One of Karina Longworth’s favorite undistributed films of last year is available to watch for free on Reel 13. Sita Sings the Blues won the Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You award at the 2008 Gotham Awards. In Karina’s review from Tribeca 2008, she called it, “a strange and beautiful little film, a potentially wispy slice of autobiography smartly elevated through irresistible, orgiastic style.”
Watch the movie and read Brandon Harris’ interview with director Nina Paley from last November (republished) after the jump.
Film Movement has acquired distribution rights to Shane Meadows’ short feature Somers Town, one of our favorite films of Tribeca 2008. According to indieWIRE, “the distributor plans a July 2009 theatrical opening in New York, followed by a national roll out.” When I saw the film last April, I called it a “70-minute portrait of a moment with zero fat to cu and not a false note.”
Of the 14 films that I saw during Tribeca Film Festival, only three were so under-accomplished that they begged the question of why they were programmed in the first place. This is an improvement over past years. Meanwhile, I saw four films that qualify as serious discoveries. With the exception of Shane Meadows’ Somers Town, over which I’ve already raved, these films are imperfect but thrillingly risky, and fascinating in their flaws. It’s maybe worth noting that only one of these titles arrived in Tribeca as a World Premiere, and that film, The Guest of Cindy Sherman, is set and was made just blocks away from the festival’s theoretical (but no longer physical) home. It’s shocking that there isn’t currently a festival in New York City that’s seriously focused on celebrating locally-produced work. Tribeca, so in need of a refined identity, might want to take note that the niche is up for grabs.
My notes on each of the 14 films, in order of preference, follow after the jump.
Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues is a strange and beautiful little film, a potentially wispy slice of autobiography smartly elevated through irresistible, orgiastic style. The 82 minute feature cross cuts between the story of the director’s own divorce, and a loose retelling of the ancient Indian myth Ramayana; we’re led back and forth between the two milieu by three silhouetted figures who colloquially comment on the events in Indian-inflected English. There are also musical numbers, set mainly to songs by 1920s jazz siren Annette Hanshaw, which drop psychedelic Bollywood versions of the Ramayana characters into Busby Berkeley configurations. It’s an infectiously personal work, and all the more admirable as a sterling example of animation meant resolutely for adults.
Swedish vampire buzz magnet Let The Right One In took the top narrative prize at the Tribeca Film Festival last night. Shane Meadows’ Somers Town walked away with consolation acting prizes for its two young stars, and the extremely narratively confused My Marlon and Brando inexplicably won the Best New Narrative Filmmaker award. More Tribeca wrap-up stuff later today.
War, Inc is a debacle. Starring, co-written and produced by John Cusack, it’s an impotent, cheap-looking political satire that longs for relevance, but feels years stale. (It has, in fact, been around for awhile––it was once titled Brand Hauser, it went into production in fall 2006, it was rumored to have been set up for premiere slots at both Toronto 2007 and Sundance 2008, neither of which, for whatever reason, ever happened.) It’s a sign that Hollywood filmmaking about the current war and its associated politics has fatally passed over from merely irrelevant preaching to the choir, to a kind of solipsistic naivete that should make anyone with an intellectually-rooted anti-war position feel embarrassed to have their politics associated with it. War, Inc personally makes me want to put my head in my hands in shame. The Left deserves to be mocked as much as the Neo-Cons, but nobody deserves to have their reputations sullied by indefensible garbage like this.
I saw six films at Tribeca this weekend, and five of them were completely blown off the map by Somers Town, Shane Meadows’ practically perfect follow-up to his 2007 triumph, This is England. England was one of my favorite films of last year, but its political/historical aims, admittedly, occasionally overwhelmed Meadows’ more subtle, character-based observations. Somers Town is less ambitious but more impressive, a 70-minute portrait of a moment with zero fat to cut and not a false note.
Back in Berlin, Madonna’s directorial debut Filth and Wisdom, which had something to do with cross dressers and strippers and generally drifted not far beyond Madonna’s expertise in sex and success, garnered some surprisingly positive reviews. But everyone I’ve spoken to who’s covering or attending Tribeca was planning on skipping I Am Because We Are, a documentary about Malawi written, produced and narrated by the star, based on the assumption that diagnosing international crises is just a little bit beyond the capabilities of a singer who has spent the past five years working her way through various Mouseketeers in search of renewed credibility.
I haven’t seen the film (I skipped Friday’s press screening in order to see Shane Meadows’ Somers Town, and I’m glad I did––more on that virtually perfect film later today), but out of curiosity, I went trolling the web this morning for reviews. Surprise, surprise––Madonna’s ethics as a documentary filmmaker are under fire from all sides.
I saw The Wackness (which has its New York premiere tomorrow at the Tribeca Film Festival) at a special screening held for the critics participating in the Moving Image Institute last week. Afterwards, Sony Classics president Michael Barker was asked about critical response to the film thus far. Barker disclaimed that “most major critics” hadn’t yet reviewed the film, but then said something surprisingly candid about the makeup of the film’s detractors. “What’s the demographic of the critics who don’t like it?” he began, starting a statement with a question in expert post-Robert Evans mogul style. “Female. Single. Mothers with teenage kids––they don’t like the movie.”
Who ever’s doing research over at Sony deserves a raise. I fit just two of those descriptors, and I don’t like it, either.
Maybe it’s true that even professional critics struggle to get beyond their own natural demographic biases. A certain (very young, very male) segment of the film blogosphere lashed out at Sony for buying The Wackness towards the close of Sundance––not because they didn’t like the film, but because they loved the film so much that they were moved to protect it from what they saw as the risk of a mis-managed mainstream release. I thought this campaign was absolutely inane at the time—in the virtually non-existent narrative buying climate of Sundance 2008, the boys should have been happy that their pet project was picked up at all––but having finally seen the thing, I’m at no loss to explain why those writers have embraced this film. With its full-on, fully uncritical glorification of adolescent male self-indulgence and permanent immaturity, The Wackness is a kind of cinematic embodiment of certain tendencies that make the sub-AICN movie web go round.
The night before Sony Pictures Classics planned to open Errol Morris’ Abu Ghraib doc Standard Operating Procedure in two theaters the Tribeca Film Festival hosted a screening of the film, followed by a conversation between Morris and Jarhead author Anthony Swofford.
Beat to the festival circuit by over a year by Rory Kennedy’s Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (which debuted at Sundance 2007 and later screened on HBO), Morris’ two-hour dissection of the Iraqi prison schedule retreads a fair bit of ground that will be familiar to anyone who has followed the scandal closely and/or seen the previous film. But where Kennedy was primarily concerned with depicting the psychological climate that led to the abuses (of both detainees and power) and their photographic documentation, Morris is more concerned with revealing the discrepancy between what those iconic photographs seem to be documenting, and what the testimony of the indicted soldiers suggests is closer to the truth. “We looked at the photographs and thought we knew everything about Abu Ghraib,” Morris said after the screening. “We knew nothing.” …Read more
With almost-sure thing comic book blockbusters (Iron Man), long-awaited franchise extenders (Indiana Jones and The Rise of Shia LeBeouf), and chick flick counter-programming for us old maids (Sex and the City) projections suggest that this May’s box office tally may break records.This just in: there are actually some great movies in Tribeca this year. As a festival programmer, I sympathize with Tribeca’s plight of being the third US premiere festival in the calendar year, and I wish I didn’t continuous hear complaints from other journalists about their programming. However, in an unfortunate turn of events for both the filmmakers and their publicists, I can’t really tell you about all the great movies, due to Tribeca’s embargo on reviews of all world premieres before the films screen publicly for the first time. Perhaps the embargo was a reaction to all the negative criticism, a move made in an effort to help ticket sales for movies that could possibly get bad press, but vicious cycles are the worst thing in the world and they make me sad for all the parties involved.
So, here we are now with nothing to cover but the program itself (and the embargo, of course). And instead of reviewing the quality of the films in the midnight program, I’m just gonna review the section as its own entity.
The Tribeca Film Festival opens tomorrow (with Baby Mama, a film I haven’t seen but am rooting for via sheer love for Miss Liz Lemon), and there are a number of films on the schedule that we’ve covered at other festivals and can reccommend, including Baghead, Bigger, Stronger, Faster* and especially Mister Lonely. After the jump, you’ll find a look at some of the films and events that I’m looking forward to covering over the next couple of weeks. The festival concludes on May 4.
With the Tribeca Film Festival beginning on Wednesday, Winter Miller analyises the festival’s “7 year itch” for Variety. “Logistics and that intangible thing known as the “festival experience” might well improve, but seven years after its founding as a call to bring the city together post 9/11, the fest is still seeking a clear identity,” hew writes. Perhaps the first step would be to do something about the fest’s institutional indifference to quality in its obsession with quantity, which Miller alludes to: “Unlike fests with mandates to screen what they perceive as the absolute cream of the crop, Tribeca wears its number of international and first-timer participants as a badge of honor.”
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We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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