I grew up in Los Angeles and have fractured but fierce memories of seeing movies in Westwood, the theater-packed micro-city surrounding UCLA, in which the Los Angeles Film Festival is now based. I think I saw Jurassic Park four times at the Avco. I know I saw my first Lubitsch movie (Design for Living) at UCLA. Yesterday I was standing in line at Rite Aid and had some kind of out-of-body flashback experience of getting ice cream at the same Rite Aid after my mother took me to a matinee of Flight of the Navigator. I’m sure people go to film festivals in their hometowns all the time and don’t think it’s weird at all, but I get painfully nostalgic. I, like, went to school and stuff, but hanging out in these theaters for entire summers is how I fell in love with movies.
Funny, then, that I’ve been here for almost two full days and I haven’t yet been able to see a single film. Part of this is a scheduling issue––I got in too late on Monday to make it to a screening, and I had already seen many of the films that played yesterday, including Medicine for Melancholy and The Pleasure of Being Robbed. I did actually try to make a screening of Largo, the documentary about the famed Fairfax club, but I, um, went to the wrong theater by mistake and missed it. And then, there were parties to go to. More on that, with photo evidence, after the jump.
The evening began with a cocktail party hosted by Cinemocracy, the Denver Film Society’s initiative to produce a film festival at the Democratic National Convention. They were handing out buttons, which was useful because earlier in the day I had spilled coffee on my dress and I had a spot that I needed to cover up. Here are (l-r) Mike Jones from Variety, Cinetic’s Matt Dentler, Throw Down Your Heart director Sascha Paladino, and Eugene Hernandez from indieWIRE.
From there, it was on to the Sunset Marquis, for a party thrown by IFC to celebrate their films at the festival. I didn’t get pictures of either of these things, but highlights included the flower that Josh Safdie was wearing behind his ear, and a “group spoon”, involving about ten drunk filmmakers lying on the floor in loose embrace. Gregg Araki, pictured above with Strand’s Marcus Hu, was not one of them.
Barry Jenkins, director of Medicine for Melancholy, did spoon. He’s pictured above right, next to Quiet City producer Brendan McFadden, IFC’s Ryan Warner, and muti-hyphenate Michael Lerman.
I have a lot of pictures of Michael Lerman, who wrote a fantastic writeup of the first half of the fest for indieWIRE. Above, he’s pretending to be a wine snob with Amy Seimetz, a producer on Melancholy who is also directing her own feature and appearing in the next film by Joe Swanberg. Below, Lerman and Yeast star Amy Judd.
Then we moved on to the Target Red Room, the Festival’s corporate sponsored party space, where Serge Bozon was DJing. Serge is here with his feature La France, which was described to me as a “World War I pop musical. Obviously, that made me swoon. The filmmaker is a vinyl collector who spent $900 on a handful of 45s hours before his set. In between each song, he’d pop on the mic in heavily-accented English (see above) to introduce the next track with what we eventually figured out were misnomers. “Here we go, with another classic track from Minneapolis!” was one of his favorites, which I think, at one point, he applied to The Ramones; for his finale, announced a “slow song” which turned out to be a ten-minute epic piece of proto punk that was essentially too fast to dance to. But I tried.
Variety critic Robert Koehler captures the magic.
Sales agent Nguyen “Wyn” Tran poses with LAFF programmer Doug Jones.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth