FFF: Day 2 & 3

The first weekend has come to a close at the 17th annual Florida Film Festival and, though I'm ready to pass out after a marathon two days, it's off to a pretty good start.

I started this year's fest with a double feature of two food movies: This is My Cheesesteak and Hamburger America. It's kind of unfair to critique movies on what you expected or wish for them to be, but both of these films skirt the larger issues of food as it exists within our culture. Both films are essentially a roll call of great places to eat these foods. We can get this everyday on the Food Network and in a feature film, you'd hope for a little more depth.

A shorts program was next on my itinerary and four more features. Flight of the Red Balloon is the first film by master director Hou Hsaio-Hsien to be set outside of Asia, but many of the familiar elements are there. Also like the other films of his I have seen, I greatly admire them for their technique, but am left a bit cold by them at the same time.

On Sunday, I only (!) went to three screenings, including the hilarious Kabluey starring Lisa Kudrow and the stellar Shorts Program #3: Shuffle, which included three films I rated a 5 on the audience ballot (a rating I rarely give).

But the real revelation here is Glenn Gers's Disfigured, a movie about Lydia and Darcy--the former a member of a fat acceptance group, the latter a recovering anorexic who tries to join the same group because, well, she also thinks she's fat. What emerges is an exploration of body image, addiction, and friendship. A movie like this could have either been exploitative or have gone for the easy "rah-rah" girl power approach, but Disfigured refuses at every turn to take the easy way out. So many films that deal with serious issues pretend to explore them with any depth and end up doing so only superficially, too naive or smug or stupid to do anything but pile cliché upon cliché in the guise of saying something meaningful. This is the 7th year I've been coming to FFF and Disfigured is among the very best I've ever seen here. If the rest of the films come even near this one, I think I'm in for a good week.