Reel Nashville 2008

There’s just a lot more of it. Last year, for the first time in its 39-year history, the Nashville Film Festival broke the 20,000 attendance mark. When it opens this Thursday, April 17, for a week’s run at Regal’s Green Hills megaplex, another boost in attendance is likely. Whether you’ve been every year since the festival was called Sinking Creek, back at Vanderbilt throughout the 1970s, or you’re going for the first time, you could probably use some help sorting through the crowds, the tickets, and above all, dozens of different programming blocks devoted to features, documentaries, panels and workshops.

If so, you’re in the right place. Below, the Scene’s writers offer previews of this year’s NaFF attractions day by day, pointing out films you shouldn’t miss (as well as some you can safely skip). Along with those, we offer some practical tips for getting the most out of the festival. First, buy advance tickets, either at the downstairs Green Hills festival office or online at nashvillefilmfestival.org. Weekday matinees rarely fill to capacity, but weekend shows (especially at night) or any film featuring visiting celebrities will sell out long before showtime. The same is often true of movies showing only once at the festival: Usually, that means the film is something special, or at least has theatrical distribution. Plan accordingly.

Then take advantage of the social opportunities a festival provides—among them the once-a-year chance to have excited, animated conversations with hundreds of movie-mad viewers and filmmakers. Filmmakers tend to congregate on the patio outside the Green Hills box office and at the tables near the VIP area; audiences congest the lobby in lines snaking in every direction. Ask people what they’ve seen—by riding the buzz, you’ll likely find something interesting you wouldn’t know about otherwise.

And with that, enjoy the show.

☛ = Strongly recommended

THURSDAY, 17TH

THE DEAL (7 p.m.) Whenever anyone makes their “love letter to Hollywood,” be warned—all such correspondences tend to be roughly the same. Co-written by star William H. Macy, the independently financed The Deal reveals exactly nothing new: The biz is crooked, execs like it rough, art becomes crap, yada yada. It just happens to do it sprightlier than most. The shockingly winning duo of Macy and Meg Ryan play a producer and an exec pummeling a loving script about British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli into a Jewish-themed action vehicle for recent convert LL Cool J. Genial stuff, but surely Macy didn’t do Wild Hogs for this. Macy, co-star Jason Ritter, and director Steven Schachter will attend. (Matt Prigge)

SEARCHERS 2.0 (7:30 p.m.; also 4:30 p.m. April 18) Repo Man director Alex Cox knows the spaghetti Western better than anyone not named Sergio, and his appealingly scroungy road movie pays loving homage. Longtime Cox stock players Del Zamora and Ed Pansullo play former character actors who set out for Monument Valley, where they plan to bushwhack a Golden Age screenwriter (Sy Richardson) who mistreated them both as kids. The two bicker and banter over Al Gore, the Iraq War and Hollywood lore against a backdrop of desert vistas and blue-highways Americana, while the deliberately minor shot-on-video movie takes in the slow fade of the mythic West. The shaggy, shambling yarn climaxes with a Leone-trivia face-off that, like the movie, memorializes the forgotten heroes buried in the IMDB’s Boot Hill. (If ya got it in ya, pilgrim, take the trivia challenge at searchers2.com.) Watch for a cameo by a real outlaw, executive producer Roger Corman. (Jim Ridley)

TWO EMBRACES (8 p.m.; also 2 p.m. April 18) With his debut film, Enrique Begne joins the ranks of Mexican directors making poetic, elliptical movies about eclectic groups of strangers. Two Embraces is one of the better examples of the genre, even though its two stories—one about a teenager who falls in love with a surly grocery clerk, and one about a grumpy cab driver who gets involved in a passenger’s life—never seem to connect up cleanly, aside from the recurrence of disease, disgruntlement and near-desperate hugs. Still, the movie looks amazing, with shifting film stocks and startling rack-focus effects that indicate subtle changes in perception. And Two Embraces delivers this hopeful message: Even people who annoy you can be comforting to have around. In Spanish with subtitles. (Noel Murray)