Tribeca Report 2 - The Misses

With a lineup of nearly two hundred films (almost double from last year's festival), it goes without saying that not all will be excellent. However, it seems (based on both personal experience and conversations with nearly everybody I've run into) that the disappointments outweigh the gems by a surprising ratio. Many of the films I saw were simply average -- films like Wah-Wah, Crime Novel, Pittsburgh, and Alone With Her -- all were entertaining, and not entirely lacking in interest, but at the same time almost instantly forgotten. In other words, not the kind of films I'd expect to discover at a festival. Yet perhaps it's wrong of me to expect a lineup akin to the New York, Berlin, or Rotterdam festivals. This raises an additional question -- does NYC truly need a festival of this size? During the two weeks of the TFF, there was also the opportunity to see a dozen Naruse films, Melville's Army of Shadows, an impressive African Film Festival, an Altman retrospective, and not to mention the releases of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Three Times, and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. Were two hundred additional films really necessary?

At half the size, the festival would still be large enough to be classified a "big" event, and would have forced the selection committee to pare down the selections -- some of which, quite frankly, didn't belong in an international film festival. One such film was Metro, part of the NY, NY Narrative Feature competition. Directed by Adolfo Doring (cinematographer on Capturing the Friedmans, and director of a pair of Hootie & The Blowfish videos), Metro takes place in a New York City awash in orange-hued sunsets, where attractive young women do little but talk on the phone and pursue careers as models, actresses, filmmakers, photographers, etc. There's not a single male character to be found in the film, which, while an interesting concept, leaves us with little more than 105 minutes of male fantasy that tries very hard to be anything but. (The film's gaze couldn't be any more masculine if it tried.) The women in Doring's world hail from all over the globe -- there's Tina, a whiney, rail-thin supermodel from the Midwest who has been forced into her career by her family. Anke is a cloyingly naive German woman who speaks of life in East Germany, even though she would have been approximately seven when the Wall fell. Chikako, from Japan, lounges around all day listening to garage rock and masturbating to pictures of Tina (such character development!), while Amber hangs out in Japanese supermarkets and photographs the cool food packages. Finally there's Lila and Tia, who are working on a documentary film about women and television. Doring's characters talk much, but say little, as evinced by the dozen or so one-sided telephone conversations that take place every few minutes. Serving as neither expository device, nor a means of furthering character development, they consist mostly of, "Hi....Really?....No!....You're kidding!.....When?....", ad infinitum. It's clear that Doring wasn't interested in creating a traditional narrative, but he makes the mistake of equating under-written characters with naturalism. Unfortunately, there's nothing that distinguishes one character from another, other than their career goal, and perhaps Lila's occasional tough New Yorker stance. They talk alike, act alike, and drift like waifs through the city in an almost somnambulistic state. Metro may represent Doring's idealized world of women, but even as fantasy, it's pretty lifeless.

Unlike Metro, Todd Robinson's Lonely Hearts isn't a small, self-made indie, but rather a big budget period piece with bankable stars. However, unlike Doring, Robinson takes no chances as a director, and the end result is a formulaic, cookie-cutter policier that offers not even a hint of imagination. That there's already been some "Oscar contender" buzz around the festival shows how out of touch I am with mainstream Hollywood tastes. Lonely Hearts is a re-working of the true story of the Lonely Hearts Killers -- Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez, who, posing as brother and sister, robbed and killed, wealthy widows who had fallen under the seductive spell of Fernandez. Their story has been told in three films -- The Honeymoon Killers (1970, the best of the bunch), Lonely Hearts (1991), and the Mexican film Deep Crimson (1996). Whereas the other films were told from the killers POV, Robinson splits the story between the killers and the two Long Island detectives who pursued them around the country, Elmer C. Robinson (John Travolta) and Charles Hildebrandt (James Gandolfini). With a screenplay that reads like a Robert McKee wet dream, the sordid story of Beck and Fernandez has been transformed into a syrupy drama about a detective (Travolta) coping with his wife's suicide and ever-increasing emotional distance from his teenaged son. (The director happens to be the grandson of detective Robinson, thus adding a level of personal involvement in the drama.) Fans of true-crime stories will no doubt find the casting of Salma Hayek as Martha Beck somewhat odd. The real-life Beck was a rather unattractive 200 pound woman, which made the dynamic of her relationship with Fernandez (played here by Jared Leto) that much more interesting. That Beck has been transformed into a curvaceous, lusty Mexican beauty in form fitting dresses doesn't exactly leave us wondering why Fernandez is so drawn to her. But as a famous producer once declared, audiences don't want to pay money to see ugly people. The beautification of Martha Beck is only one of the film's many problems. Robinson does a poor job of directing his actors, and they are often left reciting his third-rate dialog ("Hell's coming home for Christmas") with a burning sense of urgency that is entirely unnecessary. As a fellow critic observed, Travolta spends the entire film looking as if he has a bad case of acid reflux. Gandolfini doesn't fare much better, and his character portrayal is little more than Tony Soprano as a 40s gumshoe. But what ultimately makes Lonely Hearts so enervating is its use of the Fernandez-Beck story as mere backdrop to the larger, saccharine domestic drama, which teaches us that there's nothing like capital punishment to heal the rift between father and son.

Comments

[Adam]

Filmbrain -

Hope your Canadian vacation was restful.

I find your question - 'Does NY really NEED such a festival?' - interesting. Based on what I read is continually available in NY from your posts here and other sources, it seems NY doesn't need such a festival as a venue to see films that the rest of the U.S. has such trouble seeing. (Even in San Fran, since the PFA and Castro partly house our festival, the arthouses are slimmed down some by the festival taking priority for filmgoers. I think the only film really hurt by the festival this year was SISTERS IN LAW, having 2 friends tell me they wanted to see it during it's sole week showing at the Balboa but the SFIFF was their priority.)

Still, film festivals provide other benefits, promotion and community. On the promotion side, by screening at the festival, this can help boost press for later when the film is released in NY. (Of course, poor response can have the opposite effect.) And on the community side, there are the conversations that such an orgy of cinephilia causes before, during, and after the screenings and festival. People meet on route to the screenings, in the queue, afterwards at restaurants and in transit when overhearing people talking about the film, and this helps foster a film community, inspiring petty comments as much as astute ones. . .,

. . . But I myself had a positive one w/ my last screening at SFIFF. Going to see a screening of Aureaus Solito's THE BLOSSOMING OF MAXIMO OLIVERAS, I ran into my co-worker leaving a screening of Michael Glawogger's WORKINGMAN'S DEATH, a co-worker whom I enjoy talking to but don't get to talk to much since we're on different floors at work. She shared her experience at the festival, I shared mine, and there was this nice interchange of our mutual love of cinema. Along with film knowledge and the critical intertextuality that goes along w/ this Bahktinian dialogue, we both found something out about the other that, well, sure, we could have found this out some other way, but I think massive International fests like SFIFF and Tribeca allow for a greater chance of such happenings.

So, basically, film festivals serve other purposes besides just films. I wasn't thinking much about this until you posed your question, so thanks for posing that.

Adam

[Filmbrain]

Adam --

You're right about film festivals serving other purposes. However, there isn't that sense of film-lover camaraderie at the TFF. Starfucking, parties, and self-promotion seemed to be the hot topics surrounding this festival.

As I mentioned in my first post, those of us covering the festival relied heavily on conversing with each other, for so few of the films in the festival arrived with any buzz.

Also, there is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to speak about -- American indie cinema is in poor shape right now. (I'm speaking of narratives, not docs.) There wasn't a single outstanding American narrative at the fest. Nothing truly visionary, or even remotely new. "Indie cinema" has turned into a hackneyed genre.

If you recall, Sundance was rather blasé this year, and it was no different here. That Jeff Garlin's I Want Somebody To Eat Cheese With was, in my opinion, the best American narrative at the fest is more than a bit sad.