is it too long? Absolutely. Does it shove soccer's global appeal down American throats? Perhaps. But directors Paul Crowder and John Dower also adore their subject, the professional soccer franchise that emerged from the imaginations of New York media titans like Steve Ross and Ahmet and Neshui Ertegun to become the talk of a tortured town in 1977. The anecdotes run from hardscrabble goalkeepers posing nude to Cosmos star Pele mistaking the green spray paint on Downey Stadium's field for a fungus when it showed up on his feet. "You know this is going to be like Rashomon, don't you?" a former Cosmos executive warns the filmmakers. Of course we do, and we should be grateful Crowder and Dower have the acuity to put all the contradictions into such entertaining focus.

--Tell Me Do You Miss Me: You could argue that Matthew Buzzell's you-are-there chronicle of Luna's 2004-05 farewell tour will probably boast little appeal beyond the band's fan base. And to some degree, you are probably right; Tell Me's best moments revolve around the 12-year-old Luna's history of underappreciation and every artist's implicit dread of dying with a whimper. But Tell Me also exposes the agony and ecstasy of touring, where for every hour-long show one faces grueling travel, lousy pay, cynical critics, intra-band squabbles and other challenges to longevity. Luna's leader, Dean Wareham (right), acknowledges that the problems posed by the rock life are not the worst you can have, but that they can only be endured for so long. Tell Me examines that tipping point in a sober, scultpted spotlight befitting its moody subject.

Then there is the second tier: Saint of 9/11, which tells the story of NYFD chaplain Mychal Judge, who perished during the rescue effort at the World Trade Center on 9/11; The Cats of Mirikitani, which tells the powefrul (if meandering) story of homeless artist-turned-civil rights symbol; and Once Upon a Time in Marrakech, the chronicle of Hunter College film students joining a Marrakech Film Festival master class with Abbos Kiarostami and Martin Scorsese. In all honesty, the latter film is probably only half-watchable; the Kiarostami short that precedes it plays like an almost laughable, interminable screensaver-meets-soliloquy, full of lukewarm bromides like: "The road is the expression of the man's journey in search of provisions. … Whoever neglects his pack animal wil never reach his journey's end." But then you get to the master class, where Kiarostami and Scorsese do supply about a half-hour of introspection that will have cinephiles mouthbreathing in minutes. Added bonus: Look for an appearance by Man Push Cart auteur Ramin Bahrani, who scored the plum gig translating Kiarostami for the Americans. I always knew that guy would make it someday.

(Wareham photo: Franck Dewannieux)

Posted by stvanairsdale at 08:40 AM | TrackBack

April 27, 2006

'American Cannibal' Claims Premiere Audience in East Village

More than a handful of this year's Tribeca selections have evoked that most puerile of criticisms in me: the one that shakes my head and insists to myself and anyone who will listen, "Jesus Christ--I can make a better movie than that." And then there are the few exceptional films that I not only enjoy but also ruminate on for hours or days afterward, thinking, "Jesus Christ--not only can I not make a better movie than that, but I should fucking distribute that film."

The inner distributor in me is particularly excited about the documentary American Cannibal: The Road to Reality, which premiered to an enthusiastic New York crowd yesterday at the AMC Village. Local directors Perry Grebin and Michael Nigro (above) spent more than two years taping the professional lives of Gil Ripley and Dave Roberts, a writing team whose fruitless story pitches find a more receptive audience with Kevin Blatt, the C-list pornographer responsible for the Paris Hilton sex tape. Insistent on developing a reality TV show, the trio's working relationship challenges Ripley and Roberts's personal standards while tempting them with the overdue payday they both need.

Blatt latches on to Ripley's joking suggestion for a series entitled American Cannibal, a show that would plunk starving contestants on a desert island to determine the lengths they would go to survive. When Black bankrolls the show, Ripley and Roberts sign on against their better judgment. They assume increasing responsibility for their unwanted child, clash with production heads and all but smoulder with resentment as the reality parade approaches its nadir on a rocky beach fringing Puerto Rico.

Grebin and Nigro's triumph stems from their assiduous, unswerving filming regimen; while American Cannibal started out as an industrial project aimed at helping film students learn to pitch stories, it became a bruising reality exercise of its own as it narrowed its focus to a writing team wracked evenly with ambition and crisis.

"People were not pitching the way they normally pitch," Grebin told the audience during Wednesday's Q&A They weren't coming in with sitcoms and dramas. Everything had switched to reality."

"There were two writers who emerged from the group who were a little more interesting than others and had more wild ideas," Nigro said. "It was more entertaining to watch them. So once we figured out we kind of had something of a documentary on our hands, we just kept going, because we thought (the team's original pilot) Psychotic Episodes was going to be brilliant and it was really going to propel these guys. But we had nothing. But we realized that there's much more to be said for reality than for traditional work--at least at this time. So why not follow? Of course, once we'd met Kevin Blatt, things just started rolling."

The desperation depicted in American Cannibal resonates from one act to the next, from one subject to another. A director "specializing" in reality TV signs on, followed by reality host George Gray. Casting sessions gone awry lead to angry outbursts and cast members covering up physical ailments for the shot at competing on television. Ripley and Roberts risk everything they have, and watching them lose it day-by-day is as brutal as any of the trials facing their castaways. Which, naturally, is the point: These guys are the castaways, as is the entire creative industry subjugated to the reality craze.

Roberts acknowledged the toll the experience had on his emotions and family life. "There were definitely things that I'm glad are not in there," he said from his seat in the middle of the audience. "They didn't 'Michael Moore' me or Gil, and I'd have to say that the jerk I look like up actually is me. They were very fair."

But the fact that Grebin and Nigro could be where they were when they were almost feels unfair; that they could edit their footage into three cohesive acts with an ending that does justice to the dramatic tension that precedes it almost defies belief. Judge for yourself what these guys' souls are worth, and when--not if--the festival marketplace puts its own value on an American Cannibal distribution, believe me--I will pass along the news.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 11:58 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

April 26, 2006

Tribeca by Moonlight: The Reeler Joins Huffington Post's Festival Orgy

The drugs must be really good over at The Huffington Post, where somebody had the batty idea of inviting me to contribute to the blog's daily Tribeca coverage. There are something like 14 or 15 of us on the reporting team, including former FishBowl NY editor Rachel Sklar, who provides an introductory overview here. Expect maybe a little overlap between my HuffPo and Reeler dispatches, but I mostly intend to keep them separate. Mostly.

This morning I have a look at the wonderful Colour Me Kubrick--in particular, New York Times power broker Frank Rich's real-life run-in with Kubrick impersonator Alan Conway and the incident's portrayal in the film. Suffice it to say that actor William Hootkins--best known as Star Wars' doomed X-Wing pilot Jek Porkins--plays Rich. Goddamn, this can be a cruel world.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 09:37 AM | TrackBack

'United 93' Bows, Tribeca Finally Open For Business

While I really do look forward to checking out the overwhelmingly well-reviewed United 93, I was, for whatever reason, turned away from covering its premiere Tuesday evening and even from viewing the film at its Loews Lincoln Square overflow theaters. "You can wait if you want," a festival flack said, nodding toward the door. "We're totally full." Two sources who did manage entry corroborated at least a near-capacity crowd in e-mails to Reeler HQ last night; for the three of you concerning yourselves with the outcome of yesterday's Lloyd Grove vs. Tribeca Film Festival pissing contest, here is hoping that provides some closure.

Among those who covered the premiere at the Ziegfeld Theater, the Hollywood Reporter's Gregg Goldstein receives The Reeler's red-carpet blue ribbon for the quick turnaround and general thoroughness of his dispatch:

(E)ven amidst the smiles and pleasantries in the lobby, mixed emotions were very close to the surface when audience members were asked about the film they were about to see. ...

Tribeca co-founder Robert De Niro began the evening's series of introductions by acknowledging the audience's difficulty with the subject matter, something Universal is facing as it prepares for the movie's release Friday. "Given our festival's founding after September 11, for many of us, the story is difficult," he said. "We applaud the participation of the family members -- your participation means a lot."

De Niro's characteristically brief remarks were followed by Rosenthal's appearance. "The film exemplifies the highest form of the human spirit," she said. "It leaves us with a new memory that is uplifting." ...

But perhaps actor Gabriel Byrne best summed up feelings about the film: "I can understand why some people don't want to see the film, and I can see why there's a compulsion to confront it, because in many ways we still haven't confronted it."

Goldstein also features cameos by MPAA boss Dan Glickman, former U.S. Senator (and 9/11 Commission head) Bob Kerrey and some guy named Greengrass. The festival starts in earnest today, which means I must beg your pardon while I put my running shoes on and wolf down another dose of speed. No days down, eleven to go.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 08:35 AM | TrackBack

April 25, 2006

'United 93' Premiere Begs Question: 'Is That Seat Taken?'

In today's Daily News, Lloyd Grove stirs the shit about tonight's United 93 premiere having potentially been underbooked. While Grove writes that local celebrities are expected to round out the low-key nexus of the Ziegfeld Theater, he details a bitchy (and, naturally, anonymous) give-and-take between a pair of sources speculating just how packed the Lowes Lincoln Square's overflow venue will be:

"Despite grand hopes for massive attendance, it seems they were having trouble filling the seats and had to send out last-minute invitations to B-list invitees," said my source. "There's a lack of appetite for watching something so gruesome and something we already know so much about."

But a festival organizer scoffed: "You have bad information. Our overflow screening is full."

As for suggestions that Universal Studios might have overestimated the demand, the festival type said: "The phones have not stopped all day for tickets to this."

A little probing this morning from Reeler HQ revealed the latter to be closer to the truth, even if 6,000 guests are quite a lot for anyone to expect to draw at two theaters for a docudrama about one of 9/11's hijacked plane. But if no less an authority than Peggy Siegel says the screenings are the source of crowded "high anxiety," then I guess we can probably expect people sitting in the aisles. "I guess we'll see," Grove concludes; I have my money on the festival.

Posted by stvanairsdale at 09:30 AM | TrackBack

April 24, 2006

Reed, Fishburne, Cuban and the Juries That Ate Lower Manhattan

"So STV," you ask, "What was the deal with Ken Burns and Trudie Styler (among others) at the Tribeca press conference earlier today?" Great question--one I should have answered in the post before I got carried away with all that quoty goodness.

Anyhow, Burns, Styler, Oren Jacoby and nearly three dozen other New York boldface names make up the members of this year's Tribeca juries. Awards will be distributed in six categories through the International, NY, NY and Short Film Competitions, and judging by the names on some of these panels, the 2006 selections face some hard, hard graders. Take the International Documentary Feature jury, for example: Burns, Jacoby, Robert Drew, Whoopi Goldberg, Rory Kennedy and Marc Levin. Or the Narrative Short jury: Mark Cuban, Laurence Fishburne, Samantha Morton, Gayle King, Shelly Lazarus, Julia Stiles and Lou Reed. Mark Cuban, Laurence Fishburne and Lou Reed on the same jury? Fuck J.J. Abrams; they should sell tickets to those discussions.

A few other notable jurors include Craig Newmark (the "Craig" of craigslist, judging student shorts), critics David Edelstein and Glenn Kenny (judging NY, NY docs) and Melvin Van Peebles, who represents the godfather of the International Narrative jury. Look for the complete jury lists after the jump.

International Competitions

Narrative Feature Jury -- Ed Burns, Terry George, Josh Lucas, Kelly Lynch, Antonio Skármeta, Trudie Styler and Melvin Van Peebles

Documentary Feature Jury -- Ken Burns, Oren Jacoby, Robert Drew, Whoopi Goldberg, Rory Kennedy and Marc Levin

NY, NY Competitions

Made in NY Narrative Feature Jury -- Thelma Adams, Michael Atkinson, Candace Bushnell, Wyclef Jean, Georgia Lee and James Truman

NY Loves Film Documentary Feature Jury -- Victor Buhler, David Edelstein, Glenn Kenny, Moby and Rosie Perez

Short Film Competitions

Narrative Short Jury -- Mark Cuban, Laurence Fishburne, Samantha Morton, Gayle King, Shelly Lazarus, Julia Stiles and Lou Reed

Student and Documentary Short Jury -- Joe Angio, Deborah Forte, Michael Graves, Craig Newmark, Charlotte Ronson and Andy Spade

Posted by stvanairsdale at 04:48 PM | TrackBack

Fifth Annual Tribeca Press Conferences Officially Underway

The Reeler retuned to Lower Manhattan today, where Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and a few high-profile pals met the press to chat about the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival. There was not a whole lot of Earth-shattering new information to pass along (Tom Cruise is still taking over New York in a week, programmer Peter Scarlet is still condescending), but on the whole, all signs indicate a fairly powerful buzz attending the festival’s fifth year.

The Tribeca Seven meet the press (L-R): Oren Jacoby, Ed Burns, Josh Lucas, Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal, Ken Burns and Trudie Styler at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center (Photo: STV)

“In 2002, in the wake of Sept. 11, we launched a film festival in 120 days and wondered if anyone would come,” Rosenthal said in her introduction. “Four years later, we have attracted over a million people to Lower Manhattan. In the process, we’ve screened an incredible range of films that have gone on to earn international acclaim. … While we have expanded, the heart and soul of our festival is Tribeca.”

Tribeca itself was a popular subject among other filmmakers in attendance, with The Groomsmen writer/director/star Ed Burns toasting the festival and its co-founders’ impact on the city. “I’m a New York-based filmmaker,” Burns said. “I’m here for the third time in five years, like Jane said. And speaking with other New York-based filmmakers, we love the fact that we now have our film festival. I love the fact we no longer have to schlep to the mountains of Utah for an independent film festival. So there’s that.

“The second thing I want to mention is that as a resident of Tribeca from before the festival, I’ve seen over the course of five years what the festival has meant to my neighborhood. Especially in the years immediately following 9/11, there was a lot of talk about how people were going to start to move out of Tribeca, restaurants were going to close, retail shops were going to be vacant. Walk around the neighborhood now and you see the opposite is true. There’s construction on every corner, you can’t get a reservation in a restaurant and there are shops all over the place. And I think you have to look at that and a big part of that has to do with this festival—(with) Jane and Bob turning it around 120 days after 9/11 to get this thing up and running. I just want to say thank you to them as a resident of Tribeca.”

De Niro, bless his heart, appeared touched by the festival’s reception, even as photographers filled each of his pauses with a full-bodied torrent of shutters and flashes that eventually drove him and his prepared speech back to his mark upstage. He was even more succinct in, um, discussing the programming of United 93 as this year’s opening film. “Flight 93 [sic],” he said, all but retreating from the podium. “If it were not opening the festival, it would seem strange. That’s really all I have to say.”

Rosenthal said that Tuesday’s premiere at the Ziegfeld will host 91 family members of the eponymous tragedy’s victims; invitations were also sent to 9/11 victims and their families around the tri-state area. The Reeler followed up on the lack of public tickets available for Tribeca’s triad of mega-premieres (United 93, Mission: Impossible III and Poseidon), asking Rosenthal if any seats would, in fact, open up.

“We’re venue-challenged,” she said. “In terms of M:I:III, we have some screenings in Harlem and Tribeca, and again, there’s just so many people you can fit into venues. We just don’t have enough venues. Even though some people don’t believe us when we say it, we’re still a struggling festival in terms of our finances. In the past, we have put screening facilities—projection facilities into Stuyvesant High School or at Pace University or put up a screening at the World Financial Center. We do what we can.”

Fair enough. In between snapping about festival selection criteria and what audiences should go see in a festival that some say is overprogrammed if not totally overextended, Tribeca executive director Peter Scarlet offered a genuinely spirited endorsement of the event’s revivals. “Some of the classics of cinema were shown here, and we’re showing more each year,” he said. “It’s a valiant effort to stem the tide that you may not all be aware of--that about 60 percent of the films that are made don’t exist anymore. So archives and people who are pouring money and time and attention into saving the past sort of deserve our support, and now we’re not just showing films from just Martin Scorsese’s collection, we’re showing films from major archives around the world.”

“We talk about independent filmmaking in New York,” he added a moment later. “It started with a man named Lionel Rogosin, whose film On the Bowery, made in 1956, has been restored by Cineteca di Bologna. We’re showing a fantastic new print, and when you see this film, you see it was the origin. It was before Cassavetes, it was before Robert Frank. It was at the origin of American independent cinema.”

And then they were off. I stuck around. Maybe I should just stay down here. Anyone have an open couch?

Posted by stvanairsdale at 02:37 PM | TrackBack

April 21, 2006

Tribeca Survey: What NYC Media Are Saying About the Festival

Admittedly, Reeler HQ is abuzz with the Tribeca vibe even as it is deluged with what has become a succession of dodgy and dodgier program selections. As such, I have been branching out to other local writers' perceptions of what this year's festival has to offer; Tribeca represents the coin of the critical realm at The Times, New York Magazine, the Voice and Time Out New York, and while the overriding ethos behind the coverge seems to be cautious optimism, some publications' hometown pride fakes the funk a little more than others.

Take TONY's ubiquitous Anthony Kaufman, for example, who found time between his RES 9.2 feature about Rachel Boynton and all that life-draining blogging at indieWIRE to write this week's Tribeca cover story:

Indeed officials praise the festival for fueling the city's economy and advertising New York as a Hollywood on the Hudson for filmmakers. "Last year, the festival generated $77 million in economic output for the city as a whole, says Katherine Oliver, commissioner of the Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting. "This is a draw not just for the five boroughs, but people from all over the world." Proving that point, more than 2,000 volunteers from as far away as Brazil and Singapore, will work at this year's gathering.

But then there are the Tribecans who worry about screening venues' diffusion uptown, anonymous distributors bitching about films' quality and festival executive director Peter Scarlet actually calling Tribeca "a retail, not a wholesale festival." And whither Robert De Niro? Despite TONY handing over its cover and feature well to the actor and his festival, his only appearances are a few minor quotes via e-mail. Co-founder/producer Jane Rosenthal chimes in a little more ebulliently, "The city's been through a lot, it's spring in New York--let's celebrate."

Yes, let's!, writes the Voice's J. Hoberman:

Like the city it celebrates, Tribeca has proven resilient, but like New York, it's far too sprawling and abrasive to ever attain the grooviness of SXSW or the exclusivity of Telluride. Marketing—yes. Market—we'll see. Tribeca is very far from rivaling Sundance (or Toronto) as the place at which to sell or launch a movie. True, Oscar nominee Transamerica did have its premiere at the last festival—but only God and Harvey Weinstein know if the Weinstein brothers weren't already planning to make that acquisition. ...

Perhaps such inside baseball is irrelevant. Tribeca executive director Peter Scarlet, longtime head of the San Francisco Film Festival and former director of the Cinémathéque Française, has brought an urbane, genuinely cosmopolitan quality to the selection—choice restorations, an amazing assortment of documentaries, any number of movies wrested away from New Directors/New Films and the Human Rights Watch Film Festival ...

The Voice's critical cabal has at a few specific selections, recommending 40 of the festival's 174 features while Dennis Lim favorably reviews United 93 and director Paul Greengrass, "who may yet emerge as the Maya Lin of cine-memorialists." Meanwhile, in other helpful comparisons, Jim Ridley (!) pegs the Luna documentary Tell Me Do You Miss Me as "a grubby indie-rock scale down of The Last Waltz" and Michael Atkinson classifies The Yacoubian Building as "a Cairo-based Gone With the Wind." Scarlet makes another appearance, actually saying "We don't break kneecaps" when Lim asks about Tribeca's proximity to other high-profile festivals:

There are festivals that take place just before us: Full Frame, South by Southwest, New Directors. I think the cards are on the table for the filmmakers to decide what the advantages and disadvantages are.

Yeah, gang, so don't fuck this one up. And hey, look! There's Scarlet again in The Times, actually comparing Tribeca to Berlin:

"New York is a big town and has the biggest of everything, so it should not be daunted by having a huge festival," said Peter Scarlet, the executive director, who pointed out that Berlin, a much smaller city, has a festival with twice as many movies. By sheer numbers TriBeCa can be a bit of a crapshoot: choose unwisely and you could end up in the cinematic equivalent of a table in crowded restaurant next to a really obnoxious, self-impressed grad student who doesn't know how to tell a story.

That second half, of course, is the Father of The Reeler, David Carr, who contributes a more scattershot, sensuous survey of the festival ("If you've had enough of the industrial-strength stuff," Carr writes, "get a folding chair and a bottle of beer in front of the Ear Inn in SoHo; on a warm spring night it is one of New York's seminal experiences, with or without a film festival") while NYT tour guide Ben Sisario provides helpful hints on navigating 15 venues flung from Tribeca to the Upper West Side.

And finally, The Reeler got its hands on New York Magazine critic Logan Hill's "Tribeca by Numbers." The piece arrives on newsstands next week, but in the meantime, it provides a useful glimpse at a festival where ambivalence and ambition share a near-blinding spotlight. While Hill heartily recommends Jonestown, Driving Lessons, Once in a Lifetime and the "must-see" restoration of Lionel Bogosin's On the Bowery, he reveals a more disheartening truth about the "retail festival" that Scarlet praised to TONY:

0 When Tribeca announced that it was adding [Tom] Cruise’s M:I:III to its premieres of Poseidon and United 93, Daily Variety blasted the news across its front page, noting that the fest would be “putting Tribeca’s regular auds through some wrenching emotional gyrations—from viewing real-life tragedy on-screen to watching manufactured disaster and derring-do.” Variety needn’t have worried, because there are exactly zero public tickets available to the premieres of these films. Meanwhile, only M:I:III has made talent (director J. J. Abrams) available for a panel talk.

But amid all of this--all of the mixed reviews before the festival has even begun, all of the hype and red-carpet anticipation, all of the eagerly awaited independent titles--there really is only one essential Tribeca factor to remember. One quality that subsumes the rest. Just remember, no matter how breathlessly excited you are--Robert De Niro is thrilled.

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