It's all wrong, but it's alright...

So I've been feeling ridiculously shitty for the past two days and the song in this video pretty much encompasses how I feel. But the way these two kids--these two eight-year-olds--play and sing it put a giant smile on my face. At least for five minutes I feel a little better.



Hey, these guys should find that teacher from the Langley Schools Project!

American Idol

Roger Ebert has officially entered the world of the blogs. In recent years, he has completely revamped his website (with the help of his editor Jim Emerson, whose own blog is a favorite of mine) and archived the bulk of his television reviews with Gene Siskel and Richard Roeper, so this seemed like the next logical step.

Of all the people I look up to--Woody Allen, Billy Wilder, Francois Truffaut, etc.--it was maybe Mr. Ebert, through his TV show and then my subsequent discovery of archived print reviews on the Chicago Sun Times website, that had the most profound impact on my love for film. Not that I always agree with him (or with Emerson, or A.O. Scott, or Nathan Lee, or Wesley Morris). In fact, more recently, the more I've discovered my own voice and my own approach to thinking critically about film, the more I find my way away from all of these great writers. And in some ways that's the point. As the great films also do, Mr. Ebert's reviews do have a personal point-of-view and possess something of great worth to say, but also challenge the reader (or viewer in the case of film) to engage their own mind and not just sit there passively. I've learned more in reading his weekly print reviews than I have in any film class.

The world of film-blog criticism is inundated with the uninformed and the ill-conceived, the prosaic and uneducated. Maybe I'm one of those, who knows? I hope not, but I will continue to toil underneath the huge shadow Mr. Ebert's work casts and continues to cast. What I do know is that online film journalism just got a whole lot better.

Belatedly, FFF Day 9 & 10

I ended this year's Florida Film Festival on a chilly, rainy night by screening Snow Angels by director David Gordon Green, whose debut feature George Washington I feel is one of the best American independent movies of the past decade.

From A.O. Scott's review in the New York Times:

With both his subsequent films, "All the Real Girls" and "Undertow," Mr. Green has retained just enough of that idiosyncrasy to keep the promise of "George Washington" alive in the minds of his critical admirers. But these movies have also felt uneasily caught between his poetic nonconforming impulses and the requirements of sustaining a career as a midlevel, specialty-division auteur. Each one is less special than the one before.

To add, I think Green's movies have, at least overtly, become increasingly more structured--their narratives more focused on its trajectory towards a specific conclusion, rather than languishing in the nuance of character and place.

But to say that is not to diminish the film's strengths, of which there are many. One of the parallel stories involves Arthur (Michael Angarano) and Lila (Olivia Thirlby, Ellen Page's best friend in Juno), two high school teens navigating that most tenuous of young adult terrain: having a crush on a classmate. Cute without being cutesy, this budding relationship is the real soul of the film that partially takes a back seat to the eventual tragedy of the film, heavily foreshadowed in the film's opening scene. The problem with this tragic part of the storyline (of which I'll reveal nothing else) is that it seems coolly distant without seemingly trying to be. It lacks the fully lived-in feeling of the young romance and thus feels emotionally stunted, whereas the other is emotionally satisfying.

The night before I screened Young @ Heart, the British documentary about a choir of senior citizens who tour performing classic and newer rock and pop songs. There seems to have been a spate of movies recently that deal with the pairing of rock 'n' roll with unconventional performers--Richard Linklater's School of Rock, and the documentaries Rock School and Girls Rock! (the latter of which played at FFF this year, but unseen by me). Either one of these films would make a good double-feature with Young @ Heart, but watching the film, I kept on thinking about a short TV documentary on VH1 I saw years ago on an album called Innocence & Despair by The Langley Schools Music Project.

A recording on the completely other end of the spectrum than the seniors of Young @ Heart, Innocence & Despair is a collection of songs by a chorus of elementary school children from Langley, British Columbia during the late 70s. Ranging in material from David Bowie to The Beach Boys to ABBA, these songs are sparingly orchestrated and incredibly lo-fi in quality. The wonder of it all is how moving these songs can be even when their sung by kids who don't even really understand what they're singing about. I mean, how can a 9-year-old kid fathom the longing of a song like the Eagles' "Desperado" or the loneliness of The Beach Boys' "In My Room"? Well, maybe kids get a lot more than we think they do.

From the juveniles to the seniors and all other kids from 1 to 92, The Langley Schools album and Young @ Heart capture one of the great things about rock 'n' roll, which is its populism and egalitarianism. To put it more succinctly, as Hans Fenger, the music teacher who started the whole Langley project, said in the VH1 doc:

There's probably no better way to have people understand each other than to have them make music together. As cliché as it is to say that [music] is a universal language, it's in fact the truth.

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All-in-all, this year's Florida Film Festival, despite some mishaps and stumbles, was as fun as it was exhausting. In order, my three favorite movies at the fest were Disfigured, In Search of a Midnight Kiss, and August Evening. Other highlights included my mom meeting and getting an autograph from A Clockwork Orange actor Malcolm McDowell. I'm not entirely sure, but as my mom tells it, I think he might've been hitting on her! Another slightly surreal moment occurred during the Midnight Shorts program. For those who don't know, all of the midnight showings tend to skew--how shall I say it--to the more depraved, the slightly dysfunctional. The filmmakers of one of the shorts entitled Dirty Words: The Letter C were in attendance and were passing out raffle tickets to win a vibrator and throwing out tiny bottles of lube to the entire audience.

And I find it incredibly inappropriate to tell you whether or not I've used my bottle so I'd appreciate if you'd stop asking me.

Take me to the magic of the moment... FFF: Day 7 & 8

A quiet two days had me attending only three screenings, but they were among the three best of the week so far.

Late Thursday night I watched the very funny romantic comedy In Search of a Midnight Kiss. Wonderfully shot in black and white, the film is like a more modest, L.A. version of the Before Sunrise/Sunset movies. At a Q&A afterwards, director Alex Holdridge mentioned that he was good friends with Richard Linklater, who of course directed those Before movies, so the connection is tangible. In Search of a Midnight Kiss doesn't possess the lofty ambition of those films, but in its own way, it has as much to say about love at the particular age these characters are in, the loneliness of living in a big city, and of dreams that go unfulfilled.

Friday afternoon, I screened Chris Eska's August Evening, an ultra low-budget movie that was nominated for two Independent Spirit Awards this year. Like Holdridge for the previous film, Eska was in attendance and participated in a Q&A. Echoes of classic Ozu, especially his masterpiece Tokyo Story, the film centers around the familial relationship between Jaime and his widowed daughter-in-law, Lupe. The leads, Pedro Castaneda and Veronica Loren, are nonprofessional actors and, on top of that, also translated Eska's screenplay into Spanish from its original English.

Sometimes the best part of going to festivals is that the filmmakers get to participate and attend and answer audience questions. I often complain to some friends about how I don't like to hang around "film-y" people. I find that a lot of them are pretentious. [Your joke about me here.] I find that a lot of them are self-consciously quirky, edgy, and artsy. I find that many of them are just as fake as the Hollywood people they would presume to oppose. But after listening to both Holdridge and Eska, two people who seem both modest and unassuming, it renews my faith in independent cinema, both the culture of the indie world and the artists who help create it.

Quick note: Both In the Search of a Midnight Kiss and Situation Frank (part of the terrific International Narrative Shorts program) end with the old Scorpions' tune "Winds of Change". These movies couldn't be any further from each other save for the fact that they were both screened at FFF. Are the Scorpions going on a reunion tour or something?

FFF: Day 5 & 6

After a much needed day off, I went headlong into another couple of days and six more screenings. I was prepared to talk about some of the highlights. How much I was charmed by the Israeli film Jellyfish. How I enjoyed The Cake Eaters, whose director--actress Mary Stuart Masterson--was a special guest and was just as lovely to listen to as her movie was to watch. How surprised, after a tedious and clumsy first few minutes, I was at how affectionate I felt toward Tom Gustafson's gay fantasia (that sounds like porn, but it's not) Were the World Mine.

But instead I am compelled to relay two stories. The first comes after watching The Cake Eaters and the subsequent Q&A with Mary Stuart Masterson. So I go to the bathroom to, you know, use the bathroom. For people who have never been, the Enzian theater has a fairly small one. Anyway, I open the door and what I assume is a line is actually a couple of guys waiting to pass by because a guy in a motorized wheelchair is somehow stuck in the little nook behind the door. What exactly the problem was I couldn't figure out, but there was another man helping the guy in the wheelchair and eventually he was able to get out. After a couple of seconds, I realized that the guy helping out was actually the director of a short called Shrinks. I'd seen him at a Q&A earlier when I saw a shorts program and, while I also gave him a good score on the audience ballot, I'd like to give him a good samaritan shout out. Not only did I like your film, Gregg Brown, I admire your citizenship!

On a less happy note, a terrible incident happened at the Animated Shorts program I attended. Five of the filmmakers whose shorts were being screened happened to be sitting in front of me. After A Letter to Colleen started, I heard Carolyn London--one of its directors--say to one of the house managers that there should be audio that isn't being played correctly. They shut off the movie and tried to fix it so it could be started again from the beginning. This started to take awhile and since it was the second-to-last short in the program, people got impatient and decided to leave. The film got rolling again--sound on this time--but after a few minutes just cut off completely. More people left and the directors, Carolyn & Andy London, understandably looked even more upset than they already were. Their film was in competition, up for a jury award and an audience award. With maybe a quarter of the people gone, that's a quarter of the people in the audience who won't even vote for their movie (and the one after it) while all the other movies got votes. I find this massively unfair and I am just as massively disappointed that this festival--my festival--would conduct itself in this manner. I walk around wearing my various festival t-shirts this week and all year-round with pride, proud to even be just a participant in a 10-day event that celebrates something I love dearly. Maybe tomorrow I'll decide to wear a different t-shirt.

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.

If you got bad news, you wanna kick them blues

Happy 63rd Birthday, EC! See you in May when you come to Tampa.

No particular place to go

This isn't at all film related, but I thought I'd relay this to whoever's out there.

As I was driving to work this morning, the radio reported the weather forecast for the day, after which the announcer told us that "'Weather' is brought to you by Central Florida Toyota [or some other car dealership]." I had no idea! I'd like to take this opportunity to personally thank Central Florida Toyota [or some other car dealership] for giving us the gift of weather. And here I was blaming God for all the hot and muggy that is Central Florida.

Speaking of which (not really), the Florida Film Festival 2008 officially starts tonight! A woo-hoo!

Tipitina, tra la la

"What is it about movies that explains
their amazing hold over the human mind?"

-- Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies


I've just finished reading an advanced reading copy of a new memoir by novelist David Gilmour called The Film Club. It chronicles the the relationship between Gilmour and his son, Jesse, who is so bad at school his father gives him the option of dropping out altogether and not even have to pay rent or for food. But he has to agree to one condition: watch three films with his father a week and discuss. The book is more a love letter to Jesse and the relationship between dads and sons than it is to film, but there are some choice passages in it that really get what it is to love movies. Not to like them, but to love them, and what it says about those who do:

Picking movies for people is a risky business. In a way it's as revealing
as writing someone a letter. It shows how you think, it shows what moves you,
sometimes it can even show how you think the world sees you.

People often say that you can define a person by what they say or by what they do or by what they believe in or their values. But I like to take a different approach. I like to define a person by their taste, by the things they like. Because, as Gilmour alludes to in the above quote, a list of things you like says as much about you as it does about those things. That goes for all art, including movies.

And so I propose a little activity. For those of you who read this and know me personally (which is almost all of you), know I work at a library (which is, again, most of you who also do). Recently we had a StoryCorps mobile booth parked outside our library, which allowed anyone on the street to tell their story, whatever it is.

What I want is for you, yes you, to tell me your story, but not in the traditional sense. I want you to tell it through the movies you love. What are the five movies that come closest to defining who and what you are? These are not the five movies you'd want if you were stranded on a deserted island. This is not a Sight & Sound list either--I don't want to know what you think the five greatest movies ever are (well, I do, but not for the purpose of this). And I'm not even asking for your five favorite movies, that's still a little different. I want the collection of movies that in some way tell your personal story. And it doesn't have to be obvious, you can be creative. If you work in a library, you don't have pick a movie about librarians or writers or books. If you're a doctor, you don't have to pick a movie set in a hospital. And you don't have to pick five... pick two, even one. I'm just curious as to what movies hit you on a personal level; what movies mean so much to you it becomes an extension of you, a part of you.

Here's one of mine, to start the discussion:

Sunset Boulevard may be Billy Wilder's best movie, Some Like it Hot may be his funniest, and Woody Allen was once quoted as saying that Double Indemnity is probably the best movie ever made. But for me The Apartment resonates the most personally. There is a scene--a moment actually--that is as good as any in Wilder's career. (I'll try to be slightly evasive as to avoid major spoilers.) It comes at about the midpoint in the movie when C.C. "Bud" Baxter (Jack Lemmon) opens a compact and sees that the mirror is broken. In a moment, his whole world has turned on a dime. Everything he knows about someone has been turned on its head. "Some people take and some people get took," a character says to him later in the film. And what I love is that the more the two leads describe their own lives, the more they are describing each other. Pain and personal anguish is as universal as it is specific and I don't know if there's a better movie I've seen in capturing that.

Okay, it's your turn... you'll get the rest when I hear some of yours.

Oh, and The Film Club comes out May 6.

Eat it up

The end of winter/early spring time of year is often a dreaded one for cinephiles. After Hollywood indulges in its annual self-lovemaking at the Oscars, there is a bit of a post-coital letdown where theaters are awash with usually forgettable crap. Instead of giving us films to snuggle with, the industry leaves us with the one-night stand, a series of meaningless treks to the cinema, allowing us nothing but to curb our fix. (Okay, maybe I'm overdoing it with the sex analogy, but I like it and am starting to feel a little bit aroused.)

Thankfully, though, the Florida Film Festival starts in three weeks. I'd say that the festival brings a blast of sun, warming us up from the cold of winter, but it's Orlando and, let's face it, it hasn't been cold here since around 10,000 B.C.

For many, the big name celebrities are the highlight. This year Anthony Bourdain and Jennifer Tilly will be here. Bourdain will be discussing--obviously--food and it seems FFF has been increasingly intent on introducing food and wine as a major theme in the past couple of years, possibly because they have been sponsored by various food and drink businesses and also perhaps because the main theater is the Enzian Theater, which is a dinner theater. Tilly will be here for a screening of Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway, a film in which she co-starred. Last year, Oscar-winning director Peter Bogdanovich was a guest for a special screening of Paper Moon and I could've listened to him talk for days. But for me, the real thrill (besides the range of movies) is seeing and listening to the unknown independent directors, producers, and actors (although I missed seeing last year's opening night guest Judy Greer and thus missed my opportunity to ask her to marry me). For many of the films here, the festival circuit is as far as they'll get and it's both inspiring and a bit sobering hearing the hardships and triumphs of these filmmakers.

I'm taking my vacation during the festival, so I will see as many movies as I can possibly see without passing out and I will try to keep a sort of log for each day I attend.

There are a few movies I already know I want to see: Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon, David Gordon Green's Snow Angels, and the low-budget indie (redundant?) August Evening. What these and other films hold I can't say and that's what is exciting about festivals. I know that after the 10 days are up there will be a movie (or two, or three) that I will love. What's great is that I have no idea which ones they will be.