Last night, Stranger Than Fiction and the Woodstock Film Festival co-presented a screening of Swimming to Cambodia, Jonathan Demme’s 1987 performance document of Spalding Gray’s monologue ruminating on sex, drugs, genocide, “perfect moments” and “invisible clouds of evil.” Inspired by Gray’s real-life experience playing a small role in Roland Jaffe’s The Killing Fields (”I’m not making up any of these stories I’m telling you tonight,” he swears. “Except for the fact that the banana sticks to wall when it hits. Everything else is true.”), Swimming, the first of three films based on Gray’s monologues, easily eclipses Jaffe’s film in contemporary freshness and replayability. Gray’s stream-of-consciousness style of deeply personal social documentary has never been equalled on as mainstream a scale. Gray may have been great at self-documentation, but it’s the subtle sinematic shaping employed by Demme, cinematographer John Bailey, editor Carole Littleton and composer Laurie Anderson that takes the raw material of a guy sitting in front of a map at a desk with a glass of water and a MacDonalds notebook, and turns it into great documentary.
After a long layover at Port Authority spent reenacting scenes from Keane (see what I did there? I went for the obscure but creepy reference, instead of the topical, populist one) I took the bus up to Woodstock, NY this weekend, to spend about 24 hours at the Woodstock Film Festival. I finally saw Sean Baker’s Prince of Broadway, an improvised family dramedy which plays something like a Hollywood remake of L’enfant set in the bootleg luxury trade on the streets of New York; it won big at LAFF and took Woodstock’s top narrative prize on Saturday night. The awards ceremony where Broadway was honored was indie star-studded, surprisingly casual and fun, and –– maybe unsurprisingly––littered with references to the ongoing presidential election. “Kevin, we’re giving you the Maverick Award,” screenwriter Ron Nyswaner said at the start of the show to director Kevin Smith. “That means we think you’re qualified to be the leader of the free world.”
You’ll find some of the night’s most memorable quotes, from Smith, Ang Lee and others, below the jump. Above, you’ll find video of James Schamus’ Trailblazer Award acceptance speech, and the tail end of his introduction by Lee.
The Woodstock Film Festival announced late last week that two of their Maverick Awards will be renamed to honor two late local residents. James Lyon, who died in 2007 after having cut The Virgin Suicides and three Todd Haynes films and starring in Poison and I Shot Andy Warhol, will lend his name to the Festival’s editing prize. Meanwhile, the Best Narrative Feature prize will be renamed to honor actor Lee Marvin.
A total aside: I did a YouTube search for “Lee Marvin” this morning and the first result under “Most Relevant” was the above clip of Marvin singing “I Was Born Under A Wandering Star,” from the much-maligned musical Paint Your Wagon, which I’ve never seen. It’s, you know, horrible, but charmingly so, with tough guy Marvin tunelessly grumbling out lines like, “Do I know where Hell is? Hell is in ‘hello’”. I love musical misanthropy!
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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