Tribeca Film Festival - Easy Virtue

One of the great things about Tribeca is that you get to be an insider for a couple of weeks. Directors and actors are everywhere, if you know where to look (“Hey, isn’t that Jim Jarmusch?”) and you get to feel like you’re part of the process, instead of a target audience. Sometimes this backfires, like at the showing of Easy Virtue I saw. Director Stephan Elliott came out before the screening and said, “Sorry the cast couldn’t be here, but Kristin never leaves Paris, Colin’s on the Greek island he bought with all the royalties from Mama Mia, Jessica is in a hotel room with Justin somewhere, and Ben is alone in his apartment, totally depressed because Jessica is in a hotel room with Justin somewhere. [LAUGHTER] Yes, I suppose I should tell you, there’s very little acting in this movie. When you see Ben mooning over Jessica? That’s not acting. [LAUGHTER] And when you see Kristin and Jessica go at it [makes a snarly face and curls his hands like cat claws], that’s not acting either. [LAUGHTER] So enjoy the film.” To which I wanted to say “Film? What film? We’re here for the cat fight!”

And what a great cat fight it is. Although I should say right off that if you don't like Jessica Biel, you will probably not like this film. She's the intruding force, the outsider about whom everyone has an opinion, and her acting chops are nowhere near the level of everyone else’s. Which totally works for the way Elliott and co-writer Sheridan Jobbins have revised Noel Coward’s play. By making Larita American, you get a built-in conflict; she is now so totally DIFFERENT that it raises the stakes tenfold. And it doesn't hurt that Biel is eye candy. But if that’s all you think she is, then there will be a hole in the middle that nothing can fill in.

In which case I say, watch the Brits. They are all wonderful. Kristin Scott-Thomas gets huge laughs with silent reaction shots, but I'm getting a little tired of her doing the pinched, withdrawn, repressed harridan. She can do it in her sleep, and I'd rather see her do something a little more challenging before she drops off of a night in Paris. (Of course if this movie had been made twenty years ago, she would have been playing the Biel part.) Colin Firth has something like 20 lines in the whole thing (as well as one long speech) and everything he says opens up another window on who he is. Ben Barnes is okay, but if I were Biel I would go home to Justin too. And keep your eyes on Furber the butler. He’s played by Kris Marshall, who looks like the son of the guy who played Felton in the Richard Lester Three Musketeers, and he practically steals the movie.

It’s opening nationwide at the end of May, I believe. I highly recommend it as an alternative to Transformers 2.

Tribeca Film Festival - An Englishman In New York

The second part of Don Quixote starts when the Don and Sancho are reading a copy of Cervantes’ Don Quixote and say “This is an outrage! We have to go out there and correct the record.” An Englishman In New York begins when John Hurt (playing Quentin Crisp) decides to go to New York after the TV broadcast of A Naked Civil Servant, in which Jon Hurt played Quentin Crisp. Both journeys are Quixotic in the truest sense of the word –- doomed not just to failure, but to glorious failure. Crisp has three Sanchos in this movie -– the editor of the NY Native (Denis O’Hare), young artist Patrick Angus (Jonathan Tucker), and Penny Arcade (Cynthia Nixon) –- and the windmills he winds up jousting against are windmills that wind up whacking us all on our ass, like irrelevance, old age, and (my personal favorite, he said, rubbing his butt in pain) speaking without thinking.

Quentin Crisp probably would have worked the word “style” into that somewhere, and John Hurt has it in spades. It’s a wonderful performance, which does a lot to make you overlook the movie’s flaws –- all the Sanchos are continually used as plot machinery rather than people, vignettes are separated by blackouts that seem to anticipate commercial breaks and begin and end with jarringly clashing underscoring, and there’s a little too much of Crisp dispensing wisdom like Buddha under the Bo Tree.

And, alas, the wonderful voiceover pretty much disappears about a third of the way through. I suspect this was an artistic choice, because the moment you no longer hear what’s going on in Crisp’s head is the moment when he makes his infamous remark about AIDS being a fad, and discovers that being clever about hot-button issues will turn a windmill into a tar baby. From that point on, as Crisp is ostracized from his own community, we are ostracized from his inner life, and only get to see him reacting to O’Hare's editor and Tucker's Patrick Angus. Crisp’s penance for the “fad” remark seems to be watching Angus die of AIDS, but not before he helps Angus get his paintings shown. At which point the voiceover returns. (It all sounds very schematic, doesn’t it?)

Overall, it’s a worthy film (with all the good and bad which that word entails). And Crisp’s message of personal style resonates even more today, when style is about to get ten separate channels on cable: There is something unique inside you: nurture it. Let the world come to you. Stay outside -- that is your power lies. And as Denis O’Hare said in the talkback, “You don’t have to be emblematic; you just have to be yourself.”

Tribeca Film Festival - The Burning Season

Here's a movie that'll make you want to go out and change the world.

Burning Season was broadcast last year as part of the Frontline series, minus the orangutans and the shall we say pragmatic look at the Bush Regime’s so-called environmental policies, which can best be summed up the sentence: “We believe that every tree on earth is just another baby ream of Xerox paper.” There’s also a sentence that sums up the difference between that version and this version: “Oh THAT’S what you were talking about.”

Director and writer Cathy Henkel juggles three stories and a civics lesson, interspersed with images of orangutans wandering through what look like war zones. (The orangutans really are the human face of this story.) An Indonesian farmer wrestles with the need to clear forest land in order to produce a cash-bearing crop of palm wine seeds; a rescue worker is trying to save as many orangutans as possible from the burnt-out wastelands that used to be their home; and a driven young idealist is trying to get corporate backing for a carbon-trading system which would hit up environmental polluters by having them fund reforestation projects.

It’s an accomplished juggling act, interspersed with stunningly-animated sequences that provide the civics lesson. I say “stunningly” not because the animation is so beautiful, but because of its stark and primitively individual look, like captured silhouettes from some allegorical puppet show. Maps of countries sending smoke to the skies from their denuded forests are like head-shots from an info gun (when you factor deforestation into the carbon emission graph, Indonesia is the third worst offender in the entire world, behind only China and us).

The main storyline follows Dorjee Sun (the idealist), who ironically enough embodies the American ideal of entrepreneurial gumption even as he fights, in essence, America’s deliberate refusal to address the issue he wants to find a solution for. If anybody ever tells you that young people have no drive or idealism, show them this movie. Sun is inspirational, articulate, and charmingly implacable.

Overall it’s a great mix of stuff you didn’t know, stuff that makes you want to go out and change the world, and stuff that makes you realize orangutans are like Humanity’s second cousins. There’s a moment towards the end where a female with a baby clinging to her fur has been reforested, if you will, and when the door to the crate she’s in opens up, she sticks her head out like a refugee expecting to be shot at, only to see this jungle, these trees she probably hasn’t seen in months. Then, just as warily as that refugee, she moves off into the vegetation, throwing a look over her shoulder that says “I get to leave? I get to go here? It’s okay, really?” As I said before: the human face of the story.

And oh yeah -- this is all happening in 2007, when there was actual corporate cash money around for ideas like this. Which makes for an oh-no kick-in-the-gut epilogue, let me tell you.

Highly recommended. And for more info (and orangutan pictures):

The Burning Season

Ten Things You Can Do To Change The World

Theater of War: Tribeca Film Festival

This movie is the documentary equivalent of the Sufi parable about the blind men and the elephant. It’s a record of the rehearsal and performance process for the Mother Courage that was done in Central Park in summer of 06; it’s a mini-biography of Bertolt Brecht; it’s the clearest explanation of Marx’s theory of labor that you’ve ever seen; and it’s an anti-war agit-prop disguised as an examination of the intersection of theatre and politics. The fourth part is the least successful and the most predictable. Anti-Iraq-War marches and memories of anti-Vietnam demonstrations are threaded together with producers and writers talking about how theatre is only really meaningful when it addresses real issues blah blah what can one person do blah blah open eyes to blah blah make a blah blah difference. What would have been much more interesting, given the Brechtian subject, would have been a closer examination or questioning of the business decision of staging Mother Courage in 2006 –- an examination of what effect, if any, preaching to the choir has when an anti-war play is done in front of an audience that primarily agrees with its sentiments. (But that’s my documentary, not this one.)

To this documentary’s credit, there’s enough subversive and downright you’ve-never-heard-this-anywhere-else material to undermine Mother Courage as pro- or anti-anything, and make you ask questions you’re not supposed to ask in a job-based capitalist society. Most of this takes place in the Jay Cantor section. Cantor, an essayist and novelist, does an excellent job of quietly distilling the essence of Marx in a sentence that can’t help but resonate with everyone: “Marx’s theory of labor, simply put, says this: how you work, and for whom you work, equals who you are.” And when you work for people who are defined by the harm they do, as opposed to the good they do, you are part of that process. This is entertainingly illustrated by a section spotlighting the composer, the costume designer, and the head of Props at the Delacorte, and how their work contributes to the final show. Which is all interspersed with rehearsal footage and an on-camera interview with Meryl Streep about the play, the part, and her role as an actress.

In a film where you get to see Brecht’s famous “Yes I think maybe” appearance before the House Unamerican Activities Committee, and hear Brecht’s off-camera daughter telling you that this halting on-screen foreigner was really a crafty little bastard who could speak fluent English and left for Europe the day after he gave his testimony, it’s still the moments when Meryl Streep is talking or playing Mother Courage that are the most riveting and involving, especially when she’s talking about her role as an actress (“I am the voice of dead people.”) or about the rehearsal process (“Process comes off as bad acting, nobody wants to see process – it’s like you’re building a skyscraper and you show people the pipes and the plumbing. It’s the stuff that holds the building together, but it’s not what anyone really wants to see.”) It's her scenes and moments that I remember most, and keep coming back to. Does that make me a shallow apolitical slug who finds behind-the-scenes glimpses of famous people more interesting than political action? Duh. Is it going to stop me from thinking very hard about how my daily day-job contribution to corporate America helps perpetuate behavior and attitudes that drive me crazy? No. I just think that if Brecht were marketing this documentary, he’d stress the Streep part and downplay the Marxism, and maybe edit in some more of the one-on-one interview. It’s definitely the one course on the plate that puts a smile on your face as you’re being fed the rest of the meal. As Brecht himself famously said: “Grub first, then ethics.”

[director's commments in q&a to come]

Green Porno: Tribeca Film Festival

One of the extras that was shown during the Toby Dammit evening was a series of videos created by Isabella Rossellini that'll be running online here starting on May 5th and then broadcast on the Sundance Channel. The reason why the videos were part of a Fellini evening? Fellini used to work with Roberto Rossellini, Isabella's father. The subject of the videos? Insect sex.

We saw 4 clips: the firefly, the common fly, the queen bee, and the earthworm. They were alternately creepy and goofy, but totally entertaining. Their tone and subject reminded me a lot of this book, which is required reading for anyone who has ever wondered how long stick-insect copulation lasts for (10 weeks) and roughly how many species of females eat their lovers either before, during, or after sex (not counting investment bankers, that would be 80).

And here's the website.

Once Upon A Time In The West: Tribeca Film Festival

I was pretty shocked to discover that there were still tickets available for this the day before it screened; it’s one of the ten best movies ever made, and how many times do you get to see it on a wide screen the way it was designed to be seen, with Henry Fonda’s baby blues the size of swimming pools and Jack Elam’s two-day growth of beard like a forest of baby redwoods?

Judging by the reaction in the theatre, a lot of people were seeing this for the first time. Big clue right up front: when the story credit citing Dario Argenti, Bernardo Bertolucci and Leone comes up, and suddenly there’s a shocked whisper of “Bertolucci? Bertolucci was involved in this . . . this . . . western?” (I wanted to say, "Yeah and two minutes of Woody Strode can kick all of The Conformist's ass, okay?") There were also a lot of gasps of shock, like the Fonda reveal at the beginning; and a lot of laughter. You forget how funny the movie is until you see it in a theatre.

One of the things I noticed this time around is Leone's use of what I think of as camera frame POV. A character can be standing two feet away from someone on-screen, but until he enters the frame, he doesn’t exist and isn’t recognized. The classic Leone use of this is in The Good The Bad and The Ugly where Blondie and Tuco are captured by Union soldiers, and walk around a bush to see the gigantic siege hillside which they were right next to fifteen seconds ago, but never saw because the camera didn’t reveal it. The same thing happens here: almost every time Harmonica is discovered by the camera, he's entering frame from one side to the other in a giant Charles Bronson profile; the moment when Frank’s gun flips into frame and cocks in Harmonica’s face (big gasp from audience); the scene where Jill is looking for the Station model and it suddenly appears entering the audience right frame, and Jill looks up to see Frank holding it.

"Just a man." "An ancient race."

There are a lot of films that can be described as epic, but there are damn few that can be called monumental and live up to the billing. This is one of them. It's a revenge saga, it's an end-of-the-frontier story, it's a three-hour tour of the landscape of four faces, and for all its stately pace and Biblical echoes, there's not a moment wasted. To me there are few moments more monumentally thrilling in cinema than the one where Claudia Cardinale's cute little carriage lopes down a hill and right into John Fucking Ford's Monument Valley. But then to me there are few better movies, period.

Toby Dammit: Tribeca Film Festival

Up until last night, the only thing I knew about Toby Dammit was that it was originally written with Peter O’Toole in mind, complete with references to his Hamlet and his drinking, and O’Toole was actually cast to play the part, but backed out or couldn’t do it for some reason. At which point Federico Fellini called up O’Toole’s agent in London and said “Send me the most decadent actors you’ve got.” The agent sent him James Fox and Terence Stamp, and Fellini took one look at Stamp and cast him on the spot.

Having finally seen the film itself (which is like an espresso dose of Fellini) I don’t know if this was the point in Stamp’s life when Jeannie Shrimpton had torn out his heart, sliced it up into little pieces, and fed it to her poodle, but if not, then it’s totally prophetic. Stamp doesn’t look like he’s acting; he's still Billy-Budd-beautiful, but you can see the rot creeping in around his eyes, and it's either a brilliant piece of acting or a brilliant piece of cinéma vérité, because he looks like he showed up drugged and drunk and stayed that way for the entire shoot.

The plot is simple: Stamp gets off an airplane, gets driven to an awards ceremony, drives off in a Ferrari, and dies. He’s ostensibly there to film the story of Christ as a western, but he could care less, all he wants is that Ferrari he was promised for showing up. In the course of his travels we see the kind of extras that populate Woody Allen films whenever he’s trying to be Felliniesque: nuns with guitars, cardboard cut-outs of people and animals, the Beatles in their Sergeant Pepper uniforms, men wearing capes, three matrons who look like The Furies watching the awards ceremony, and a lot of grotesque-looking women. It was weird to watch all this; seeing the original source material from which countless parodies and sketches and homages to Fellini have been mined was a vivid reminder that Fellini's art was actually something alive once, before it was embalmed as a style.

Judging by the Italian guy behind us who wouldn’t shut up, there were also all kinds of Italian cinema in-jokes during the awards ceremony. That was one Fellini moment in the audience; the other was when a gum-chewing brunette wearing perfume you could smell five aisles away and little else walked back and forth in front of the screen with her party of four, looking for a seat. In visual terms, she could have been an extra at the awards ceremony in the film; in architectural terms, her front porch and back porch were so counterbalanced that she had to arch her spine like a longbow just to walk.

One false note that only rings true after the fact: there’s no way any British actor no matter how squiffed would ever respond to a request for a speech from Shakespeare by quoting The Scottish Play. Which of course explains why he dies in the end, doesn't it?

And note to Tim Burton: please start paying back royalties to Fellini’s estate for stealing the entire look of Michael Keaton’s Beetlejuice from Stamp’s pallid, corpse-like makeup.

Trucker: Tribeca Film Festival

From the press release:

"Diane Ford (Michelle Monaghan), a vivacious and successful independent truck driver, leads a carefree life of long-haul trucking, one night stands and all-night drinking until the evening her estranged 11-year-old son (Jimmy Bennett) shows up at her door. Peter hasn’t seen his mother since he was a baby and wants Diane as little as she wants him; but with his father Len (Benjamin Bratt) in the hospital, Diane and Peter are stuck with each other -- at least for a while. Burdened with this new responsibility and seeing the life of freedom she’s fought for jeopardized, Diane steps reluctantly into her past and looks sidelong at a future that is not as simple or straightforward as she had once believed."

If I were to play the Continental Op's "How many lies in this sentence?" game, I'd point to "vivacious," "successful" and "carefree" from that first sentence as cumulatively giving the (wrong) impression that all is happy and sunny with the main character's life until her damn kid shows up. Not so. The film starts with a one-night stand, and in the next seven minutes shows you a loner who avoids intimacy, has to fend off jerk guys, and hangs out/gets drunk with somebody's husband. Just as in the Plympton movie, there's very little to like in the main character here; and just like that film, a story that starts five miles past the last exit to Lovable earns its U-turn, in this case because of the fierce performance from Monaghan.

"Where do I know her from?" asked DJ. "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," I said. "My God, she doesn't even look like that girl," was DJ's reply, and Monaghan doesn't. (A performance like this shows you what she could have done in Gone Baby Gone if the Affleck Brothers had fleshed out her character with stuff from the novel. But then she would have blown Casey Affleck off the screen.) She doesn't blow Nathan Fillion off the screen, and their chemistry is just what you'd expect from two people who know that only their scars can kiss. Her scenes with Jimmy Bennett are real and borderline shocking for all the anger and resentment that erupts in them, and (except for one false-note moment when the kid tells her "I think you're the most frightened person I know" and it feels like The Author Talking) it's totally believable. This is the kind of role for women that only seems to pop up in small films, personal films, or self-produced films. Diana is a rich, real, complicated part, and Monaghan inhabits every nasty, frustrated, hopeful moment of it. What makes this movie even more amazing: it was filmed in less than three weeks. Plus Monaghan actually drives truck -- she got her license so she could do the picture.

Excerpts from writer/director James Mottern's pre-show and post-show comments:

MOTTERN: When I first sat down with Michelle to talk about this -- well I wasn’t actually talking her into doing it, it was more like tricking her into doing it -- I said, y’know, it’d be nice if you could get your CDL and actually drive a rig for this, and she said, yeah, I guess I could do that; my dad’s a farmer, he drives truck. And then when we were looking for financing, she’d be sending me reports, saying, “Yknow, there are 18 gears a stick shift and a splitter, and it’s little tough for me because I didn’t even know how to drive normal stick before this.” And I said to her, “You don’t really have to learn how to do it,” thinking please God I really hope she learns how to drive the truck, and she said, “I can’t do this part unless I learn how to drive the truck. I mean, can I, James? Can I?” So yes, in this movie, Monaghan drives truck . . .

We shot this in 19 days. It was a lot of fun; it was like the drama club went to the desert and made a movie . . .

We shot an awful lot of scenes in that golden twilight at the end of the day. A lot of producers say “It doesn’t matter what it looks like, it’s about the performance,” but in this case we waited it out till we got the right light. We filmed in Riverside, which is outside LA, which is gnarly during the day -- it’s polluted, it’s hot, people are on crystal meth –- but at night when all the sodium vapors come out in this polluted air, it’s really kind of beautiful . . .

[In response to the question “How much of the character Runner’s dialogue was yours and how much was ad-libbed by Nathan Fillion?”] My approach with the actors was kind of like an open society. We had the script but I’ve always believed that talk is cheap –- you need to find out what the subtext is and write for that. Michelle, well Michelle has depth to her –- depth like Ellen Burstyn, Sally Fields, Gena Rowlands – but there’s also this breeziness, this breeziness from another era, like from 1974. Nathan’s part, the character of Runner, is like this Southern California cliché, this football star who has everything going for him and then one day somebody hands the guy a joint and that’s it for the rest of his life. Nathan’s a great actor and the way he works, it’s off-handed but it’s very real, he makes it very real, and he always comes up with good things. And when I was writing I was riffing on the actors’ voices, that helped a lot, knowing who was playing the part; I could pick up on rhythms of speech and not just write the characters, but write the characters for them. Nathan’s great; I love him. And that chin. It’s just so –- I feel like I cast his chin in this movie.

And here's the website.

Idiots and Angels: Tribeca Film Festival

The tag line says it all: “This asshole guy wakes up one morning to find wings sprouting out of his back that make him do good deeds, and he doesn’t like it.” It's a three-part story: first you see the asshole in all his assholiness, then you see him fighting the good deeds his wings make him do, and then he is (quite literally) reborn as a decent guy.

Bill Plympton is there to introduce the film. This is its first showing at the Festival “and the first time we’ve seen it on a big screen,” Plympton says.

BILL PLYMPTON: We’ve been working on this for three years. I warn you, this is an imperfect film, but I think imperfections make it cool and human and special. It’s not Pixar or Disney with a $150 million budget – it’s dark and moody and surreal, so if you’re looking for happy little bunny rabbits you’re in the wrong cinema.

He's right. No happy little bunny rabbits here. And the main character is truly unlikeable; there's a ride ‘em cowboy scene in the first ten minutes that really makes you wonder whether you’ll ever be able to like this guy. But Plympton pulls it off because (a) everybody else in the film is worse than he is, each in his own or her own way and (b) and there are those wings, which make him a reluctant hero and a reluctant romantic. It’s vintage Plympton animation; pencils and bizarre points of views, garish smiling faces and physical impossibilities. It’s also wordless, though not soundless; and it has a score of songs and music that range from happy Tom Waits to despairing Tom Waits.

Questions at the end:

“What was the process of creating the story?”

BILL PLYMPTON: I was at a film festival in France and some young guy asked me what my next project was, and I didn’t have a next project, I wasn’t working on anything, so I said off the top of my head, “It’s about this asshole who wakes up one morning with wings on his back.” And I thought to myself, “Not a bad idea,” so when I got back to my hotel room, I started drawing scenes. And I just kept doing it. There was no script, I would just draw scenes, and I did that for about a year, and then we built the storyboards and the production and post-production process took about nine months, so it was almost three years from start to finish. The graphic novel will be available soon; we’ll announce it on the website.

“What percentage of the film was traditional animation versus computerized or digital animation?”

BILL PLYMPTON: The usual process, the one I’ve always used, is cels and paper drawings which are then filmed with a 35-millimeter camera. This time we tried something else. Biljana, why don’t you talk about this, you were the one who was involved the most in the process.

BILJANA LABOVIC (producer): Everything you saw in the film was drawn by Bill. It’s all his drawings, with pencil – a number two pencil – which we then scanned and colored in Photoshop by hand. Then we gave it shading, and volume, and composited it in After Effects. Very few of the shots were digitally animated. Post was done in Final Curt pro, which gave us a chance to look at it before it was done and actually gave us more control over the final product as we were building the picture. Bill would sit with the editor for instance while the edits were being done and have input into it.

BILL PLYMPTON: I have to say, this is the most fun film I’ve ever done. It’s been great. No one says you can’t do this or that’s impossible, or you have to do it this way. I would spend ten to twelve hours a day drawing, and after I finished I would feel totally refreshed, I would feel so high that I’d want to go to a bar and drink.

“Was the lack of dialogue a conscious choice?”

BILL PLYMPTON: Good question and I’m surprised nobody asked that. There are three reasons why there is no dialogue in this film. Number one, it’s hard to sell a film overseas when you have to pay for dubbing and translations and subtitles. It’s just a lot easier when there’s no real dialogue to speak of. Number two, it’s very hard to animate words. The lip synching process requires that every frame in a drawing have a corresponding vowel or consonant sound, so that makes it a lot more detailed and complicated to put together. And three, I’m a terrible writer of dialogue. I’d much rather make it real and visceral and emotional, and let that carry the story. It’s like the old Hollywood saying – don’t talk about it, show it. That’s what we tried to do here.

And here's the website.