Of the 14 films that I saw during Tribeca Film Festival, only three were so under-accomplished that they begged the question of why they were programmed in the first place. This is an improvement over past years. Meanwhile, I saw four films that qualify as serious discoveries. With the exception of Shane Meadows’ Somers Town, over which I’ve already raved, these films are imperfect but thrillingly risky, and fascinating in their flaws. It’s maybe worth noting that only one of these titles arrived in Tribeca as a World Premiere, and that film, The Guest of Cindy Sherman, is set and was made just blocks away from the festival’s theoretical (but no longer physical) home. It’s shocking that there isn’t currently a festival in New York City that’s seriously focused on celebrating locally-produced work. Tribeca, so in need of a refined identity, might want to take note that the niche is up for grabs.
My notes on each of the 14 films, in order of preference, follow after the jump.
1) Somers Town – see full review here.
2) The Guest of Cindy Sherman – The company responsible for helping this Sundance Channel-funded personal doc find theatrical ditribution has been circulating a statement from photographer Cindy Sherman, disavowing the movie, which tells the story of her five year relationship with co-director Paul H-O from the ex-boyfriend’s (generally smart and self-deprecating) point of view. “Against my better judgment, it was clearly unwise to cooperate with the project at its inception,” Sherman’s statement concludes. Several people I’ve spoken with think the statement must be a publicity stunt, because the actual film shows Sherman in nothing but a positive light. It’s not really even about her, as much as it’s about Paul, and his experience of going from punky-but-affectionate art-world outsider, to entering the upper echelon of the industry on Sherman’s arm, and ultimately becoming “downsized” both personally and professionally. In telling his own story, Paul also manages to encapsulate the massive changes in New York’s art scene over the past 20 years. Yes, it can be cringe-inducingly intimate, especially in the footage of the couple’s early flirtations, but for the most part, Sherman remains an enigma to both the audience and her boyfriend, and Paul H-O’s desire to tell all ultimately seems less opportunistic than bittersweet.
3) Sita Sings the Blues – see full review here.
4) Milky Way Liberation Front (pictured above)–– A messy little mind-**** from South Korea. This exercise in comedic meta-autobiography follows a young director to a film festival, where he struggles to put together a feature while his girlfriend is breaking up with him. Milky Way constantly slips back and forth between dream space, a film within-a-film, and more-or-less real time; it’s sometimes exhausting but always engagingly weird.
5) Lost Indulgence –– A haunting and beautifully shot drama about a woman left crippled in a taxi accident, who goes to live with the widowed wife and son of the taxi’s driver. I’m sure I would have rated this film higher, and would have had more to say about it, but I slept through most of the second half. Such are the casualties of film festivals, unfortunately. I hope to be able to catch it again elsewhere
6) Milosevic on Trial –– A fully competent and occasionally chilling account of the Serbian leader’s war crimes trial, based on actual court tapes and evidentiary video, this TV-style doc effectively transmits the drama and tension of the prosecution’s effort to convict a compulsive liar who had apparently frightened all potential witnesses into denial. It’s not much of a formal triumph, but the film does wrangle recent history into a nail-biter, and that’s an achievement.
7) The Objective –– Daniel Myrick’s Afghanistan-set follow-up to The Blair Witch Project isn’t a disaster…it’s just a boring, and unnecessarily obtuse, waste of an excitingly insane premise. See our preview here.
2001 –– 2001 is 2001––it looked breathtakingly great on Pace University’s big screen, and the experience of watching it with an audience is always a fun one (I can never predict where people are going to laugh). But the after screening discussion, involving a disparate cast of characters including Buzz Aldrin and Matthew Modine, was an unfocused disappointment.
9) Standard Operating Procedure –– see full review here.
10) My Marlon and Brando — Another sterling premise shot in the foot by shoddy execution. The storytelling is simply incompetent––I only understand what became of a major character because I read the press notes––so the fact that this film won an award at the festival for Best New Narrative Filmmaking is a bit baffling.
11) Fauberg Treme: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans –– A miscalculation on the part of Tribeca’s programmers, a deliberately pedestrian history lesson that would seem more appropriate screening in an elementary school library than in a wannabe-world class film festival.
12) The Chicken, The Fish, The King Crab –– A really artsy episode of Iron Chef, with suspense swapped out for subtitles. It’s fine, but again, it doesn’t really belong at a film festival.
13) The Wackness – See review, and know that it could be worse…
14) War, Inc — See review, and know that it doesn’t get any worse.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth