By Jim Ridley, Donna Bowman, and Noel Murray
Thousands of indie features are produced every year, but only a handful ever receive theatrical distribution. As a result, film festivals have become an alternative distribution route for some fine movies you’d never get to see otherwise. But even festivals are logjammed by submissions: The Sundance Film Festival was reportedly deluged this year with some 3,000 entries, of which 40 made it into festival slots. Based on the quantity and quality of rejected festival entries I’ve seen over the years, I’d guess that at least 2,700 of those films should never have been made.
That leaves a gray area of maybe 300 films of varying merit. But just because a film gets accepted to a festival doesn’t mean it’s any good: Several years ago, Nashville’s Sinking Creek Film/Video Festival canned Matthew Harrison’s larval, pretentious The Rhythm Thief, which somehow won a major Sundance award a few months later. (Sinking Creek caved in and showed it the next year.)
By the same token, just because a film gets rejected for distribution doesn’t mean it’s bad. At festivals such as Sinking Creek and Austin’s excellent South by Southwest, I’ve seen some first-rate films that never got the theatrical exposure they deserved. The festival circuit gives these outstanding, risky movies a forum.
The Yahoo Web browser lists more than 150 film festivals in the U.S. Many of these were founded in the past 10 years in the wake of Sundance’s feverish industry press. The Nashville Independent Film Festival, running through this Sunday, is not one of those. Founded in 1969 by Mary Jane Coleman, the festival championed genuine independents before the term became a buzzword: Directors such as Les Blank, D.A. Pennebaker, and Frederick Wiseman screened work here. Now in its 29th year, the festival sports a new name and a new location—as well a new sense of purpose and enthusiasm.
The jury’s out on the name change: Sinking Creek had its problems—countless people flubbed it as “Stinking Creek,” which wasn’t always unintentional—but even so, it’s more memorable than the generic-sounding NIFF. That said, the festival improves in every other way over last fall’s edition, which nonetheless drew Sinking Creek’s biggest crowds in years. The selections are better; the new location at the Watkins Belcourt is infinitely more pleasant and more accessible than Sarratt’s parking-free bunker; and the NIFF’s executive director, Michael Catalano, has worked to make it an all-inclusive social event (including an all-day block party Saturday in Hillsboro Village) as well as a celebration of cutting-edge film.
Apart from the screenings, Catalano and his exhausted assistants have landed an impressive lineup of workshop participants and panelists for the five-day festival. The coolest is John Pierson, host of the excellent Independent Film Channel series Split Screen, executive producer of Chasing Amy, and a caustic, funny, tough-minded authority on indie film. Instrumental in the careers of Spike Lee, Michael Moore, Kevin Smith, and other fledgling auteurs, Pierson wrote the essential book on the rise of the indies, Spike, Mike, Slackers, and Dykes; he’s also a guy who distrusts hype and knows and cares about movies. He’s scheduled to appear Sunday.
Nor should aspiring filmmakers miss Saturday’s 11 a.m. panel at The Trace with October Films cofounder Jeff Lipsky (who shows his film Childhood’s End 9:30 p.m. Thursday), Metropolitan producer Peter Wentworth (who shows his Paradise Falls 7 p.m. Friday), and local writer-director Coke Sams (Existo). For Nashville’s many documentary makers, there’s Thursday’s 5 p.m. panel discussion at the Pancake Pantry on doc funding and production with The American Experience’s Margaret Drain, P.O.V.’s Lisa Heller, ITVS’s Lois Vossen, and producer Maxine Wishner. The Cartoon Network’s Linda Simensky and Keith Crofford will lead discussions Saturday afternoon on animation production for broadcast.
As for the films, there are more worthwhile screenings than you’ll ever be able to catch, from Saturday afternoon’s screening of shorts by young filmmakers (including a tap-dance documentary written, edited, and shot by 12-year-old Preston Burger) to Sunday night’s feature Naturally Native (starring Nashville actress Kimberly Guerrero). Will Edward James Olmos show for Saturday’s The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit? Who knows? The best deal is to grab an “Any Ten” pass for $30 and pick screenings that sound interesting, including the following:
Kiki’s Delivery Service (11 a.m. Thursday) Taking advantage of the summer holidays, the NIFF has wisely scheduled morning premieres of children’s movies every day. The biggest event is the second U.S. screening of this animated blockbuster by “the Walt Disney of Japan,” Hayao Miyazaki, whose top-grossing Princess Mononoke will get a wide release here this year. Disney itself purchased this tale of a 13-year-old girl who wants to be a witch; the studio dubbed in the voices of Kirsten Dunst, Janeane Garofalo, and the late Phil Hartman. The film won’t be out on home video until this fall. Repeated 10 a.m. Saturday.
Animation (7 p.m. Thursday) At the not-for-kids end of the cartoon spectrum, this year’s animation night includes nearly an hour of the Cartoon Network’s B-Sides: Rarities, Outtakes & Oddities, an adults-only sampling of offbeat material that never reached the airwaves. Expect weirdness ranging from Space Ghost Coast-to-Coast and Dexter’s Laboratory to a predictably unhinged work print of a Yogi Bear short by Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi.
Lunker Lake (11 a.m. Friday) Shot partially on a submerged soundstage at Speer Communications, this Gaylord-coproduced family comedy written by Nashvillians Coke Sams and Bruce Arntson centers on the puppet denizens of the fishing community Lunker Lake and its zany annual “Lunkerthon.” The clip on the press reel was pretty strange—something like a clean version of Peter Jackson’s Meet the Feebles.
Les Blank and Burden of Dreams (9 p.m. Friday) Esteemed documentarian Les Blank has devoted more than 30 years of filmmaking to outsider Americana and to any free spirit with the guts to follow his or her muse. His subjects include polka kings, folk artists, garlic lovers, bluesmen, Afro-Cuban drummers, and obsessive German auteurs. Burden of Dreams is Blank’s record of the legendarily troubled production of Fitzcarraldo—during which director Werner Herzog went nearly as mad as his obsessive film hero, who carries a steamboat over a mountaintop and vows to build an opera house in the Peruvian jungle. (For an interesting companion piece, seek out Blank’s earlier film “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe”—exactly what the title says, and more.)
At 5:30 p.m. Saturday, Blank appears again with his 1969 classic “The Blues According to Lightnin’ Hopkins” and his award-winning 1994 film “The Maestro: King of the Cowboy Artists.” The latter explores the life and art of Gerry Gaxiola, who quit his job to become a folk artist outfitted in Western regalia. Rumor has it The Maestro himself will make an appearance.
Gay/Lesbian Mini Fest (10:50 p.m. Friday) A program of four short films, including Jennie Olson’s “Blue Diary,” the impressionistic aftermath of a young lesbian’s one-night stand with a straight girl; Joel Moffett’s comedy “My Body,” about the perils of coming out, and “Sexually Repressed Shedding Disorder”; and Tom E. Brown’s hysterical B&W “Don’t Run Johnny,” an AIDS melodrama that crosses the horror-spoof opening of Todd Haynes’ Poison with Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda?
Juicy Danger Meets Burning Man (12:15 a.m. Friday) Filmmaker David Vaisbord follows Canadian performance artists Tom Comet and Christine Taylor—whose “extreme cabaret” act involves chainsaws, fire, and a 10-foot transgendered beast with a spurting penis and strobe-light breasts—on their pilgrimage to the renowned “Burning Man” tribal festival on the alkali flats of Nevada.
Amy Everhart (12:30 p.m. Saturday) Nashville filmmaker Sam Stumpf premieres his family-themed comedy about a little girl so desperate to attend a classmate’s party that she mails herself to Memphis in a cardboard box.
Topless Women Talk About Their Lives (9:30 p.m. Saturday) Based on a popular series of four-minute films made for New Zealand TV, Harry Sinclair’s comedy-drama about a group of Auckland twentysomethings facing pregnancy, infidelity, jealousy, and unexpected success won several major awards down under. It features one of the strangest birth scenes we’ve ever seen on film. Arrive early for the opening short, the South African drama “The Storekeeper.”
Circus Redickuless (midnight Saturday) An audience favorite at South by Southwest this year, Philip Glau’s hilarious documentary joins the ill-fated tour of a no-budget circus, as its troupe of malcontents contends with broken-down vans, five-person audiences, and frequent clashes with hustling ringleader Chicken John. More than simply the Spinal Tap of performance art, this is an amusing meditation on what it takes to realize any artistic endeavor—including Glau’s own film.
The Jew in the Lotus (1:30 p.m. Sunday) Laurel Chiten’s account of a meeting in India between a group of rabbis and the exiled Dalai Lama, and the spiritual reawakening that the event triggered in Rodger Kamenetz, the writer chosen to record it.
Wonderland (3 p.m. Sunday) John O’Hagan’s comic documentary reflects upon the 50th anniversary of Levittown, N.Y., the prototype for the instant suburbs that sprang up across postwar America. Through rituals ranging from bowling to wife-swapping, O’Hagan examines how the notion of a planned community shapes—some would say warps—the people who live there.
Nightingale and the Rose (7:30 p.m. Sunday) One of the few foreign-language films at the NIFF this year, Alfredo E. Rivas’ romantic fantasy concerns a 150-year-old ghost (Rivas) who falls for a mortal woman (Visi Argudin Noya), with tragic results. Don’t miss the preceding short films “Dos Corazones” (set in an inner-city maternity ward) and “Sin Papeles” (about the confrontation between a Latino couple seeking green cards and an unsympathetic Latino immigration officer).
Screenings will be crowded, so show up at least 15 minutes early to get in. For more information about schedules, ticket prices, and workshop fees, call 343-3419 or stop by the Watkins Belcourt.
—Jim Ridley
Blood and sand
Hollywood promoters are trying to convince us that we’re entering a new era of huge films with huge subjects (and huge budgets and huge running times). If only Hollywood could add one more item to the list of epic qualifications: larger-than-life heroes. Lawrence of Arabia, showing Monday through Thursday at the Watkins Belcourt, represents the pinnacle of an earlier epic tradition, one that exalted complicated and pivotal figures in history and made them the fulcra of enormous filmmaking endeavors.
Director David Lean plucked from obscurity a young actor with burning blue eyes, Peter O’Toole, and made him a star as T.E. Lawrence, the British officer who became the leader of an Arab revolution during World War I. The enigmatic Lawrence had long fascinated biographers and historians, but making a successful film out of his complex, contradictory story required the services of England’s very best talents: screenwriter Robert Bolt, cinematographer Freddie Young, composer Maurice Jarre. After two years of filming in the Arabian desert, they produced a majestic vision of one man against the endless sandy horizon, bridging heaven and earth to call down cosmic forces in a single fantastic, fleeting moment.
Many critics complain that Lawrence is historically inaccurate, that it fails to depict intelligibly the forces of war, and that its portrait of Lawrence himself is selective. Yet Lean understands that art is a selection of possibilities for realization out of the infinite and chaotic environment; it is not and never has been simple dramatization, recreation, or hagiography. His film, made in 1962, prefigures the rise of the antihero in the cinema of the late 1960s and ’70s. Lawrence goes to Arabia almost by accident, proves himself to the Bedouin tribes (represented by Omar Sharif’s Ali) by sheer instinct, and falls fatally in love with the desert—which, as an Englishman, he cannot possibly survive. His heroism is in spite of himself: He has no outstanding qualities other than his unsuitability for army life. Yet Lean believes, and makes us believe, that astounding forces of necessity and chance converge on this slender figure, raise him up to lead armies and nations, and then cruelly abandon him.
To see the 221 minutes of Lawrence of Arabia in a theater, in all its widescreen glory, is to fall in love. Lean portrays the national character of the British—their inability to see past small details, their amused incomprehension of other cultures, and their tenacious Anglocentrism—with great warmth and good humor. Ancillary characters played by Claude Rains, Jack Hawkins, and Alec Guinness have a dry wit that enlivens Young’s tableau-like compositions. Jarre’s music swells unforgettably; Arabia is beautiful in its timeless emptiness. Yet it is earnest, bloodthirsty, suicidal Lawrence who captures our hearts.
The neo-epics of the ’90s betray no understanding of T.E. Lawrence’s appeal. Perhaps we suspect, but do not want to admit, that if heroism catches us as it does Lawrence, it will be by accident and beyond all our imaginings.
—Donna Bowman
Sharp cookie
Despite an original script by John Grisham, The Gingerbread Man somehow managed to avoid popular success earlier this year. It deserved better. Directed by Robert Altman, who specializes in offbeat takes on popular genres, The Gingerbread Man stars Kenneth Branagh as Rick McGruder, a barely likable Savannah defense attorney who decides to help a young waitress (Embeth Davidtz) with her seemingly insane father (Robert Duvall). After the father escapes from a mental institution, McGruder’s children disappear, and he must outrun the law to find both the kids and the truth as a hurricane approaches.
In the hands of any other director, The Gingerbread Man’s familiar terrain would be routine and unproblematic. But Altman sees the story as a framework for dark broodings on how the real world—faceless, tempestuous, and immune to manipulation—shatters our illusions of personal control. He makes a virtue of Changwei Gu’s murky, muddy photography and reveals the ruddy clubbishness of McGruder’s law offices to be as artificial as a theme park. And Kenneth Branagh is a revelation as a good ol’ boy whose amiable chatter conceals a fundamental lack of interest in other human beings. His terror as his life spins off-kilter will stay with the viewer long after the details of Grisham’s plot have been forgotten.
—Donna Bowman
Hope sinks
Hope Floats opens with a biting piece of satire—a Ricki Lake-esque talk show on which Sandra Bullock is informed that her husband has been sleeping with her best friend. The live studio audience hoots while Bullock tries to put on a brave face; in the audience, her 8-year-old daughter (Mae Whitman) sobs uncontrollably. Soon enough, the two of them move back to the small Texas town where Bullock grew up. While Bullock contemplates a new romance with Harry Connick Jr. and tries to ignore the gossip of all the townsfolk who resent her days as a local beauty queen, her kid deals with a new school, new friends, and the absence of her beloved father.
Directed competently, if not especially stylishly, by Forest Whitaker, Hope Floats is routine soaper material, and the attempts at “eccentric” local color—a taxidermist mother (Gena Rowlands) who talks in aphorisms, a boy who likes to dress up as animals—play like they were ripped from the script of a failed sitcom pilot. Also, the movie hinges on a spurious premise: that people secretly hope for the comeuppance of their more popular high-school classmates (as if anyone still thinks about them at all). But Whitman almost makes the film worth seeing; her reactions to the heartbreak and silliness around her have a genuine quality that the rest of the film cannot muster.
—Noel Murray
—Noel Murray
