Florida Film Festival 2014 - Day 3 & 4

I had a short but good Monday night at the festival with two very good films. Every Monday night for the past several years has been Italian Night at FFF, with a retro Italian film being screened leading into a nice spread outside the Enzian sponsored by a local Italian restaurant (this time by Buca di Beppo). Whether Italian or otherwise, I've always seen the movies featured in the retro screenings before, but this night's film, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, was not only new to me but a film I had never even heard of before. Shame on me because it is a clever and funny satire about a high-ranking officer who kills his mistress then plants clear clues to see if the police will charge him with the crime, much less figure out that he's the culprit.

FFF favorite Bill Plympton is here as usual, but this time with a animated feature, his first since Idiots and Angels five years ago. In his post-screening Q&A, he scoffed at the widespread belief that animation is relegated only to big-budget CGI cartoons targeted to young children and this movie, Cheatin', certainly aims to dispel that myth. It's a bawdy, sexy, yet ultimately touching and of course hilarious look at a couple torn apart by infidelity, brought through with Plympton's typically expressionistic artistry.

Florida Film Festival 2014 - Day 2 & 3

Dispatches from this year's Florida Film Festival

Nature in some ways seemed to be the theme connecting my first two movies of the fest. The title of the first, Druid Peak, refers to an area in rural Wyoming populated by wild wolves, a population maintained and monitored by dedicated scientists and naturalists. But this isn't a nature doc. The story begins with Owen, an apathetic high school student living in a small, working class town--the kind of town, frankly, you see in one too many of these microbudget films. Thankfully, Marni Zelnick's story (which she also directed) leaves this oft-looked at setting when after a tragic night that sees one of his friends killed in a car accident, Owen's mother sends him off to Wyoming to be with the father he's never met.