Reel Nashville 2008

The Nashville Film Festival isn’t huge, like Sundance or Toronto. Nor is it tiny, like the many regional festivals that have sprouted in the past 10 years like mushrooms after rain. What the Nashville Film Festival is, mostly, is ours. It reflects our identity as Music City, with an ever-expanding section of films devoted to bluegrass, country and beyond. It has a makeup as diverse as our own population, with selections targeted to Nashville’s thriving Mexican and Kurdish communities. Its audiences—celebrities, college kids, churchgoers, out-of-towners—could be the line outside Pancake Pantry any given Saturday.

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)