THE 2002 LOS ANGELES FILM FESTIVAL: One Person's Experience
By Warren
Curry
7/01/02
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THE 2002 LOS ANGELES FILM FESTIVAL: One Person's Experience By Warren
Curry |
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In its eighth year of existence, the IFP/Los Angeles Film Festival proved to be one long, tiring, educational and fun week of film going. Although Los Angeles may be the movie capital of the world, it is a city that as of yet doesn't have a film festival to match the international recognition of those highest in profile, such as Sundance, Cannes, Venice and Toronto. If it continues on its current path, the LAFF should go a long way to changing that situation, as the festival screened a total of 153 films representing 22 countries and boasted Alfonso Cuaron, the director of one this year's biggest indie films Y Tu Mama Tambien, as its guest director.
LAFF awards were handed out on Saturday evening prior to the closing night screening of Miguel Arteta's (Chuck and Buck) Jennifer Aniston-starring film, The Good Girl. Jeffrey Blitz's spelling bee documentary Spellbound took home both the audience and jury awards for best documentary. Ryan, who caught the film for CinemaSpeak, reported that the movie earned a five-minute ovation following the screening he attended. I can safely say that Spellbound is the film I most lament missing at this year's festival and hope that it's able to land a distribution deal before long. Another documentary prize was given to Scott Hamilton Kennedy's OT: Our Town, a film about the first theatrical production to take place in a Compton, CA high school in 22 years.
As for narrative features, Przemyslav Reut's Paradox Lake won the Target Filmmaker Award, which also carried with it an unrestricted $50,000 grant. The audience award was bestowed upon Alfredo De Villa's New York-set drama Washington Heights, which Ryan also caught for CinemaSpeak and gave a decent review to.
If I have one regret about my schedule
at the festival, it was that I didn't make an effort to see more
of the narrative features in competition. In fact, I waited until
the last day to see any, when I caught the morning/afternoon doubleheader
of The Dogwalker and the highly anticipated Showboy.
The Dogwalker (
), written and directed by Jacques Thelemaque,
takes a look at an abused woman (Diane Gaidry), on the run from
her boyfriend and previous life in Buffalo, who settles in L.A.,
befriends an older woman (Pamela Gordon) and enters into her dog
walking business. I have a soft spot for any film that highlights
the unique parts and personality of Los Angeles (dog parks, in
this case), and while The Dogwalker is a bit meandering
and sort of routine, it was a hard movie to not like and impossible
to dismiss. Showboy (), co-directed by Six Feet Under
producer Christian Taylor and Lindy Heyman, is a mockumentary
where Taylor plays himself and taps into a latent passion for
performing in Vegas shows, after being fired from his position
on the HBO series. Six Feet Under Executive Producer/American
Beauty writer, Alan Ball, makes a cameo appearance, along
with Whoopi Goldberg and Siegfried and Roy. Showboy was
entertaining and amusing, but borrowed most of its ideas from
the work of Christopher Guest, although not done as well. It's
designed to be a crowd pleaser, but was only a little above average.
The international section was home to the three best narrative films I saw, which were two German movies, Neither Fish Nor Fowl and the extraordinary Something To Remind Me, as well as the French production 7 Days In Tehran. Truth be told, it was also the section that screened my least favorite film of the festival, the Japanese downer Harmful Insect. American documentaries were well represented by three solid music-related features: I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, Breath Control: The History of the Human Beat Box and Biggie and Tupac, and an engrossing film about a Teamster's strike entitled American Standoff.
Breath Control offered the best Q&A moment, when two of the beat boxers showcased in the film each grabbed a mic and performed a duet (is that what you call it in beat boxing?). The strangest incident of the fest had to be standing in line for Biggie and Tupac. When I arrived, I strolled to the end of the ticket holder line, which stretched through a part of the DGA lobby and spilled onto a balcony -- it seemed like I walked past miles of people to take my spot, but 30 minutes later there was an even bigger line standing behind me. Apparently, the LAFF organizers must have thought the film brought with it a possibility to attract an unsavory audience, so security searched bags, broke out a metal detector wand on a few people and generally made their presence noticeably felt. The film was supposed to begin at 10:00 P.M., but the projector started rolling closer to 11:00 P.M., which was pretty late for a Sunday night.
Both centerpiece films were somewhat of a disappointment. I'm not exactly sure why Tadpole sparked the biggest bidding war at this year's Sundance Film Festival before landing at Miramax, and 24 Hour Party People fell short of my expectations, which were admittedly very high. Tadpole did garner a rousing response from the audience, so that in part explains why Harvey Weinstein runs a movie a studio and I write for this humble website.
Other thoughts: The DGA theaters were beautiful (especially theater one, which can seat 500+ people) and spacious. Lamelle's Sunset 5 was the only other facility I attended (although the John Ford Ampitheater, the Pacific Theater and The Arclight were other venues), and it had no choice but to pale in comparison to the DGA. The parking situation was well-handled and organized, but were some of those attendants unfriendly! The festival staff did a great job of crowd control and making ticket holder lines and wait list lines easily distinguishable. The only real organizational gaff was when they decided at the last minute to switch the DGA theaters that Breath Control and 24 Screams Per Second were going to play in, which forced the already seated audience for Breath Control to have to leave the big theater, re-enter the smaller one, and scramble for seats at the sold out screening.
By the end of the week, I had seen 13 movies, wrote full reviews of 11 of them and lived to tell the tale. I was drained (as was the CinemaSpeak webmaster Ian, who matched Ryan and I step-for-step, posting our reviews just as fast as we could crank them out), desperately needed to recharge my batteries and felt all the better for it. And now that the festival has ended, I can focus my attention on such truly challenging summer fare like The Powerpuff Girls and XXX. Such is life at CinemaSpeak.com.
(Click here to read reviews of most of the films
mentioned in this article)
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