fun with fan mail....

I got this in my inbox this morning:

In criticizing An Inconvenient Truth (http://www.nycny.com/movies/inconvenient_truth_an/index.html by calling Al Gore a “big fat liar,” Eric Lurio demonstrates how the “skeptics” of global warming make up their own analysis to prove their points. His statement that the film cites “a bogus survey of scientific papers on global warming in order to show that there's no disagreement on the subject” is not supported in any way, which is because it is completely without foundation. His “bogus survey” was published in one of the world’s leading scientific publications (Science magazine, volume 306, p. 1686) by a reputable scientist (N. Oreskes with the Department of History and Science Studies Program at the University of California in San Diego) only after careful peer review. Clearly, Mr. Lurio’s work never passed through such a peer review process, but truth and accuracy does not seem to concern “skeptics” like Mr. Lurio. Andrew Gunther ----- Andrew J. Gunther, Ph.D. Executive Director Center for Ecosystem Management and Restoration 4179 Piedmont Ave, Suite 325 Oakland, CA 94611 voice: (510) 420-1570 fax: (510) 420-1345 email: gunther@cemar.org ----- The author is a member of the Board of Directors of the Union of Concerned Scientists

There were clearly problems with the survey, and these complaints have been quite public. Notice that he doesn't mention the Little Ice Age, which Gore expicitly denied happening despite every single climatologist in the world aknowledges.

This is fun, especially how the personal attacks have nothing to do with anything.

Brooklyn FF: Day 8

This is the penultimate day of the festival, and there may or may not be some free screenings depending on the weather, which at the moment is rather good. Here are two more reviews, and they might be the last of the bunch depending if I decided to go to this evening's screenings:

Little Fugitive

Written and directed
by Joanna Lipper

There will always be a Coney Island. New York’s historic amusment district has seen both better and worse days, but that is neither here nor there. There’s an allure which will never leave, because even during it’s nadir during the 1970s and ‘80s, you could still feel it. But this film isn’t about that. This film is about hopelessness and desolation. To say this film is bleak is an understatement.

Joey’s(David Castro) family is about as dysfunctional as you can get. his father Sam (Peter Dinklage) is in prison and his mother Natalia(Justina Machado) spends all her time working or hanging out with her friends. Joey’s old brother Lenny (Nicolas Salgado) hates Joey, and when we meet them, he’s watching some bullys beat the crap out of his baby brother. Mom is furious when she finds out, but she doesn’t care all that much. She has a day off on Lenny’s birthday, and celebrates by going to Atlantic City with some friends, leaving the two brothers to care for themselves.

Being seven, Joey follows Lenny to target practice [illegal guns and that sort of thing], and the latter decides to pull a nasty practical joke, which leads him to became the title character. Lenny of course is filled with remorse and goes looking for him with their friend Destiny(Raquel Castro). Joey has some innocent adventures and fights off a predator(Brendan Sexton III). Then, just as the happy ending is on the horizon, the system gets them.

Exactly what Joanna Lipper wanted when she decided to do this remake [the 1951 version is considered one of the first modern “indies”] is unclear. This isn’t exactly a slice-of-life type flick, and it’s not all that entertaining. The ending is really a downer. The performances are fine, but not great enough to make up for the horribly depressing script. Don’t waste the bucks.

The OH in Ohio

Directed by
Billy Kent

Marilyn Monroe was wrong. Diamonds aren’t a girls best friend, her vibrator is. That’s to some extent the message of this silly trifle, which is about as lewd as you can get without actually getting just beyond PG-13 territory.

Screenwriter Adam Wierzbianski and first time director Billy Kent have attempted to make a new kind of sex farce, and while they’ve made some stabs in the right direction, they didn’t quite make it. Mores the pity.

Priscilla(Parker Posey) is what you might call…frigid. Her husband Jack(Paul Rudd) has been trying for years, but he’s never actually made her achieve orgasm. Out of frustration, he leaves her and moves into the garage. This may have been the best thing that has happened to them. Each gets to go on the classic “hero’s journey.”

Jack, a biology teacher is saved by Kristen(Mischa Barton), one of his students. Rarely has this sort of thing bee shown in such a positive light. The fact that she’s hot and looks about five years older than the character she portrays, makes the situation palatable. Priscilla’s journey on the other hand, is longer and more complex…

First she goes to a seminar on masturbation, signifying the cinematic comeback of Liza Minnelli in a delightfully over the top performance. Then she gets the abovementioned vibrator from
Heather Graham’s lesbo sex shoppe. Had it not been for the graphic subject matter, this would be something out of a mediocre TV sitcom. Don’t get me wrong, most of the jokes actually work, but this is too clever by half, and a bit too cutesie to boot.

Danny DeVito’s Larry the Pool Guy is not necessary to the movie. While Devito himself is terrific, he’s more of a dues-ex-machina than a real character. The ending isn’t all that well thought out.

This is a cute beginning, and Kent has a future ahead of him.

Brooklyn:In between screenings

It turns out that they are having a reception here in between screenings: selling munchies and red bull for about twice the price you can get the stuff in a supermarket, but that's what sponsers generally do. I just saw The oh in ohio, and it wasn't half bad. Wasn't all that great either. They also have a comptuer here for no real reason.

The shorts weren't that bad either. There was one about an old radical couple having sex. Not all that great, although some people find that humorous.

Now for home....

Brooklyn International film festival day seven

I haven't really been doing all that much when it comes to the festival for most of it, there's too much "normal" stuff to do, but I did go to see some more starting wednesday. The trip from Times Square to the Brooklyn museum isn't nearly that arduous and I managed to get into at least three more films. Here are two of them:

Lower City (Cidade Baixa)

written and directed
by Sérgio Machado

Salvidor, Bahia is in northeastern Brazil, south of the Amazon river. Here, rather than a tropical paradise, we’ve got a kind of tropical hell, where people live an existence of quiet, or in this case, loud desperation. Welcome to Brazil.

Karinna(Alice Braga) is a prostitute flitting from one big city to another, looking for work as a stripper and turning tricks when that’s not exactly available. She’s on her way to Salvidor and has just missed the bus from another city on the river, when she negotiates a deal where for 40 cueseros and a screw for both of them, Deco(Lázaro Ramos) and Naldinho(Wagner Moura) will give her a ride on their trawler.

Love is in the air. So is hate. We’ve got a classical love triangle where everything’s in the shit beforehand. Karinna now works at a strip joint, while her two “boyfriends” haul freight and commit petty crimes for a local hood named Sergipano(José Dumont). Deco, who aspires to be a fighter, and Naldinho, who aspires to nothing, fight and make up, screw Karinna, and fight over her all over again.

Meanwhile, she’s preggers, and we don’t know who the father is. It’s typical for this kind of thing, but then despite the fact that none of these people are the least bit nice, we find ourselves invested in them. That’s what good moviemaking is all about. The local doesn’t seem as exotic as are some films of this type, mainly because it’s urban and to some extent, the slums of most cities seem the same.

This is nothing really special, but it gets the job done.

THE LAST QUEEN OF THE EARTH

Written and Directed
by Mohammad Reza Arab

A simple yet powerful film about a young Afghani immigrant who works in a in Iran. As a US-led attack becomes...

When in doubt, blow stuff up. That’s a pretty good rule of thumb. Especially when the filmmaker is completely inept. The reason we have this thing at the Brooklyn film festival is that it’s exotic as hell and taking us into a different world is what film is all about. However bad acting, editing and dialogue doesn’t balance the positive values of seeing the alien out.

It’s somewhere in eastern Iran. Our hero is dreaming of his wife on the Afghan border and wonders what became of her. One of his supervisor confesses to withholding our hero’s letters from home in order that he would stay at the Henna grinding factory.

But the guy is forgiven and our hero sings a song. However, it turns out the date is 9/11/2001, and the World Trade Center has just been taken down. So he has to go.

Arab doesn’t have much of an imagination. Sure the guy gets robbed, but he gets help to find the robbers from some friendly thugs, who get the crap beaten out of them offstage, He crosses the border “illegally” and the Iranian police shoot a straggler. The Taliban arrests him, but one of them is a friend of his….

It’s all typical obsolete melodrama with lots of explosions. Lots of people die even though our hero is pretty much unscathed. The climax is really dumb, too. Fortunately nobody will ever see this again.

The Brooklyn International Film festival day one

So with Staten Island out of the way [too much rain!], we head to the Brooklyn Museum, where for the ninth year in a row they've got a film festival. This year, they're actually going to have a bunch of stuff which is actually going to get distributed. The first selection was followed by a party where they served Red Bull and beer.

The Former didn't work, as I went fast asleep as soon as I got home and it wasn't even that late, however it was raining cats and dogs, so to speak...same thing with the entire weekend so far. Here are a a couple of the films...[okay I saw one at Sundance...you've probably forgotten, so I'm putting it up again]

Sangue - La Morte non Esiste

Written and directed
by Libero De Rienzo

Yuri(Elio Germano) and Stella(Emanuela Barilozzi) are half siblings. The former came into the world as the product of rape and is a symbol of original sin. He’s needy and a bit of a moron, but Stella loves him anyway even though she refuses to tell him. She’s headed to New York to study ballet and he’s headed nowhere, but in the meantime, there’s a rave to attend…

The film is set in three acts. The first is all about Stella, who has errands to do and people to see. At first she seems pretty normal, or at least sane. She loves practical jokes, and plays at least one on Yuri. We don’t know where exactly this film is going. Are the two going to break taboos and screw? Will they go to their uncle’s wedding? Do we really care? All we know is that Yuri is an incompetent drug dealer and is paranoid. I’m not sure we feel for him, as he’s such a baby, and we are rather happy that Stella’s getting out of there.

Then they get to the rave, which is a complete waste of time. Yuri breaks down, proclaims he’s gay, and preens, while Stella gets some advice from a hindu guru(Libero De Rienzo) and doesn’t actually get it. It’s kind of a metaphor for the whole film. There’s another chapter, which is about Yuri trying to figure life out in the early morning hours while he and she detoxify themselves. This is actually the boring part. Apparently auteur De Rienzo is bored too, because he sends in the Nazi storm troopers to break everything up. Stella and Yuri escape only to discover that there’s a guy named
Bruno(Luca Lionello) sleeping in the back seat.

I guess it’s the boredom and pointlessness of the first two thirds of the film that inspired De Rienzo the car chase. This is a movie, you have to have a car chase right? Especially with guns blazing. Then there’s the final chapter, entitled “Comic Finale,” which basically changes the film entirely, from a philosophical exercise in cinematic navel gazing to slapstick comedy. This is actually rather funny, but seem a bit tacked on. It doesn’t fit even though it’s the best part of the film. What a waste.

The question is whether or not there’s any entertainment factor here. Until the last section, there really isn’t any, but one can see how Europe has decided to tackle the decline of it’s culture in the first decade of the 21st century. Feh!

Factotum

Written and Directed
by Bent Hamer

Hank Chinaski (Matt Dillon) fancies himself a writer. That he may be, but for the most part he’s a bum. Going from low-paying job to low-paying job, while he and his girlfriend Jan (Lili Taylor) screw and drink. This cannot last, and they part. Then our hero takes up with Laura (Marisa Tomei), who’s being kept by Pierre (Didier Flamand), who runs a home for wayward floozies.

Welcome to the world of Charles Bukowski, the greatest slacker of the 20th century.

Exactly, why should we care about this loser? Because Hamer has used the exquisite prose of Bukowski to the maximum advantage, making Hank and his useless friends somewhat interesting. Also, we have bravura performances by Dillon and Taylor, which are Oscar quality, but probably won’t get much kudos because the characters and the story are quite pathetic, and I don’t mean that in a good way.

Watching this film is sort of like watching a train wreck, it’s horrible, but you can’t take your eyes off of it. Which means that it’s probably worth the bucks for a bargain matinee. This is one of the best bad movies of the entire year.

The Staten Island Film festival

Does Staten Island even deserve a film festival? With the abuse the distaff boro has given us in Manhatten for the last century or so, probably not, but on the other hand, everyone else in the world his having one, so who's the right to actually complain about it?

The fest began in the beautifully restored St.George theater, just up the hill from the ferry terminal. The people were very nice, and there it ends, for the opening night film is among the worst of the year. If the rest of the flicks are anywhere near as bad, then God help it.

Here's the review:

The Celestine Prophecy

Directed by
Armand Mastroianni

It’s an old technique: “a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down.” Coat your philosophical crapola with a fictional veneer, preferably an adventure story with lots of sex and violence, and you’ll at least get the general public to think about the stuff.

That is what made James Redfield’s silly book a best seller a decade ago, and with “The Da Vinci Code” being adapted into a film, Redfield obviously felt left out, so he financed a movie version himself.

One would think that since the book sold 14 million copies, Hollywood would have bought the film rights waay back then (they might have, I dunno), but they didn’t. After seeing this turd, I can understand why.

John Woodson (Matthew Settle) is a teacher at a parochial school somewhere in the ‘States. He gets “laid off” due to budget cuts, and when he gets home to mope, the phone rings. It’s an old friend(Robyn Cohen), who tells him about some ancient Jewish texts found in of all places, Peru, so with nothing better to do, he gets a flight out the very next day to check it out.

Well the Catholic church and the Peruvian Junta don’t like the idea of a New Age cult taking over the world, so semi-evil Cardinal Sebastian (Hector Elizondo) and very evil Mr. Jenson(Jurgen Prochnow) have decided to wipe everyone involved with the texts out. John is saved by Wil (Thomas Kretschmann), and the two of them flee to the rain forest, where they meet the rest of the cult in a luxurious mansion…

What follows is philosophical discussion punctuated with gunfire, and believe me when I tell you, there’s nowhere nearly enough of the latter. There is nothing in this movie that is anywhere near interesting, the acting is wooden, even though much of the cast can actually act, the plot far too contrived [actually, the contrivance is part of “insight #2,” or something like that], and writing is horrid.

There is no sugar coating here, and this may actually qualify for the Razzie awards, yeeesh!

Baseball

I went to see the Yankess trounce the Royals 15-4 yesterday. My cousin Bob had some extra tickets (he and a group of friends have season tickets) and since the people he was going to invite begged out at the last minute, he gave me the chance to go.

I hadn't gone to a Yankee game in all of a week [prior to that I han't gone in a couple of years], and this was better. The weather was perfect and the Yanks were hot. I mean that the Royals pitching was some of the worst I'd seen in ages. The Royals fielding was awful too, but the crowd was loving every minute of it, something that wasn't the case the week before, when the Bronx Bombers lost.

It's a good way to spend the memorial day weekend.

The outer boros

Brooklyn and Staten Island are having film festivals next weekend, and there are actually a few films I want to see. In the meantime, it hit the thirties early this morning. It's warmer and they say it should hit the 80s by the weekend. Good, it's fucking cold out there.

The Daisy Party

The new government of Italy is a colalition affair, and the minister of defense is head of the Daisy party. How could anybody vote for a party with a name that astoundingly dumb?

Rain and Relations

My nephew graduated from Columbia this morning. I didn't stay for most of the ceremony as the rain was so intense that i couldn't see anything. So I left and am now waiting for my pants to dry. There's a lunch in about an hour that I'm going to attend. It's at least indoors....the rain didn't ruin everything, however.

The Yankee game up in the Bronx was rather good. Mostly a pitcher's deul the Rangers managed to get a four point lead before the thing was temporarilly called on account of rain. I did get to see both my brothers and the first eight innings were under clear skys. There's stuff going on with the Staten Island film Festival, but I'm not sure what's doing with that.

The Sundance Brooklyn roadshow

The Sundance Film festival has decided to expand this year by having some of it's more obscure and unsellable films shown at the Brooklyn Acadamy of Music for a week in May.

This is a good idea because most of them won't actually get more than a cursery distribution and the only way to get them seen is to have them as part of a fest. So here we are. A documentery about a celebrity crack-head and hard core porn aren't exactly the kind of things you'll find in your local bijiu, would it?


We've also got a slightly more mainstream story...

TV Junkie

A Documentary Directed by
Michael Cain and Matt Radecki

Rick Kirkham was both a nationally syndicated TV journalist ("Inside Edition,") and a crack addict. He also recorded pretty much everything he ever did with amateur video cameras, and that in itself was a tale to tell.

Cain and Radiecki took thousands of hours of his video ramblings and confessionals to produces a heartbreaking tale of woe, as he went from being a dancer on “American Bandstand” to local TV reporter to national celebrity to a physical and mental wreck, as well as wife-beater and drug addict. This is not a fun picture to watch, it’s more like a train-wreck, and a warning for those of us who can’t actually turn away from stuff like that.

Destricted

Produced by
Neville Wakefield
and Mel Agace

A number of years back, producers asked a number of famous “artistic” directors to do a cinematic critique of the phenomenon of pornography and it’s omnipresence in the American culture. Exactly what Wakefield and Agace wanted isn’t made clear in this festival of shorts, but it’s quite clear that they didn’t actually get it. There is really no critique of porn here, just porn.

Hoist

Written and Directed
By Matthew Barney

We begin with a ten minute prologue where we watch a man’s uncircumcised penis get hard, then we travel to Brazil where a giant truck is hoisted into the air. Barney very nicely digitally obscures the faces of the workers doing the heavy lifting.

The main part of the film is a fellow with gourds stuck up his ass and in his mouth, in a tribute to Barney’s “Cremaster 3,” and we watch him basically have sex with the universal joint of the giant machine.

Like most of Barney’s work, the film is hideously expensive and completely obtuse. Which is basically what the entire “festival” is about. IK.

House Call

Written and Directed
By Richard Prince

Good old fashioned ‘70s porn given a digital makeover (which makes it look even worse) and an annoying soundtrack.

The plot is typical of the original genre, a doctor and a patient have sex. YAWN! A complete waste of time and money, although it’s not the worst of the bunch, which is probably Gaspar Noe’s crap.

Impaled

Written and Directed
By Larry Clark

Clark put an ad on an internet porn site, and filmed the various male applicants give their opinions on the business and why they want to get into it. The winner gets to interview the female applicants, all of which are quite experienced.

The winner is a 40-year-old chanteuse who seems really frisky, Then they fuck. This is very funny although I don’t think Clark intended it that way.

Sync

Written and Directed
By Marco Brambilla

This is one of the better films in the series. We’ve got Bramilla editing what seems like seven hundred porn films together in an extremely quick paced three-minute montage. It’s visually interesting and makes the point, whatever that is, quite nicely.

Onan: Death Valley

Written and Directed
By Sam Taylor-Wood

Man masturbates in the middle of the desert. That’s it. He doesn’t even cum. We get it. Men masturbating is boring.

Balkan Erotic Epic

Written and Directed
By Marina Abramovic

This is the only really good short of the bunch. A filthy Monty Pythonesque look into the pagan sex folklore of the Balkans, we get lots of bawdy jokes with men fucking bridges to make the crops grow, and traditionally clad women exposing themselves in order to placate nature and keep everything fertile. If only the rest of the bunch were this good.

We Fuck Alone

Written and Directed
By Gaspar Noe

A young Hitler look-alike watches port on the video while he masturbates with a blow-up doll while in another room a woman covers her snatch with a large teddy bear while she does it. Noe uses grainy video and a stroboscopic effect, which makes watching the film pretty nigh impossible. This is truly ugly.

Forgiven

Written and Directed
By Paul Fitzgerald

The death penalty has been controversial for over a century now, and the question of the possibility of an innocent person getting “put to sleep” has been always been the driving force of activists on the subject. The question here is whether or not one can be even handed about it.

Well in his vanity project, actor Paul Fitzgerald gives it that good college try, and he almost manages to get away with it. Almost.

Fitzgerald plays Peter Miles a DA in a small North Carolina city who’s about to make it into the big time. He’s just about the perfect person to make it big in politics. He has the perfect wife(Susan Floyd), a wonderful kid(Cooper Agar) and a newly found faith in Jesus which gives him moral certitude. The powers that be want him in the US Senate, and so does he.

Therefore he must be destroyed.

The instrument of that destruction is Ronald Bradler(Russell Hornsby), a convicted murderer who’s on the gurney for a lethal injection and the needle is already in his arm when the Governor calls with a pardon. Apparently the defense was incompetent and the main witness later recanted but Peter didn’t do anything to exonerate him.

So Peter’s people leak to the press that Ronald was convicted of a felony long before. This makes him unemployable. So unable to get his life back together, he decides to make Peter pay.

This revenge fantasy would be more satisfying if Fitzgerald wasn’t of two minds about it. In order to make it actually satisfying, we need to make the difference between hero and villain more stark, Fitzgerald tries to make Peter be “inadvertently” evil, and has his black campaign manager tell him he might be racist.

No. Too clunky. The character of Ronald’s lawyer Jamie(Kate Jennings Grant) is really muddled. While she’s supposed to be on the side of the angels, her actions near the end of the film are so hateful that it ruins Fitzgerald’s whole argument.

If you’re going to have a revenge fantasy, make it more fantasy. Otherwise you get an ambivalent mess like this one.

Back to Sundance....

With the DJI down another hundred points, I was able to get some tickets to the Sundance roadshow festival at the Brooklyn Acadamy of Music this and next weekend. Between that, the Yankees and my nephew's graduation, there's lots to do.

The Dow Jones Industrials

I was about to go to my broker and invest in stock-average trusts when the market fell about a hundred and sixty points. I guess I'll try again tomarrow unless it falls more today. I hate high finance!

thursday.....

The rain has started and it's not getting any warmer. the weather report is predicting a lousy weekend, and the following week is going to be kind of weird. I just hope that the Yankee game isn't going to be a washout, because it's the first that I've been to in about two years. My brother Larry bought it as a kind of graduation present to my nephew or something like that.

The kid is graduating Columbia University on Teusday. I remember MY graduation, I found the diploma in the mailbox and walked back to the elevator humming ruffles and flourishes If there was a January ceremony, I might have gone.

But enough sour grapes. I'm going to have to figure out where to go on my next trip real soon in order to get around the summer release...or give up on the movies.

Nah.

There was this explosion see...

I was writing a new post here when the entire cable system exploded. I"m not sure if it was a virus from here or not, but it blew out the cable and I was unable to even watch TV for the better part of an hour. Fox is having a secret screening for the Lindsey Lohan flick tomarrow, they said it was today, but they made a mistake...

What a week. I still have to pay some bills....shit!

The final batch from Tribeca

We finish with two horror flicks. Why? Because we didn't get to them until now. The Sundance film festival is having a roadshow at the Brooklyn acadamy of music over the next two weeks. I think I'll go to that. In the meantime, here they is:

Sam's Lake

Written and Directed
byAndrew C. Erin

The first great horror sequel was “Bride of Frankenstein” then we had “Son of Frankenstein” then “Dracula’s Daughter.” Over the years, monster’s relations became a joke. Before we started having roman numerals after the title, we had brothers and sisters.

But not recently, sure Jason’s mother was the original monster in “Friday the Thirteenth I,” and Freddy’s daughter made an appearance [as a good guy] in at least one of the “Nightmare on Elm Streets,” but for the most part, the profession of supernatural slasher/killer hasn’t usually been one passed down from generation to generation. Which makes this one a bit different.

Every summer, Samantha(Fay Masterson) likes to take friends up to her old homestead on the lake, way out in the Canadian wilderness. This time, she’s bringing her gay friend Dominik(Salvatore Antonino) his business partner Kate(Sandrine Holt) and their friends
Franklin(Stephen Bishop) and Melanie(Megan Fahlenbock) to spend a beautiful week lounging around the natural world.

So we see them joking around back home and looking at all the beautiful scenery on the way north. But all is not well. When we get near the area of the lake, we see strange corncob figures hanging from the houses and at the last-chance general store. There’s even a mysterious figure that scares one of the friends.

Apparently, in the past, people would disappear and be replaced by one of the dolls. But that was a story. When they finally get to the lodge, they’re met by Sam’s old pal Jesse(William Gregory Lee), who helps set up a cookout, and tells scary stories about the famous boogieman(Robert William Smith). Then they explore the notorious ruined house. Then we get the plot twist, and the second half of the film is one long chase. Who’s going to get offed first?

Will the boogieman get our campers before his kids do? Who are the kids anyway and how do they relate to Sam? That’s part of the fun and is in fact one of the neater twists in recent years. The acting is really good, especially the actors who change into the monsters.

Conversations on slasher tactics on the fly is something genuinely new. Worth the money.


The Gravedancers

Directed by
Mike Mendez

The art of the slasher movie is getting old. It’s pretty much the same tired old game. Who gets it first? The question is are there any thrills before you get bored to death.

It’s the funeral of an old friend, and Allison(Clare Kramer) and Harris McKay(Dominic Purcell) have an encounter with Kira Hastings(Josie Maran), an old girlfriend that Allison obviously hates. But there are times when bygones should be bygones, and She lets Harris and Kira go off to do some drinking with Sid Vance(Marcus Thomas), who was good friends with Harris, Kira and the corpse long before. After drinking quite a bit, the threesome goes over to the graveyard to share some liquor with the dear departed, when they come across a strange greeting card on his gravestone.

They read the poem printed on it and dance on some graves (natch—otherwise they’d have to call it something else) and are followed home by some evil poltergeists. These drive the foursome crazy [Kira gets it too, she lives with Harris], they get in touch with Professors Vincent(Tchéky Karyo) and Culpepper(Megahn Perry), who are the official ghostbusters for the local college. They have this big spooky house with all sorts of nifty instruments.

So we’ve got a final battle with the ghosts, who get stronger and stronger as the movie progresses. The film isn’t nearly as bad as it could have been, the inconsistencies don’t stick out like a sore thumb, and the implied commentary on science and adultery is actually kind of refreshing, but there’s not enough of it.

Most of this thing is your typical slasher shit, but if you’re a fan of same it’s worth a look.

Tribeca 16: Jeff Goldblum is a dirty old man

More stuff. I think we may have one or two before we're done.....

Pittsburgh (U.S.A.)

A sort of Documentary Directed
by Kyle LaBrache and Chris Bradley

Catherine Wreford is a 25-year-old Canadian actress who has been married to a big shot movie star named Jeff Goldblum, who is old enough to be her father, for a couple of years now. If this film is to be believed, and we're not exactly sure if it should, she needed a green card, and the best way to get it was to get a part in a play before her work visa expired.

Now a few years back, Goldblum got together with filmmakers Kyle LaBrache and Chris Bradley about doing a film of some sort about him going to his hometown of Pittsburgh, PA, exactly what, he wasn't sure. Then Catherine said that she might be up for a part in “The Music Man” there.

Ah-HAH!!!! Bradley, LaBrache and Goldblum thought. Why not do a Christopher Guest-style mock-umentary which actually crossed over the line to turn into a genuine documentary at some point.

So they decided to basically take over the production in Pittsburgh, which was real, and have everything leading up to it be improvisational comedy. It was a neat idea, but would it work?

Not really. Goldblum got his friends Ed Begley Jr. and Illeana Douglas to play along, and she may have gotten punker Richard “Moby” Hall to come aboard as her faux boyfriend. They “break up” at the Coney Island Mermaid parade. It doesn't work all that well.

The problem here is that we're not sure which is real and which isn't, so we can't exactly know what we supposed to be feeling. Is director Richard Sabellico really chewing Goldblum out for doing a lousy performance? We can't be sure.

Movie stars make vanity projects every now and then. Big deal.

Mini's First Time (U.S.A.) - World Premiere.

Written and Directed
by Nick Guthe

There is nothing Hollywood hates more than Hollywood, with the possible exception of President Bush. So without mentioning W. again here, Nick Guthe has decided to concentrate on that which he despises most, and comes up with a deliciously evil black comedy that's sure to elicit lots of shameful giggles throughout.

Mini(Nikki Reed) is the first person in her high school's history to become valedictorian while having a C-average. She's clearly not going to be that dumb.

Our protagonist lives with her über-bitch mother Diane(Carrie-Anne Moss) and her cuckolded stepfather Martin (Alec Baldwin) in one of the more expensive neighborhoods of Beverly Hills, where Mom spends her time lying around and planning to screw the pool boy and other members of the zillionaire support industry who are horny that day.

With nothing better to do and lots of money to do it with, Mini goes off on a meaningless existence of trying out “firsts,” one of which is working as a call-girl for a ritzy escort service. Here she's sent to service a guy who she later discovers is her step-dad.

Can incest and murder be far behind? Of course they can. But what to do about mom? That's where it starts getting good. This is one of the meanest movies in quite a while and it's hilarious.

Baldwin is a wonder. So is Moss, who takes a character she rarely ever does, and makes it her own. While it goes on they parody a few dozen genres and urban myths from slasher films to the casting couch. Jeff Goldblum is great in a small part as the horny next door neighbor. It's clear that everyone in the cast is having a whopping good time and we're invited to join in. Do so.

Tribeca 15: the preantepenultimate batch

With the Festival over, we've been writing up what's left of what we've got. I've seen over 70 films and we're probably going to write up most of them. I don't think we'll do them all, though.

Five Fingers

Written and Directed
by Laurence Malkin

According to the press notes, Martijn (Ryan Phillippe) is an idealistic Dutch pianist on his way to Morocco to work on a humanitarian food project. His girlfriend (Touriya Haoud) is Moroccan and wants to help those less fortunate from her country, fair enough. So since she doesn't have a passport, Martijn and his bodyguard Gavin(Colm Meaney) head off to North Africa with a million bucks (US) and high expectations.

But once they arrive there, the pair are kidnapped, and they wind up in a basement somewhere in Africa, or at least we think it's Africa. Greeting them is Ahmad (Laurence Fishburne), their captor, who doesn't quite believe that their intentions are as good as they claim.

With Gavin dispatched almost immediately with a shot between the eyes, we're treated with what might be called a psychological thriller. On the one side we've got Martijn, who must try to outwit Amad and fellow terrorists Youseff (Said Taghmaoui) and Aicha (Gina Torres), who are more than happy to follow Amad's lead and cut off Martijn's fingers from his left hand when he refuses to give out the information requested.

This is a horror flick with a political agenda, and not the one you would think at the beginning. Things begin to change as the film goes on and by the end, the whole situation has been stood on it's head. This may be one of the few PRO torture films to ever be made.

This film is clearly Oscar@-bait. The performances by Fishburne and Phillipe are terrific, Torres is really good as well. The questions it raises are the right ones to be asked at this point in history and may actually be worth full price.

The Treatment (U.S.A.) - World Premiere.

Written and Directed
by Oren Rudavsky

Romantic comedy is always better with a little hallucination. Jake Singer(Chris Eigeman) is an English teacher in a fancy prep school where he also assistant coaches basketball. His life is kind of on the boring side, what with his still pining for his lost love Julia (Stephanie March) and all. This torch will have to be put out as she's about to marry someone else.

This is not that kind of movie. His shrink Dr. Ernesto Morales(Ian Holm) is the last of the great Freudians and won't allow for that sort of thing. Not only does he give bizarre advice when he's presiding over his $125-an-hour sessions, but he's apt to appear at the most opportune moments out of the blue to give sage advise.

This is mostly of no help when he meets the beauteous Allegra Marshall(Famke Janssen), a widow with two adopted children. It's not exactly love at first sight, but it's your typical romantic comedy relationship. There are the usual complications. Jake's father(Harris Yulin), with whom he's not talking has a major illness and Allegra's having problems with the adoption agency.

Then there's the problems with the shrink, who's more of a pain in real life than as a hallucination. It's all rather predictable, but the cast is so damn winning, and the script so cute that we can't help but have a good time watching the romance bloom, crumble and bloom again. The jokes all work and the pathos is just right temperature. This is worth seeing.

House of Sand (Casa de Areia)

Directed by
Andrucha Waddington

When one thinks of Brazil, one tends to imagine the Amazon rain forest but that's not what the country looks like. It's as big, if not bigger than the United States, and one of the stranger parts of the country is Maranhao, which is kind of like an endless desert that turns imperceptibly into an endless beach. It's that way now, and was that way back in 1911, when a certain Vasco de Sa (Ruy Guerra) has dragged his young pregnant wife Aurea(Fernanda Torres), mother-in-law Maria(Fernanda Montenegro), and a bunch of extras over miles of sand to a small oasis near the sea.

They are menaced by the descendents of escaped slaves and most of the immigrants escape back to civilization, but Saa won't let his wife and mother-in-law go. He himself bites the big one soon enough, and the women try to make a run for it, but Maria doesn't have the energy. They have to go back, and it's a life sentence.

All of a sudden it's ten years later, and Aurea is now the mother of a ten year old girl named after her grandmother (Camilla Facundes), and is in a relationship with Massu (Luiz Melodia), one of the local population in this desolate area. There is a window for escape, with an expedition of scientists testing Einstein's theory or relativity, but this fails.

The various scenes in the film are sometimes decades apart with Torres and Montenegro changing parts as grandma dies and mom and daughter grows old against a timeless landscape.

With very few characters, it's just the two women and Massu as everything and nothing happens. This isn't bad as art films go, and the two lead actresses, who are mother and daughter in real life, are terrific. Worth a look when it comes out on cable.

Tribeca 14: Three Docs from Persia

There are lots of films from Iran this year for some reason. Most of them bitch about the evil regime there. Here are three typical ones:

Siah Bâzi (France, Iran) – North American Premiere.

a documentary directed
by Maryam Khakipour

Back in the bad old days of the evil Shah, Tehran had some really good nightlife. Theater on Laleh Zar, the so-called "Street of Joy," as the old theater district was known, had everything from movie theaters to opera and everyone liked vaudeville. When they began filming this documentary, there was just one left on the street, the Nasr, an old vaudeville theater that still kept packing them in in the middle of the afternoon.

But that’s all gone now. The mullahs have decided that since the place needs patching up, a centuries-old theatrical tradition should be thrown out with the trash. The actors, some of them quite old, are without pensions, and one was begging in the street.

This is really a sad film, but what can one do? That’s progress, for ya. I hope the film had an effect in Iran.

Inside Out

45 minutes isn’t exactly a short, in fact it was just about as long as the feature. This is about Iranian transsexuals, not homosexuals.

Homosexuality is a crime in Iran, while transsexuality is considered a disease. The mullahs approve of the need for sex-change surgery, which is something that is a bit unexpected.

We meet three of them, and a junior ayatollah who explains the theological implications of this situation. Rather boring all the same.

President Mir Qanbar

Directed By
Mohammad Shirvani

Mir Qanbar is a 75-year-old joke. A retired beaurcrat, he has been running for office ever since the Iranian Republic was established and keeps on coming in last or next to last.

He goes around on a bike or his crippled friend’s horsecart, and makes a few speeches and hands out leaflets. He’s harmless, so the mullahs don’t generally throw him off the ballot like they do many other, worthier candidates. Still one has to admire the fellow’s gumption. One can’t really be sure if the filmmaker is doing this as a joke or as a real look at the politics of the nation.

This really a waste of time, although it’s nice to see that he’s finally getting his bachelor’s degree at the local community college. A pathetic film about a pathetic guy.

The Street Fair

Each year, the Tribeca Film festival has a street fair. If you're in Manhattan and are sick of movies, come down and take a look...or don't. The lines for the films are going to be long today.

Tribeca 13...I'm giving up on catigorization

So here we are with another batch. We no longer have any press screenings, so there are a few public screenings to go to for stuff with no press or those I missed.

A Stadium Story: The Battle for New York's Last Frontier (U.S.A.) World Premiere.

A documentary Directed by
Jevon Roush and Benjamin Rosen

Local doesn't always mean that it's interesting. The Olympic stadium controversy was something that was best forgotten.

Why the hell did we in New York need the Olympics anyway? The games are a waste of time, the IOC is one of the most corrupt organizations in the world, and we weren't going to get it anyway.

One of the things that the filmmakers forgot was that the City hosted Ted Turner's “Goodwill Games” a sort of counter-Olympics to protest Jimmy Carter's boycott of the 1980 Moscow games, in 1998, and that pretty much killed them.

But the problem here is that there doesn't seem to be a bad guy. Both sides are seen to be on the side of the angels, and we sympathize with both the pro- and anti-stadium sides.

With no real negatives set out for one argument or the other, we get lots of interviews with the principles and clips from vintage movies as golden oldies play in the background.

Meanwhile, nothing has been done with the Hudson yards site. Unless you are into NYC politics, then this is basically a waste of time, albeit a well done one.

The Architect (USA) - World Premiere

Written and Directed
by Matt Tauber

Families in crisis always make for good drama. What we've got are the usual good people suffering for little or no reason, and for some audiences, that's always forefends a rollicking good time.

So we've got two families: one rich living in the suburbs, one poor living in a certain public housing block that is so bad people commit suicide rather than continue living there.

So we begin with Martin Waters(Sebastian Stan) coming home after dropping out of his college the middle of his first semester. His father, Leo(Anthony LaPaglia), the architect of the title, doesn't seem all that much concerned, although he's glad to see the young man in one piece. His mother Julia(Isabella Rossellini) and sister Christina(Hayden Panettiere) don't seem that concerned, although they're clearly aware of the situation. Typical suburban angst, of which we've seen all too much before, Is there a divorce in the offing? Why not?

The other family is in that housing block which, of course, Leo designed. Tonya Neeley(Viola Davis) is trying to have the whole development torn down and thus end the living hell that it is. In fact her sone killed himself by jumping off the roof several years back and she had her younger daughter Cammie(Serena Reeder) sent off to some rich people in the suburbs, much to the shagrin of her older sister, who's now an unwed mother. She wants Leo to sign a petition demanding the developments demolition, which Leo won't do because he's still proud of it.

Which brings us to the question: Is Martin really gay? The “recruitment” of him by a black fellow named Shawn(Paul James) is entirely gratuitous. Do we really need sexual awakening to bring any more angst than we already have? Does Christina's shagging a truck driver Joe(Walton Goggins) add anything to the main plot about architecture and the lives of ordinary people?

Holiday Makers (Ucastnici Zajezdu) (Czech Republic) - World Premiere.

Written and Directed
by Jiri Vejdelek

Literal translation sometimes doesn't cut the mustard. What this should have been called is “Vacation,” “The Trip” or maybe just “Holiday,” It's a very cute film and the English title is clunky.

The movie itself isn't clunky. However, the film is a bit on the tame side. A bunch of people have paid for a vacation in the Croatian side of the Adriatic sea. It's the standard bunch of people, some gays, some homophobic parents with a possible gay son, some horny teenagers, a middle aged couple who's sick of each other, their horny daughter and a a possible perv.

This is all pretty tame, and not only that, it's been done before. But that doesn't mean that it's not entertaining. It's a cute little comedy, which proves that those government-funded movie commissions can do Hollywood-type comedies if they wanted to.

Tomarrow's the last day...

For me at any rate, but I've still got a dozen or so reviews to finish, so keep on coming back.

Great British Actors with Big Noses

I was asked to group the reviews into themes a while ago, so I guess this might do....


Snow Cake

Directed by
Marc Evans

Just because something is obviously Oscar®-bait doesn't mean it has to suck. Sigourney Weaver hasn't been nominated for one since she got two noms way back in 1989, to be perfectly frank, she could use one. So, since playing disabled people is generally considered a call for help by respected actors who want kudos, this film is on the very early lists.

It may actually deserve to be.

We don't really know who Vivienne Freeman (Emily Hampshire) is when we first see her on the screen. We know she's a neo-hippie, and she's looking for someone special, and she settles on Alex Hughes (Alan Rickman), who's looking depressed although we learn soon enough is a manslaughterer just out of prison. He doesn't like her, but the force of Viv's personality forces him to relent, and soon enough they're on the road headed west, where he's to drop her off at her home town.

That's when the unexpected truck plows into the car, and the person who we think is going to be the main character gets killed.
I include this spoiler here because we're only about fifteen minutes into the film and the rest is about what happens later.

Viv's mom Linda(Weaver) is disabled. She's a highly-verbal autistic person who can take care of herself to some extent, but still acts like she's about five. [That's the Oscar®-bait part. Apparently, the voters are supposed to love that sort of thing.] Alex comes over to pay a condolence visit and winds up spending the better part of the week there. There's a funeral to organize and Linda's parents are off somewhere having fun.

So we have two great actors doing what they do best, and having a wonderful time not grieving. There's even a chance for romance between Alex and Linda's next door neighbor Maggie(Carrie-Anne Moss), who's a bit of a slut and is a glutton for grownup conversation. That balances off the bizarre goings on at Linda's.

The best thing about this is the fact that script is so smart and fresh, scribe Angela Pell has crafted a really funny and touching script. It should be seen.

Land of the Blind

Written and Directed
by Robert Edwards

A political allegory shouldn't actually be as predictable as this. That is unless you've read the book first. But this isn't based on a book.

What we've got here is a political fantasy reaching for great truths and falling flat after proclaiming them. This is a comedy of government and it's been done before, many times in many places, most recently in “V for Vendetta,” which at least had some nifty explosions.

We're somewhere sideways in time. The leader of this unnamed nation is Maximilian II(Tom Hollander), President for life and failed movie director, who's turned his country into a cesspool while he lives it up in a palace with his wife Josephine(Lara Flynn Boyle).

Since this is a fascist dictatorship, the political prisoners are in a hellish prison. Their leader a certain Mr. Thorne(Donald Sutherland), refuses to wear regular prison clothes and writes slogans in his own shit on the walls of the cell. Watching this is our hero Joe(Ralph Fiennes), who's a prison guard. When he isn't serving lunch or watching his first sergeant beat(Don Warrington) the crap out of Thorne and others.

But despite the happy face TV news reports, where everything is a commercial, all is not well, and President Max's top advisors (Jonathan Hyde and Robert Daws) get their fearless leader to cave in bit by bit. IN the meantime, Joe becomes enthralled to Thorne's philosophy and charisma.

Of course, when the revolution comes, Throne proves to be even worse than Max was. We could see that coming a mile away. It's all very “1984.” We've seen this before and seen it much better. Still it's worth a look for the weirdness.

Okay, MI:3 doesn't suck That much.

I forgot to post the review here since it's part of the festival. It'll go up on the regular site tomarrow.


Mission: Impossible III

Written and Directed
by J.J. Abrams

One of these days we’re going to have an action film where the plot is actually interesting. There comes a point where just blowing stuff up just doesn’t cut it. This doesn’t mean that I’m against doing that in movies, I love a really good explosion, what I don’t like is a tiresome story that appears that Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and the redoubtable J.J. Abrams took about ten minutes to write the first draft of this sucker. At least they kind of admitted it when they had
super-spy Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) say: “There comes a time when bold becomes stupid.” Truer words were rarely said.

We start with what might be called: The “how’d we get here?” introduction. Ethan is chained to a chair and is sitting across from his significant other Julia(Michelle Monaghan), who is in the same predicament, as über-villian Owen Davian(Philip Seymour Hoffman) prances around threatening to shoot Julia and then use his nifty enema bomb to blow up our hero’s head—>cut to the burning fuse and the “duh-duh-DUH-da, duh-duh-DUH-da” Theme music.

Apparently, Ethan is semi-retired and is about to get married to Julia, when his boss Musgrave (Billy Crudup) gives him a call and gives him the usual package. Apparently they’ve decided not to disavow agent Lindsey Ferris(Keri Russell) and instead have our hero and his usual team: Luther (Ving Rhames) Dermot (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and Zhen (Hong Kong star Maggie Q) head off to Berlin to recover her. We’ve got lots of explosions, but not the one we wanted. It’s okay to have Lindsey get killed at the last minute, but why not have her head actually explode when the enema bomb goes off? That would have been cool!!

We finally get to see the IMF headquarters, something that allegedly didn’t exist before, and there’s also internal politics between Musgrave and his boss Brassel (Laurence Fishburne) as well as IMF’s version of Q (Simon Pegg), who’s got some of the best lines in the film. There should have been more of that.

We go from Virginia to Berlin to the Vatican to Shanghai, where we get to see ancient Roman art blown up for little or no reason, to full scale war on the Chesapeake bay bridge. The writers at least acknowledge that the media might have noticed something that big.

But this is pure fantasy, and as such it’s completely unoriginal. The acting is professional, as one would expect, and we know that it’s going to make a ton of money because attendance is mandatory.

If you’re in the demographic, you should only see it once, at a bargain matinee, and forget getting the video. If you’re not, don’t bother at all.

Mission Impossbile 3 Still sucks

Charity. That’s what the so-called “Tent Pole” screenings are. The big studios know that everyone’s going to see this stuff anyway, so they help the poorlittle film festival by having screenings in a couple of the of the venuesand make sure that none of the regular people who’ve bought passes couldget in.

Well, that’s what they did with Mission Impossible III, at least.

The press release began something like this:

APRIL 12, 2006 [New York] – Tom Cruise, the most exciting and successful
action star in the world, returns to one of his signature roles, Secret Agent
Ethan Hunt, in the summer’s most highly anticipated action thriller, “Mission:
Impossible III” – and Cruise will celebrate the U.S. premiere of the film on
May 3 at the Tribeca Film Festival with a full day of screenings and events
throughout Manhattan as part of “Mission: NYC.” Bringing the film and
Cruise directly to fans and filmgoers,“Mission: NYC” kicks off with Cruise
appearing live on “TRL” in Times Square and culminates nearly six hours later
with the U.S. premiere of the film at the Festival.

There were actually three premiers. One was at the Zigfield, the last humongous movie theater in Manhattan (Radio City doesn’t count), where premiers aresupposed to be, the 68th street AMC/Lowes, which is an official venue ofthe TFF, and the Magic Johnson Theater waay uptown in Harlem. That was the one I attended.

I wasn’t planning to go that far north, but I gotan email from one of those “free movie tickets if you pay twenty bucks toget into a party” companies, and they said that there giving out a hundred free tickets I got there by five. So I went uptown.

The line was around the block. They didn’t tell me that Paramount had passed out flyers all over Harlem.

Iwaited on line for the better part of an hour. The thing moved slowly andthe people giving out stuff repeatedly told us we’d get in, but when we gotto the front of the line we were confronted with an old trick dating fromthe days of Studio 54, they just corralled us back on the street. That wasn’tnice at all.

So I put my press pass around my neck and went past thesecurity up to where Black Entertainment Network’s® 106 and Park show washaving the stars of the film as guests and rap star and über-hottie Kanye rapped her way around the stage as a couple of hundred kids who’d been theresince about two in the afternoon danced in the lobby of the multiplex.

It’samazing how many of the girls thought that Tom Cruise was cuter than Larry Fishburne. Doesn’t matter, I was too busy drooling over Kanya, while theyasked the stars stupid questions and everyone in the studio audience juststood there during the commercial breaks.

When the whole mischagas was over, there was the problem of getting into the movie. Everyone elsehad a color-coded wrist band which indicated which theater they should goto. I didn’t have one and didn’t know if I could get passed the burley securityguards that were far too much in evidence.

It wasn’t has hard asI thought. I just went into one of the screening rooms where the guards lookeddistracted. I waited alone a bit, left, came back again, and nobody stoppedme. Then the place filled up and before it did the film had started.

Ididn’t have the address to the party until I got back, but then it was toolate. I was dead tired. I should have gone because the Paramount PR department hates my guts because I’m still a film critic and won’t stop trying to get in their screenings.

Everybody else is fine with that, which is why I get into most movie screenings and have for more than a decade. But that's neither here nor there.

The beginning of the end

We've got a few more screenings, two or three this today, tomarrow and a few later on. The last of the press screenings are on friday and there are a few regular ones over the weekend, then I crash.

Have there been any truly great flims this time out?

Yes.

Unfortunately, it was United 93, which was a Hollywood film.

Have there been any truly lousy films?

Yes.

I think there have been three, and we'll get to that later.

Will we get this blog working properly?

Probably not.

Mission Impossible 3 sucks.

I"m not sure about that, but since the flacks at paramout publicity are a bunch of royal shits, there may not be a review, even though it's the tentpole film of the festival.

Sorry.

Tribeca 13: Hollywoodland

Well, here are some of the best films of the festival, which were, of course done by professionals with lots of experience in the business.

Lonely Hearts (U.S.A.) – World Premiere.

Written and Directed
by Todd Robinson

Today, they’re history’s forgotten serial killers, but in 1949, they were really big news. The “Lonely Hearts” murders numbered over twenty, and they were pretty gruesome. They were

Then as now, there were lots of lonely people out there and the personals were really big business, and there were predators out there who were more than happy to ruin the lives of the lonely.

One of those people was Raymond Martinez Fernandez (Jared Leto), a rake and a gigolo who would romance anyone with money before he would relieve them of it. That is until he met one Martha Jule Beck (Salma Hayek), a nurse who was one of his tricks.

She saves his butt and they become a team.

But, they make a mistake. They start killing people. The first is a beautiful woman who’d been fleeced by Ray and committed suicide, but the lead detective working on the case, Elmer C. Robinson (John Travolta) something is fishy. He and his reluctant partners Hildebrandt (James Gandolfini) and Reilly (Scott Caan) start investigating, and soon they are flying around New York state connecting the dots and building a case.

Robinson has baggage. His wife commits suicide during the opening credits, and his son(Dan Byrd) have had a bad relationship ever since. But in following Fernandez and Beck, he comes to back to life. He also has an affair with a coworker named Rene (Laura Dern). The two stories mesh quite nicely.

The film is quite straightforward, it starts with an introduction to the cops, and then the criminals, and from there it goes logically and without a break. The acting is good, and since the case has become obscure with time, the fact that Beck weighed almost three hundred pounds is completely ignored by the casting of the svelte Heyek. Travolta and Byrd have some real chemistry together, and so do Heyek and Leto. Leto is the star of the film much more than Travolta, he gives a bravura performance here, and his Fernandez is both a charmer and a psycho. Heyek isn’t nearly as good.

If you like true crime stuff, this is worth a look.

A Very Serious Person (U.S.A.) – World Premiere.

Written and Directed
by Charles Busch

Charles Busch is one of the more famous drag queens in the world. Famous in the gay community, his camp classics played in small theaters around Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side for the better part of the 1970s and ‘80s. Busch always played the heroine in what is the epitome of camp. Nothing wrong with that. Some of it was really funny.

He hasn’t done all that well in movies, however. “Die Mommy Die” never actually made it beyond a token release, and “Psycho Beach Party,” in which Busch had only a small part, was a minor hit on cable. It was with great interest that I heard that he was going to play a real guy this time. Could he do it? That was a question.

The film is about as autobiographic as he could really get. He doesn’t play himself, of course, but a talented young kid named
PJ Verhoest does. Technically, he plays Gil, the fourteen year old grandson of a certain Mrs. A(Polly Bergen). Grandma is dying of some horrible disease, has only a few weeks to live, and wants to spend them at the ’Jersey shore with Gil and her faithful housekeeper Betty(Dana Ivey).

Unfortunately, two of the nurses the agency sends over don’t work out, so they send Jan(Charles Busch), who’s that “Very Serious Person” of the title. He’s Danish, gay [I’m not all that sure Busch could write a straight man, although he probably could], and doesn’t take shit from anybody.

The film is the story of the relationship between surrogate father and son, and it’s actually pretty touching. Busch was very fond of his own grandmother, and the emotion shown here is quite genuine. There is a genuine-ness between Jan and Gil as well, made even more real by Verhoest’s superb acting.

There is a genuine concern for the future of gay youth in a debate between Gil and Jan’s hairdresser friend Lee(co-writer Carl Andress) and Jan. This is actually, the most serious thing Busch has written, at least of what I’ve seen, and I’m a bit of a fan.

This is about the least campy thing Busch has ever done, and one of the best. It’s worth a look.

Colour Me Kubrick (UK, France) – International Premiere.

Directed by
Brian Cook

They say truth is stranger than fiction, and sometimes we’ve got evidence of this maxim. Take the con man who spent a number of years impersonating director Stanley Kubrick during the last couple of years of his and Kubrik’s life.

This is the story of Alan Conway(John Malkovich) a con man who goes around fleecing innocent artistic types, pretending to be Kubrick, promising his marks the moon, and disappearing when the loans come due. The film begins with two punkers who were thus fleeced harassing some rich shlub demanding that Kubrick pay them the money they lent.

Conway is a flaming queen and a chameleon who changes accents and mannerisms whenever he meets someone new, and he’s also a bit lazy, he gets caught by anyone who knows the work of the real Kubrick just a little bit. Apparently, the real Conway never saw any of his films.

The film is basically a one-man show. Malkovich gives the performance of a lifetime, while the hamminess drips out of every pore, there’s an honesty in the dishonesty of it all which makes the performance priceless. He’s so brazen that he goes up to NY Times film critic Frank Rich (William Hootkins) and his wife Alix (Marisa Berenson) in a London restaurant screaming his displeasure at what the newspapers have been saying about him. This proves the beginning of the end. Rich is suspicious, and so are quite a few others, including the cops.

Meanwhile Conway continues his impersonation, and this time hits real paydirt, a midlevel celebrity(Jim Davidson) who thinks he could make it big in the US. It’s a hoot. The supporting cast, which is made up of has-been TV stars are really good.

Anthony Frewin’s script is a bit erratic. The film goes on in a haphasard way for the first half at least, but Malkovitch’s perfornace makes up for it. This is a perfect revenge by two of Kubrick’s most loyal assistant. Had he lived, I’m sure Kubrick would have wanted to make this film himself.

midday sunday

We're in the middle of the day between screenings and all I get is coffee and donuts. I would much rather have a tuna sandwitch

Tribeca 12: The 50th film....

I've done a count and have gone through fifty features since I started three weeks ago. That's some sort of personal best for a festival. That's why I didn't put anything up yesterday...not that there's anyone out there looking....

Burke and Wills (Australia) – World Premiere.

Written and Directed by
Matthew Zeremes and Oliver Torr

For the record, it’s important to explain that “Burke and Wills” is Australian for “Lewis and Clark.” In other words, the two filmmakers who made this piece of crap decided to give it a title that was either somewhat deceptive, promising an epic that isn’t there, or being cheeky in a particularly lame way. I think it’s the latter because that describes the entire film.

Burke(Oliver Torr) rents a house somewhere in Sydney, and sublets out a room to Wills(Matthew Zeremes). Now Wills has a girlfriend named Elinor(Elizabeth Richmond) and is a bit outgoing. He’s also, one hell of a bore.

So after Wills moves in, nothing happens, then nothing happens some more, then Wills breaks up with his girlfriend, then more nothing. Then Burke’s grandmother dies, then some more nothing.

Near the end, something happens, but by the time it does, we’re already fast asleep and can’t really appreciate it. The last couple of acts (they are separated by chapter headings) are meant to be shocking, but it’s perhaps that the rest of the film is sooooo banal.

This is a complete waste of celluloid, Fortunately, it’ll never see the light of day again, do don’t worry.

Mee Shee: The Water Giant (Canada, U.S.A) - North American Premiere.

Directed by
John Henderson

When you have a film specifically made for babies, you can get away with a heck of a lot more plot holes than you would in a film made for older audiences. A simple story that doesn’t talk down to the wee ones is all that is necessary, and the special effects should be good too. That’s where the Jim Henson creature shop comes in, but more on that later.

Sean Cambell(Bruce Greenwood) is a heroic rescue submariner, flying around the world with his minisub and trusty assistant Neilds(Joe Pingue) saving people and important artifacts from the bottom of the sea. But does his six-year-old son Mac(Daniel Magder) appreciate that? Not on your life!!!

So when a vacation to Sea World is suddenly aborted when a helecopter is shot down over the Great Slave Lake in Northern Canada, Sean and Neilds are on the job, and they decide to take little Mac along, Mac’s mom having been killed offstage sometime before. So they head off to the Great White North, where Mac is told by the landlady(Phyllida Law), about the legend of Mee Shee, the great lake’s own monster, who few have seen and allegedly lives in a cave somewhere.

Given a bike Mac drives around the area, and here he falls into a hole, goes through a rollercoaster-like tunnel into the lake, and gets saved by the monster, who, being made by the Jim Henson company to look friendly, reminds one of a giant manatee.

Of course there’s danger, as evil competitors of the oil company our hero works for has sent to stock villians(Joel Tobeck and Charles Mesure) to sabotage Dad’s mission. In what might be an original idea that seems to have gone nowhere, this is at first blamed on Greenpeace, who in real life do do such things. But this is for little children and we can’t have that sort of thing, especially for a Canadian production.

The film follows a cookie-cutter plot after some cute innovations, and the jokes work. What annoys the grownups is the fact that the government of Canada is nowhere to be seen except for Laura (Luanne Gordon), of the Canadian environment ministry, but she doesn’t have a radio to call the cops with.

Wait until it comes out on the Disney Channel or Nick.

The TV Set (USA) – World Premiere.

Written and Directed
by Jake Kasdan

Write what you know. Except for science fiction or cheesy romance , that’s the first rule of fiction. Jake Kasdan has been in and around show business all his life [his father Lawrence is a big shot honcho] and he’s done TV, including a pilot that never was picked up. So he knows what he’s talking about.

Kasdan’s doppelganger is Mike(David Duchovny) a writer with a vision. He’s doing a thing called “The Winslow Chronicles” about the adventures of guy recovering from his brother’s suicide. The script’s gotten past gate, so to speak, and it’s actually going to be produced. This is exiting news indeed, but there are other factors involved that are going destroy the pure vision Mike originally had.

Lenny(Sigourney Weaver) is the number two person in the network, and she wants as much input on the series that Mike has, but doesn’t want him to actually think that. Her number two is Richard(Ioan Gruffudd), who’s marriage is in trouble because his wife hates LA. Slightly different visions lead to conflicts, and since Lenny is paying the bills, Mike generally loses.

Not for want of trying. He and his assistant Alice(Judy Greer) try to force the hands of the powers that be by getting a bad actor named
Zach Harper(Fran Kranz) to go against the person he wants for the job, so Zach gets it instead, of course. This sort of thing happens for the entire film and by the time it gets picked up, it’s completely different than what was originally pitched.

This is the writer’s protest against the suits who destroy creativity in the TV business. If the writers had been left alone with their vision would the world be a better place? Dunno. But the film is funny, and everyone in the film is fighting on the same side for truth, justice and the American way. Writing for TV is compromise anyway, so nobody should really have all that much to complain about. This is inside baseball and is only going to be popular with the people in the biz.

Tribeca 11: miscellaneous

Since we've got five screenings today, we're going to stop doing it in catagories and just put stuff up.....

Mee Shee: The Water Giant (Canada, U.S.A) - North American Premiere. A Screenmedia Release.

Directed by
John Henderson

When you have a film specifically made for babies, you can get away with a heck of a lot more plot holes than you would in a film made for older audiences. A simple story that doesn’t talk down to the wee ones is all that is necessary, and the special effects should be good too. That’s where the Jim Henson creature shop comes in, but more on that later.

Sean Cambell(Bruce Greenwood) is a heroic rescue submariner, flying around the world with his minisub and trusty assistant Neilds(Joe Pingue) saving people and important artifacts from the bottom of the sea. But does his six-year-old son Mac(Daniel Magder) appreciate that? Not on your life!!!

So when a vacation to Sea World is suddenly aborted when a helecopter is shot down over the Great Slave Lake in Northern Canada, Sean and Neilds are on the job, and they decide to take little Mac along, Mac’s mom having been killed offstage sometime before. So they head off to the Great White North, where Mac is told by the landlady(Phyllida Law), about the legend of Mee Shee, the great lake’s own monster, who few have seen and allegedly lives in a cave somewhere.

Given a bike Mac drives around the area, and here he falls into a hole, goes through a rollercoaster-like tunnel into the lake, and gets saved by the monster, who, being made by the Jim Henson company to look friendly, reminds one of a giant manatee.

Of course there’s danger, as evil competitors of the oil company our hero works for has sent to stock villians(Joel Tobeck and Charles Mesure) to sabotage Dad’s mission. In what might be an original idea that seems to have gone nowhere, this is at first blamed on Greenpeace, who in real life do do such things. But this is for little children and we can’t have that sort of thing, especially for a Canadian production.

The film follows a cookie-cutter plot after some cute innovations, and the jokes work. What annoys the grownups is the fact that the government of Canada is nowhere to be seen except for Laura (Luanne Gordon), of the Canadian environment ministry, but she doesn’t have a radio to call the cops with.

Wait until it comes out on the Disney Channel or Nick.

Crime Novel (Romanzo Criminale)

Written and Directed
by Michele Placido

The mafia in Italy isn’t as smart as the mafia here in the ‘States. We’ve got an epic here, and it seems that if you’re mean enough you can pretty much roll over the Italian mob in Rome with just a flick of the finger.

Ice(Kim Rossi Stuart), Black(Riccardo Scamarcio), Lebanese (Pierfrancesco Favino) and the Dandy(Claudio Santamaria) have been friends since they were little kids. They’re loyal to each other and to no one else, as they hit the big time by kidnapping a minor noble. They kill him before getting the ransom, but after getting the money Lebanese gets the brilliant idea to invest the money in wholesale cocaine instead of fancy cars and cheap women.

So with a bribe here and a stabbing there, they quickly take over the rackets in the eternal city. But Capt. Scialoja(Stefano Accorsi) is on their trail, which should be scary for them, but the Italian Intelligence service is on the side of the crooks. This is a story taking decades, so when the Red Brigades kidnaps and murders a former prime minister, our boys are enlisted to help find him, but they fail. That’s Italy for you.

Then there’s the women, the Dandy is in love with Patrizia(Anna Mouglalis), the best whore in Rome, and to show this he buys her a cathouse of her own, but unbeknownst to him, she’s also sleeping with the good Capitain. Ice is in love with the innocent and cultured
Roberta(Jasmine Trinca), who hasn’t a clue what a royal shit she’s screwing. This is a long film, so there’s lots of soap opera to fill the spaces between the shootings and stabbings.

For a film of this magnitude and scope, this is surprisingly boring. We don’t really care a rat’s ass about any of these people, even though Stewart is quite good looking.

Don’t bother.

The Groomsmen (U.S.A.).

Written and Directed
by Edward Burns

Paulie(Ed Burns) and Sue(Brittany Murphy) are finally getting married, and it’s about time, what with her being six months pregnant and all. So Paulie, has wants to get his best buddies together for the big event.

Getting his brother Jimbo (Donal Logue), cousin Mike(Jay Mohr) and old pal Dez (Matthew Lillard) was easy, they all live on City Island, but TC(John Leguizamo) has disappeared years before and finding him was lots of work. But found he was and as the movie starts, he’s waiting at the train station.

Of course, everyone in the group has problems, and that’s the main focus of the film, how to deal with the problems of everyday life when you don’t know what you really want and are beginning to get on in years.

What this is, is a typical film about nothing, which is what Burns likes to do best. Everyone gets to work through their problem except Dez, whos managed to figure everything out. There are parts of it which are interesting, and the acting is for the most part really good, after all this is the young has-been brigade of former teen stars and this proves that they haven’t lost any of their mojo.

Worth a look when it lands on cable.

Hollywood family films.

In addition to the vast number of Indies and foreign films, there are a number of genuine, actual Hollywood movies shown at the festival. The three here are called "family entertainment" as they don't say shit, fuck, piss, tits or cocksucker even once.

Keeping Up With The Steins

Directed by
Scott Marshall

The Bar Mitzvah (Hebrew for “first blessing), is one of the most important ceremonies in the Jewish religion. In olden times, the 13-year-old boy, would come up to read the torah at the synagogue for the first time. Then he would be given a party prior to being kicked out of the house and forced to get a job.

Except for the last part, the tradition continues to this very day, and the party is one thing that everyone remembers. The jokes about how ostentations and vulgar the bar mitzvah parties can be have been going around since kicking the son out of the house was a real part of the whole meshegaas.

Benjamin Fiedler(Daryl Sabara), the privileged son of a Hollywood super-agent, is almost thirteen and thus is scheduled to take part in the rite. When we meet him, he’s attending the party of his friend
Zachary Stein(Carter Jenkins), who’s parents had it on a cruise ship with a Titanic theme. Vulger it is. Ben’s parents(Jami Gertz and Jeremy Piven), not to be outdone, are preparing for a hyper-expensive to-do of their own.

Imagine “Father of the Bride III” from the point of view of the bride.

Ben’s parents have issues, but the real one is between Ben’s dad and grandfather. Decades before, Irwin Fiedler(Garry Marshall) had left his wife Rose (Doris Roberts) and son Adam, and Adam had never forgiven him. Reconciliation between father and son being a mitzvah in and of itself, Ben decides to invite Irwin and his girlfriend
Sandy “Sacred Feather” Frost(Darryl Hannah), a new age vegan type, and unknown to his parents, changes the date so they would show up a week early.

This is one of those “true meaning of Christmas” type plots, where everyone lives happily ever after, and as such it works. The jokes, are for the most part good, and so is the acting. For those of us who are members of the tribe this will bring back memories, whether or not they’re good or bad depends on the viewer, but bring them back they will. For gentiles, this is a good insight into the Jewish mind, whatever the heck that is.

Worth the bucks.

RV

Directed by
Barry Sonnenfeld

Film critics generally hate comedies. Family comedies especially. That’s because ever since “Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation” back in the early 1960s, if not further, it’s been pretty much the same plot: In order to get from here to there, every disaster that can happen will happen. It’s inevitable. Been there done that.

Now the reason that critics hate these films is not only that they’ve been done before [why can’t they just rent a good old Shirly Temple movie…oh yeah, they’re racist] a hundred times, but because the critics have seen…them…a…hundred…times.

This doesn’t mean that they can’t be done right anymore. They can.
In this version, corporate type Bob Munro(Robin Williams) is taking his wife Jamie (Cheryl Hines) and kids Carl (Josh Hutcherson) and Cassie(Jojo Levesque) to a corporate swaree, and the friend that Cassie brought along attacks Bob's boss Todd(Will Arnett) for ruining the children of America with his soft drinks, sloshing them all over his new suit. Hardeeharhar.

Due to an emergency, Todd has decided to NOT fire Bill and tells him to cancel that Hawaii vacation that they were going on the next week and head out to Colorado to make a presentation.

This being the American upper-middle class family, we need family bonding!!! So We’ve got the title vehicle, which, as expected, doesn’t work properly.

Just because the thing’s been done before doesn’t mean that much of the shtick isn’t funny. The porta-potty disposal joke actually works, and the helpful, but rather corney Gornicke family(Jeff Daniels, Kristin Chenoweth and some kids) from whom the Munros try so very hard to escape, are actually a decent foil for them.

All in all, it’s good not great, and is worth the bucks to take the kids, after all, it’s a family comedy, and there are always going to be families….

Goal! The Dream Begins

Directed by
Danny Cannon

One thing we learn in this picture is that Mexico gives sells passports quickly, cheaply and with no questions asked. Apparently, you don’t even need a birth certificate!

Otherwise how would an illegal alien like Santiago Munez (Kuno Becker) be able to get all the way to London, England from LA so fast? If there wasn’t some sort of magic involved, then how would there be so many bizarre coincidences?

One of the bad things we’ve got is the politics. The film begins with
young Santiago(Kuno Becker) crossing the border illegally with this father(Tony Plana), who apparently hates soccer. Cut to ten years later, where Santi, is living with his dad, his grandmother (Miriam Colon) and baby brother Hernan(Tony Plan). They’re not doing too well, although they live in a nice house and make more than the minimum wage….Now dad knows that since the whole family, except for little Hernan, are illegal, they can’t get all that far in the world of work. He has to rake leaves and work as a busboy in a Chinese resturant, where he’s discriminated against.

But he still has soccer, where he plays in a local league against college teams. It’s here he’s discovered by one Glen Foy (Stephen Dillane), a former soccer star himself and also a former scout for Newscastle United. From here we go directly to fairy tale land.

First off, the scout he’s with decided not to go see our hero, but hang out with bodacious babes on the beach. So Foy calls up NU owner Erik Dornhelm(Marcel Iures) at three in the morning GMT, and gets the latter to let Santi try out.

Thing is: Dad is dead set against it, and goes as far as to steal Santi’s life savings to buy a truck and start his own business. This leads to a real rift, and it’s the only thing that’s the least bit real on an emotional level. Then Grandma buys a ticket via Mexico city to London, Santi gets his magic passport and off we go to Newcastle.

The rest of the film is a bit of a cheat. Santi makes mistakes, but someone, somewhere, be it Foy, superstar Gavin Harris (Alessandro Nivola) or love interest and nurse Roz(Anna Friel), someone always comes to save our hero’s butt. They have to have a happy ending, right. The father/son conflict isn’t sorted out in the way you might expect, but that’s the only thing. The rest is by the book.

Still, it’s a cute film.

The Test

I tried to get from one venue to another in time for the next screening, it's just about impossible unless they're at least an hour apart. Bummer.

It's the morning...are you up?

I'm just wondering if there's anyone actually out there, the statistics show that while we're actually getting readers, most of them accidently click on and go right off. So if you are reading this leave a comment, okay? Just don't leave obnoxious advertisements like: "I'm so glad you've got a blog on homeowners insurance, here's my sex site!" Here's a review left over from yesterday:

My Dad is 100 Years Old

Directed by
Guy Maddin

Isabella Rossellini is famous for being a B-list actress and being the daughter of, Ingrid Bergman who left her husband for Roberto Rossellini soon sometime in the 1940s. We tend to forget the relationship between father and daughter in light of the famous divorce and other stuff, but Isabella and Guy Maddin have gotten together to produce a birthday card for the late director.

In this short valentine, Isabella plays the parts of a number of directors who knew Roberto, who’s played by a prosthetic belly, and they discuss the meaning of his films and his famous lifestyle. It’s very informative and oh so sweet. A very cute film indeed.

Tribeca 10: Euro politics: the Docs.

Unless there are elections or major riots, the politics of Western Europe are generally ignored, which is a pity, that bunch over there makes us appreciate the morons we have over here all the more.....

Viva Zapatero!
(Italy) - New York Premiere.

a documentary written and
directed by Sabina Guzzanti

Imagine if the Bush administration ordered Comedy Central to fire Jon Stewart, and then all of a sudden every major newspaper in the country began to attack the “Daily Show” for not being respectful enough to George and Dick. Satire having to be sweet and all….

Well that actually happened to comedienne Sabina Guzzanti, and as one might expect, she’s ticked off big time.

In 2003, the premier of her satirical TV show “RAIot” [the network’s called RAI, get it?] went after the premier of the country, one Silvio Berlusconi, who owns the media. I’m not kidding, he really owns the media. He was ticked off and Sabina was outta there. So were some of the top journalists in Italy, and Freedom House, which keeps track of that sort of thing, is about to kick Italy out of the free world and reclassify it.

In order to get revenge and pubiicize her cause, she goes on pretty much every TV station in Western Europe, doing schtick and interviews for this very doc. She also managed to get all sorts of sketches from satirical shows from Britian, France and the Netherlands, and those are really vicious.

This film is both funny and horrifying. It reminds us how fragile our freedoms are and how important humor can be. This is a must…oh yeah, you may be wondering who the heck Zapatero is, he’s the prime minister of Spain. Why his name is in the title is unclear.

The Case of the Grinning Cat

Written and Directed
by Chris Marker

This isn’t exactly a documentary, this is more of an illustrated essay. Sometime around the turn of the millennium, a graffiti artist started painting pictures of a certain cartoon cat all over the city of Paris. Who created this new mascot of the city of light? Why did it get so popular?

Maker, who’s been doing this sort of thing for years and years, tries to find out. This is gonna be fun.

So what we have is a lighthearted tour of Gay (in the original definition) Paree during the first half of the ‘00z, starting with a flash-mob just after the 9/11 attacks. Above the crowd is that cartoon cat, painted on a building, and soon, there are smiling cats painted everywhere. Who originated this? Marker either doesn’t know or isn’t telling, but he goes on a search, and wherever he goes, the cat precedes him. In the Metro, the sewers, buildings large and small, even the occasional tree.

The cat turns up in the midst of the 2002 presidential election, where the left was so split that the self-proclaimed fascist candidate came in second. Then came the Iraq war, the cat was at the demonstrations. Then there were more marches prostesting pretty much everything, Where was the cat?

On TV, on the web, you name it, someone was putting that sucker on pretty much everything, with all unsigned with the exception of a © mark, but who owns the copyright?

Doesn’t matter, really. Long live the chat.

Tribeca 9: Eurotrashpop, or is it Europoptrash?

Okay, folks, celebrity culture is as big in Europe as it is here in the 'States. Here we have two examples of the thirst for fame, fortune and access to same. It all seems like it is here, but that's globalization for ya. They had it first....

Beauty And The Bastard (Tyttö sinä olet tähti) (Finland) - North American Premiere.

Directed by
Dome Karukoski

An interesting phenomenon is how happy people are when the government film commissions of some European countries decide to fund a Hollywood-style film. If an even halfway decent film of that ilk starring local talent in the local language will be a real hit.

This is that sort of film, halfway, but not full-way, decent. Had this been an American film, it would be considered a throw-away romance that would be gone inside of two weeks, with maybe a short afterlife on DVD or cable.

Nelli(Pamela Tola) is a recent college graduate studying for her medical school entrance exam. But she doesn’t actually want to be a doctor, she wants to be Shakira or Britiney!

So in an act of desperation, she accosts a big-shot Helsinki record producer (Mikko Kouki) who gives her a ten second audition in an elevator and tells her to come back when she’s got a demo. When she asks where she could make one, he pawns her off on Hip-hop
DJ Sune(Samuli Vauramo), who just quit in a huff in the scene before. This is a typical romantic introduction scene. They hate each other on sight. They meet again at a club, and he agrees to produce the demo. Sune’s bandmates Kondis(Joonas Saartamo) and Mr. Daddy(Eero Milonoff) bet him that he can’t get her into bed, and he takes it.

What he doesn’t know is that Nelli has a fiancée named Mikko(Jussi Nikkilä). He thinks he’s her brother. Standard complications with the usual twists, we have nothing original here. Not that we really need that sort of thing, this is a romantic comedy after all, and the intended audience isn’t as cynical as it is here sometimes.

Everybody lives happily ever after except poor Mikko, but that’s romantic comedy for you!!! It’s a nothing movie, but it’s the Finn’s very own, and don’t they deserve a little glitz?

Backstage (France) – U.S. Premiere.

Written and Directed
by Emmanuelle Bercot

People blame America for celebrity culture, but it’s a universal phenomenon. Emmanuelle Bercot and Jérôme Tonnerre know this and that the French are just as star struck as we here in the US, and thought that this might be a good way to explore a releationship.

Lucie(Isild Le Besco) is a bored teenager living out in the boonies. It’s her birthday and her mom(Edith Le Merdy) decides to get a special surprise for it. She’s contacted the producer of a TV reality show, and he got Lucie’s heroine, the famous singer Lauren Waks (Emmanuelle Seigner), to film a music video in Lucie’s back yard.

Lucie, of course, freaks out big time.

But soon after, knowing that her idol has left her a note that she’d like to meet her again, and feeling that she’s blown the biggest chance of her life, she hitches all the way to Paris and after waiting in front of the hotel with the other deranged fans before sneaking in and getting first past the bodyguard(Jean-Paul Walle Wa Wana), before wangling an audience the diva. Lauren’s secretary-minder Juliette (Noemie Lvovsky) and her business manager(Valery Zeitoun) are at first mildly supportive (it’s only five minutes) but Lauren has for some reason decided to hire Lucie as her pet go’fer.

Thus begins a semi-lesbian platonic love affair, where both diva and fan feed off each other’s neuroses and develop a bizarre codependency. Lauren is pining for her ex Daniel (Samuel Benchetrit), and Lucie, who’s met him while packing up the soon to be abandoned apartment, immediately begins a relationship with him, that’s for Lauren’s benefit, of course.

This is the story of two sick people trying to stay that way. The film has a mesmerizing quality about it, but the fact is is that it’s ruined by the music, which is terrible. The acting is good, so much so that we can suspend disbelief and go with the absurdity of the whole thing.

Tribeca: The intermission

We're almost two days into the official festival and the big thing is that I've discovered that all romances have the same damn plot. Each and every one is about the celebration of adultery and usually some damn fool gets dumped who shouldn't. They made a movie about that which was here last year called The Baxter.

More on this later.

Tribeca VIII: The empire formerly known as British

The British Empire isn't exactly dead, but has been transformed into something else, there are lots of films that take place in the days of empire or afterwards, since Blighty, except for parts of Glascow and London, and it's former colonies are exotic as exotic can be. Here are two of them...

Return to Rajapur (U.S.A.) – World Premiere.

Written and Directed
by Nanda Anand

Adultery is a staple of romance novels. Writers and filmmakers love when marriages fall apart, especially when there’s death and destruction about. Destroy the marriage and then kill off the cuckolded husband, just so “true” love can triumph between the heroine and hero. It’s been done a zillion times.

Exotic locations are also de rigeur in this sort of film, so with auteur Nanda Anand being of Hindu decent, India would do just fine. You can’t get more exotic than that.

We start in the present day, where Samantha Hartley(Kelli Garner) is traveling to the 1100-year-old town of Jaisalmer, on the edge of the Thai desert somewhere near the Pakistani border. She’s on a mission, and that is to solve a mystery, what happened to her father before she was born. Or is it her father?

She wants to stay in the former Maharaja’s palace, but that shouldn’t have been possible, as Amar (Bhanu Goswami), the driver [and defrocked prince] notes, it hadn’t been used as a hotel in years. But, they’re trying to get a grant to defray the costs of renovation, and are expecting an American student to help write the grant proposal. So Sam decides to pretend to be the student. Implausibility number one, but it gets her inside the building.

Flash back to 1982 and the B story. Jeremy(Justin Theroux) and Sara Reardon(Lynn Collins), who are obviously Sam’s parents are on their honeymoon, and are going to spend some time at the palace while Jeremy does commuting to the big city of Jaipour for business.

The son of the former Maharaja is they young and sexy Jai Singh (Manoj Bajpai), who starts taking a liking to Sarah, while Jeremy is revealed to be a bit of an ass. Paint-by-numbers romance if there ever was one. All the clichés are there in their glory, including the dying-in-childbirth offstage. Medicine was advanced enough back in 1982 so rich people would have that problem…jeez!

The writing, happily, isn’t nearly as bad as it could have been, and the acting is quite good. If you’re into “harlequin romances” you’ll definitely like this. But it’s generally a fan-only type thing.

Wah-Wah (U.K.)

Written and Directed
by Richard E. Grant

What does the title of this film mean? It’s a jokey reference to the upper-crust British colonialist slang that was used back in the late early 1970s when this thing takes place. They may as well called this film “Yackity-yack.”

The terrible title aside, this isn’t all that bad a film. This is an exercise in autobiography, and filmmaker Richard E. Grant grew up in a culture long gone, that of the British Empire.

Grant’s pseudonym for himself is Ralph Compton, and we first meet him at age 12 where he’s played by Zachary Fox, just as his parents(Gabriel Byrne and Miranda Richardson) marriage is falling apart. Mom’s been boinking a local diplomat and has decided to shack up with him. Ralph and his dad Harry are both devastated, and soon our hero has himself shipped off to a boarding school somewhere, where he’s transformed into Nicholas Hoult during the middle of a cricket match. It’s always interesting how they try to do that sort of thing and this is one of the better transitions.

On his return, Ralph discovers that his dad is not only a roaring drunk, but is now divorced and married to an American named
Ruby(Emily Watson), who turns out to be an extremely lovable extrovert. Mom comes back, and Swaziland, which is the colony where this all takes place, is going to get its independence and as the empire crumbles, the colonials play a waiting game, getting ready an amateur theatrical performance for Princess Margaret and sleeping around. Decadence as metaphor for decadence, how original.

The acting is really good, as Grant has lots of friends in the business and was able to get a delightful supporting cast. While there is tragedy here, everyone ends up living happily ever after. It’s cute, not great, but cute.

The first official press screening

The first official press screening was for a thing called The Peace Tree. This was a propaganda film for babies explaining how "tolerence" for other religions should be practiced. It was so poor that I walked out. I was th only one to do so because I was the only one there!!!!

That's right folks, the first official press screening of the festival had only one person attending. This doesn't bode well for the rest of the fest.