October Country, Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri’s debut documentary feature describing a year in the lives of four generations of Moshers living in a depressed upstate New York suburb, is a rare work of impressionistic nonfiction. Its patchwork of visual detail often reminded me of the photographs of Gregory Crewdson (whose work you might have seen on the cover of this Yo La Tengo album, or this Six Feet Under campaign). Crewdson’s work usually imbues suburban and domestic scenes with the aura of the supernatural; nothing actually horrific is visible in the frame, but the presence of something is always implied, out of frame, in the air. With their arresting images of smoked-clogged rooms and American flags convulsing in the wind, Mosher and Palmieri demonstrate a similar knack for lighting and framing the mundane to spin it towards the surreal, suggesting an invisible but not imperceptible force altering the proceedings. The style fits because the Moshers are essentially living a ghost story, with each member so haunted by past decisions that’ve lost control of the future.
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I’ve seen five films in three days at the Los Angeles Film Festival, and every single one is, at least partially, about the break-up of a romantic relationship. Three of these films are in the Narrative Competition: Harmony & Me, Hollywood, je t’aime, and Wah Do Dem. It would be an interesting exercise to try to make the argument that this trend is a sign of the times, that (of course!) filmmakers are using the universal touchstone of romantic trauma as a key to understanding a wider world torn asunder. But break-up movies tend to resist obvious real-world relevance. These three films all exist in vague fantasy worlds where the defining difficulties of life in our contemporary world don’t exist, where our heroes — all of them men, two out of three pining over lost women and one haunted by an ex-boyfriend — are essentially unaware that anything exists but their own heartbreak, until that outside world barges in and demands their attention. This is as it should be — this is how break-up films work — but it does seem notable that a film festival would devote nearly half of their narrative competition to movies about white men moping. Hey, maybe this *is* realism! Let’s investigate.
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Film Independent has released the core line-up for the 2009 Los Angeles Film Festival. There are a LOT of world and US premieres in the Narrative and Documentary competitions, both of which offer the winner a $50,000 prize courtesy of Target. I’m particularly excited about the latter, which includes Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri’s October Country and the final cut of Convention, which AJ Schnack previewed at True/False. Though the opening and closing night titles have yet to be announced, the Centerpiece selection of Michael Mann’s Public Enemies adds a bit of starpower to a lineup also including some familiar 2009 circuit titles, including Humpday, Harmony & Me, In the Loop and We Live in Public. Also: The Muppet Movie! The full list of titles is after the jump.
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I had heard a rumor about this earlier this morning, but Mike Jones at The Circuit is the first to confirm it: Rich Raddon has resigned from his post as the director of the Los Angeles Film Festival. Raddon, who is a practicing Mormon, first submitted his resignation last week, when it was revealed that he had made sizable donationto the campaign in support of California’s anti-gay-marriage Propositon 8. The FIND Independent board who govern LAFF chose not to accept the resignation, but instead met, talked it out and took no action. The conversations calling out Raddon for putting his money where his beliefs are did not stop, and when Raddon submitted his resignation again last night, LAFF accepted it.
UPDATE: As I commented below, I didn’t mean above to take a stance one way or another on any of these issues, and I think if anybody had read what I wrote carefully rather than jumping to conclusions, they would see that. But because nobody seems interested in actually reading anything carefully and I don’t have time to defend an innocuous statements from the instant emotional responses of everyone on the internet, I’ve deleted a paragraph in which I essentially said that this is a bad situation for all involved.
I had to leave Westwood on Saturday before the much-anticipated (well, at least, by me) screening of Heaven Wants Out, the long-gestating film at the center of Mark Mann’s documentary Finishing Heaven. I’ve been eagerly awaiting published reports that would clue me in on what I missed, but saw nothing for days. Finally, Craig Kennedy has weighed in at Living in Cinema. “I’d love to report that Heaven Wants Out is a belated triumph that will change how we perceive cinema,” Craig writes. “But…
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Friday at LAFF brought back-to-back screenings of two very different documentaries about how sexual politics and policies within two individual communities come to define these worlds-apart spaces. Sarah Friedman and Esy Casey’s Thing With No Name follows two women in sub-Saharan African villages as they controversially begin a program of anti-retroviral drugs after having been diagnosed with full-blown AIDS. Undeniably beautiful to look at and powerfully poetic in its depiction of a community of women stricken with poverty and sick with a virus that they don’t fully understand, the film ironically and sadly fails at its propagandist mission when tragedies of timing and fate intervene. Meanwhile, Trinidad offers a portrait of the titular “sex change capitol of the world,” a frontier town in Colorado where a male-to-female post-op transsexual rockstar surgeon named Marci is pioneering the art and science of genital reassignment surgery. In tone and content these films couldn’t be more different, but they still constitute a sort of double feature of films about real people living lives impacted by scientific attempts to customize fate.
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I grew up in Los Angeles and have fractured but fierce memories of seeing movies in Westwood, the theater-packed micro-city surrounding UCLA, in which the Los Angeles Film Festival is now based. I think I saw Jurassic Park four times at the Avco. I know I saw my first Lubitsch movie (Design for Living) at UCLA. Yesterday I was standing in line at Rite Aid and had some kind of out-of-body flashback experience of getting ice cream at the same Rite Aid after my mother took me to a matinee of Flight of the Navigator. I’m sure people go to film festivals in their hometowns all the time and don’t think it’s weird at all, but I get painfully nostalgic. I, like, went to school and stuff, but hanging out in these theaters for entire summers is how I fell in love with movies.
Funny, then, that I’ve been here for almost two full days and I haven’t yet been able to see a single film. Part of this is a scheduling issue––I got in too late on Monday to make it to a screening, and I had already seen many of the films that played yesterday, including Medicine for Melancholy and The Pleasure of Being Robbed. I did actually try to make a screening of Largo, the documentary about the famed Fairfax club, but I, um, went to the wrong theater by mistake and missed it. And then, there were parties to go to. More on that, with photo evidence, after the jump.
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Just minutes ago I was trying to figure out where to stay in L.A. during the Los Angeles Film Festival, when an email floated through informing me that the fest’s full lineup has been posted at The Circuit. The Film Independent-backed event will open with the, um, less-than independent Angelina Jolie action film Wanted; it will close with Hellboy II. In between, Medicine for Melancholy and The Pleasure of Being Robbed are among the seven films in the Narrative competition; other notable titles on the schedule include Let the Right One In, Man on Wire, Momma’s Man, Encounters at the End of the World, and a film I’ve been dying to see, Roy Andersson’s You, The Living. See the full lineup here.
Via indieWIRE comes news that Jennifer Vendetti’s Billy the Kid has won Target-sponsored Best Documentary jury prize at the Los Angeles Film Festival. If you’re keeping score, that makes two big festival awards for the controversial doc, which might be enough to conquer its brutal Variety review. Meanwhile, August Evening won the LAFF jury prize for Best Narrative Feature. The immigration-themed drama was acquired earlier this week by Maya Entertainment.
Wanted
IFC has picked up
