I spent the weekend at the Traverse City Film Festival, the fifth annual event presided over by Michael Moore in the waterfront town where the filmmaker lives and works in Northern Michigan. Though he and his staff were editing Capitalism: A Love Story across the street from the festival’s main venue around the clock all week, Moore himself introduced nearly every event I attended, including one where he unveiled both a trailer for the almost finished latest film and the entirety of the rarely seen film that gave Moore his first experience in front of a film camera (more on that later). At most of these events, he’d take the stage and talk at length to an entirely adoring crowd, casually making reference to his new film, his reputation and past career, and his future plans. A scoop from the later category: Moore said he’s planning to star in a one-man show on Broadway, presumably along the lines of his 2002 shows at the Roundabout Theater in London, “sometime in the next 24 months.” He promised to give the show a tryout first at the film festival — “because if you kill ‘em in Traverse City, you’ll kill ‘em anywhere.”
Outside of Moore’s shadow, Traverse City’s vibe as a festival is along the lines of Telluride and True/False — small town, secret screenings, celebrity/legendary filmmaker guests who blend in with the locals and lesser known attendees while giving each installment of the invent a specific character — but with a dedicated emphasis on comedy. In addition to the panel which I already reported on, in the three days I was in town TCFF hosted an afternoon course on the art of comedy, a preview of the long-anticipated upcoming season of Curb Your Enthusiasm hosted by festival board member Jeff Garlin, and Moore and the festival co-founders handed special prizes to the Funniest Fiction Film and Best Comedy Documentary (to In The Loop and Winnebago Man, respectively), and gave the “Stanley Kubrick Award for Bold and Innovative Filmmaking” to Bob Byington, who was the first director to have two films in the festival — both of them no-frills comedies. I’m not complaining, but one does wonder how Moore’s just-announced comedy festival will actually differ from the film festival in practice.
The full list of TCFF 2009 winners is after the jump.
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On the “Comedy, American Style” at his Traverse City Film Festival this morning, Michael Moore announced plans to launch a comedy festival in the waterfront town, beginning in 2010. Likely taking place the first week of March — “the deepest, darkest part of winter” in Michigan, Moore noted — The Traverse City Comedy Arts Festival will be a collaboration between Moore and comedian/actor Jeff Garlin, who participated in this morning’s panel with Moore, Larry Charles, TCFF 2009 Lifetime Achievement honoree Paul Mazursky, Wavy Gravy, and Austin-based filmmakers Bob Byington and Ben Steinbauer, whose three features (Byington’s Harmony & Me and Registered Sex Offender and Steinbauer’s Winnebago Man) are being screened here as the sole exemplars of “the new hotbed of American independent cinema.” As described by Garlin and Moore this morning, the comedy festival seems to be an attempt to spin-off the experience of the comedy panel, which has become an annual tradition at the film festival, anchored by frequent guests Garlin and Charles, into its own thing. With that in mind, here are five things I learned from the assembled geniuses during today’s 90 minute session:
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I’ve been in New York for a grand total of about two weeks in the last month and a half, so I missed most of the press screenings for New Directors/New Films, the annual co-production of MoMA and the Film Society at Lincoln Center, which opened last night. We’ll be publishing a recap of the full festival from Brandon Harris tomorrow, but I wanted to drop some notes on the one film for which I did have a chance to attend a press screening, Harmony & Me.
Written and directed by Bob Byington (his RSO: Registered Sex Offender premiered at SXSW last year and then played around the country on the Range Life tour) and edited by Frank V. Ross (Hohokam, Present Company), the film was shot in Austin and features a number of faces that will be familiar to devotees of SXSW cinema and its descendants: Justin Rice as Harmony, a “loser” who we meet mid-heartbreak at the hands of a brunette succubus (Kristen Tucker); Alex Karpovsky as a friend whose verbal abuse of his sweetly nerdy wife is played for uncomfortable laughs — and serves as a reminder to Harmony that relationships are inevitably sad and cruel as often as they’re legitimately romantic; Pat Healy as the dickish boss at Harmony’s cubicle job; Allison Latta as an outlandishly outgoing neighbor who sets her sights, against his wishes, on our retiring hero.
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MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center have released the schedule for New Directors/New Films, and as in the past, it’s heavy on films that recently played Sundance, including award winners (Push, We Live in Public, The Cove and The Maid). I’m looking forward to catching Amreeka (the ND/NF opening night film), Stay the Same Never Change and Unmade Beds, all of which I missed in Park City, as well as Bob Byington’s Harmony and Me, a world premiere starring Justin Rice.
indieWIRE has the full lineup. ND/NF starts March 25.
In the song “Range Life,” from their 1994 album Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus sang about the frustrations of being a touring indie band on the summer festival circuit, settling for cred (”Hey, you’ve got to pay your dues before you pay your rent” ), while much more famous but arguably less talented artists sucked up the spotlight. Stuck on the disenfranchised end of this binary opposition, Malkmus brattily goads the behemoth bands reaping its spoils: “Stone Temple Pilots, they’re elegant bachelors…I will agree they deserve absolutely nothin’, nothin’ more than me.” In the chorus, Malkmus longs to be rid of the touring hassle: “If I could settle down, then I would settle down.”
When Todd Sklar named his indie film roadshow venture Range Life, the Pavement reference wasn’t coincidental. The same kind of imbalance cited by Malkmus in the middle of the so-called alternative music revolution has arguably gone on to infect the indie film world: the movies which least need the film festival as a platform benefit from it the most, but the little guys continue to play along (if they’re even invited to) because it’s the only game in town. You could say that Sklar’s Range Life, which is shepherding four truly independent films to 20+ cities in North America, is an attempt to shake up that model’s monopoly. But for Sklar, the Pavement reference goes deeper.
“The other thing that really struck a chord is that sarcastic chorus, talking about ’settling down,’” Sklar said this week. “That really connected with hopping in a van and taking the film on the road rather than having it showcased to the same crowd every month while we get free cheese and crackers and fruit leather in the filmmaker lounge. Don’t get me wrong, I do LOVE filmmaker lounges (and fruit leather in specific), but I truly think, and more so now than ever, filmmakers shouldn’t be settling down when they’ve finished their film. That should be when you’re most excited and most involved in the work.”
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