Your user's guide to the 2010 Nashville Film Festival, from cool guests to hot tickets
Reel Nashville
Psst. Hey, bud. Yeah, you. Over here, by the concession stand. We see you trying to decide whether to buy a ticket for Clash of the Titans, or just skip the middleman and pay someone $10 to kick you in the inseam. We can't let that happen. Not with dozens of worthwhile films showing most every hour of the day for the next seven days.
On Thursday night, the venerable Nashville Film Festival kicks off its 41st year, making it the South's longest-running (and arguably pre-eminent) festival. It's the place where upwards of 20,000 die-hard cinephiles from north, south, east and west of the Cumberland find common ground each year in the lobby of Regal's Green Hills 16. It's also the place where movie lovers of every stripe can find something to suit their tastes, from foreign films and local features to documentaries, shorts, experimentals and animated ventures.
Below, you'll find capsule reviews of more than 40 of this year's NaFF selections, intended to help you sort through the festival's dizzying options and inevitable scheduling conflicts. First, though, we offer some practical tips for getting the most out of the festival.
To begin with, you'll want to get advance tickets, either at the ticket office in the downstairs Green Hills lobby or online at www.nashvillefilmfestival.org. You'll especially want advance tickets for anything with a visiting celebrity (such as the closing-night film, Teenage Paparazzo, with director Adrian Grenier in attendance), a local element (such as the certain-to-be-controversial Southern Belle), or that has only one show.
If shows sell out, watch the downstairs lobby for announcements of additional screenings (or cancellations). The NaFF has wisely built repeat screenings of some of its most popular selections into the closing-day schedule: those should be announced late in the fest.
Make sure you show up at least a half-hour ahead of time, as lines build quickly (and traffic can congest the adjacent parking garage). Arrive even earlier and you can spend some time hanging out on the landing outside the downstairs entrance, which has become a de-facto chill zone for visitors, filmmakers with downtime between screenings and the hardcore movie aficionados whose conversations typically fill the Belcourt's front stoop.
Which leads us to our annual recommendation: Ride the buzz. You'll be spending a lot of time in line, but you've got a natural icebreaker to strike up a conversation with the people around you. Find out what people have seen, and if a film you've never heard of rouses a lot of enthusiasm, take a chance on it. This may be your only opportunity to see it in a theater, especially with the cast or filmmaker in attendance.
What's that? The lights are going down? We'll continue this conversation later — maybe out back over some VIP-tent nachos. In the meantime, you might consider resting your eyes a few minutes. You're gonna be giving those babies a workout over the next seven days.
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