Entries associated with the tag "Film Festivals":

Given that there are only a handful of narrative archetypes—I used to be able to rattle them off, but college was a long time ago—it's not surprising that, watching two dozen features over six days at the Toronto film festival, I sometimes thought I was watching the same one over again. That's not necessarily a rap against any of the filmmakers, because the details are what make an old story come alive. But in at least two cases, the similarities helped me clarify what separates a good movie from an exceptional one.

One of the festival's biggest buzz movies was Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, which ended a distribution drought on Monday when Fox Searchlight picked up the U.S. rights for $4 million. Its main attraction is Mickey Rourke's unimpeachable performance as a washed-up wrestling star who's still riding on the fumes of his 80s glory when a coronary forces him into retirement for good. Rourke is one of those actors who's always working (since Diner made him a star in 1982, he's appeared in a whopping 50 features) but who's become such an industry punchline that any good role is inevitably heralded as a comeback. In The Wrestler he looks like a truck ran over him, but I can't think of many 52-year-old actors still ripped enough to get away with this role; the real subtext of The Wrestler is Rourke's indomitability, not the character's. The story is fairly sentimental—more Requiem for a Heavyweight than Requiem for a Dream—and the wrestler's relationships with his estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) and a stripper with a heart of gold (Marisa Tomei, another jaw-dropping specimen at 43) are pretty familiar. But the grimy details of life at the bummed-out bottom of the wrestling circuit are so convincing that I was pulled into the story anyway.

The same tale unfolds with a lot more energy, wit, and meta-movie flash in JCVD, a French action flick starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. Writer-director Mabrouk el Mechri befriended the Muscles From Brussels and wrote him the comeback role of all time—as himself, a washed-up action hero whose early 90s stardom in movies like Timecop and Universal Soldier has deteriorated into a life churning out straight-to-video martial arts flicks. People badger him on the street for autographs, making embarrassing remarks about his fading career; in a child custody hearing, his daughter testifies on the stand that classmates make fun of her whenever daddy's movies come on TV. When Van Damme blunders into a hostage crisis in a post office, the hostages look expectantly to him for heroic action, while the bad guys try to exploit his fame in negotiating with the police, who've set up a command post in the video store across the street. JCVD functions perfectly well as an action vehicle, but it's also a funny and poignant look at a man who can no longer live up to the exploits of his youth.

Another French production screening at Toronto—and scheduled for the Chicago film festival in October—was I've Loved You So Long, the debut feature of novelist Philippe Claudel. As the film opens, a middle-aged woman (Kristin Scott Thomas) is waiting for her much younger sister (Elsa Zylberstein) to pick her up at the airport; the woman has just been paroled from prison after 15 years, and before long Claudel reveals that she was convicted of killing her six-year-old son. Claudel withholds the details of the crime until the very end—you'd think a novelist would know better than to play around like that—exploring instead whether the killer, who moves in with her sister's family for the time being, can ever be accepted again by them or the larger community. Thomas acquits herself admirably as the remote, hardened woman, but when the truth finally comes out, it's considerably less heinous than one might have imagined. I've Loved You So Long purports to be about living with guilt, but in the end Claudel seems more intent on ameliorating it.

Where Claudel promises, Jonathan Demme delivers. Rachel Getting Married begins with a young woman (Anne Hathaway in a decidedly unglamorous role) getting picked up from her drug-treatment facility so she can attend her sister's wedding. Like the Thomas character, she's treated with a mixture of anger and alarm by her sister, her milquetoast father, and the assorted relatives who've gathered for the nuptials, and the reason for this emerges soon enough: years earlier, as a drugged-out teen, Hathaway drove into a lake, drowning her preschool brother. In contrast to the well-mannered I've Loved You So Long, Rachel Getting Married gets messier as it goes along, ripping the scabs off the dysfunctional family. (Declan Quinn's handheld photography contributes to the sense of barely contained chaos.) I've Loved You So Long contrives to isolate and alleviate the heroine's responsibility for a child's death, but in Rachel Getting Married, the responsibility seeps slowly outward, staining everyone.

TORONTO—Four days into the Toronto film festival, I've seen many fine features, and four that were excellent: Agnes Varda's delightful, career-spanning memoir The Beaches of Agnes; Jonathan Demme's vertiginous domestic drama Rachel Getting Married; Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's melancholy immigrant tale Sugar, and Joel and Ethan Coen's cruelly funny farce Burn After Reading. But the only film so far that's really turned me inside out is Kelly Reichardt's minimalist, ultra-low-budget indie Wendy and Lucy.

Readers might remember Reichardt's previous feature, Old Joy, which premiered in Chicago at the Gene Siskel Film Center in September 2006 and played for a week at the Music Box two months later. Part landscape film, part muted drama, it followed two old friends (Daniel London and Will Oldham) as they try to rekindle their relationship with a road trip to a natural spring out in the wilderness. Like many such reunions, their time together only confirms that they no longer really understand each other, and the sadness of their dead friendship is objectified by the passing of lush greenery into crummy industrial landscape as they drive home.

Wendy and Lucy is similarly low-key and landscape-oriented, taking place in a hick town in Oregon, but its simple story also delivers a profound social punch. Wendy, played with impressive restraint by Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain), is homeless and sleeping in her car, trying to make her way north so she can find work in a cannery. Her only companion is her beloved mutt, Lucy, who she makes the dire mistake of tying up outside a grocery store before she goes in to steal some food. Caught red-handed, Wendy spends 12 hours at the police station, and by the time she gets out, Lucy has long since disappeared.

Presenting her film at the AMC theater in Toronto, Reichardt explained that she and coscreenwriter Jonathan Raymond began working on the story after listening to the conservative backlash and "contempt for poverty" that immediately followed Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Some commentators, she recalled, couldn't fathom the idea that you can't escape a storm zone if you're too poor to own a car. In her movie, Wendy has no safety net whatsoever—no job, no insurance, no assets except for her beater. She's one mishap away from falling through the cracks forever, and in its haunting finale, Wendy and Lucy recalls no less than Mervyn LeRoy's classic Depression-era drama I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932).

Remarkably, when Wendy and Lucy opens in Chicago this December, it will be the second high-profile American indie this year to stare poverty in the face, after Courtney Hunt's thriller Frozen River. This may be box-office suicide, but it's also a hell of a dramatic device. Most movies do all sorts of huffing and puffing to raise the stakes for their characters, but when you don't have a dime to your name, just pulling a meal together can be a matter of life and death.

The Sundance Film Festival, which runs January 18 through 29 in Park City, Utah, has announced its line-up of dramatic and documentary features. Among the titles for 2007 are new films by Gregg Araki (Mysterious Skin), Luc Besson (The Fifth Element), Craig Brewer (Hustle and Flow), Nick Broomfield (Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer), Steve Buscemi (Trees Lounge), Tom DiCillo (Box of Moonlight), David Gordon Green (Undertow), Hal Hartley (Henry Fool), actor Anthony Hopkins, Tamara Jenkins (Slums of Beverly Hills), Justin Lin (Better Luck Tomorrow), Rod Lurie (The Contender), Brett Morgen (The Kid Stays in the Picture), Julien Temple (The Filth and the Fury), actor Justin Theroux, screenwriter Mike White (School of Rock), and Jessica Yu (In the Realms of the Unreal).

The festival will open with Morgen's Chicago 10, a documentary about the conspiracy trials that followed the 1968 Democratic Convention. Other likely gossip-magnets are Jarrett Schaefer's Chapter 27, a drama starring Jared Leto as John Lennon's assassin, Mark David Chapman, and Waitress, the last feature by actress-writer-director Adrienne Shelly, who was allegedly murdered November 1 in her Manhattan apartment.

A comprehensive round-up by Anthony Kaufman can be found at Indiewire, while David M. Halbfinger offers a more thematic overview in the New York Times. Festival director Godfrey Gilmore told the Times, "There’s a real change that’s gone on from the insularity of a decade ago. It really brings you back to a sense of a new form of American independent film as an engaged cinema. You start to watch films gradually think about not only that sense that the world’s about to change, but how to change it.”

Maybe, but it's worth remembering what happened to the two films singled out by the Times at Sundance 2006. Little Miss Sunshine, a glorified sitcom about a dysfunctional family driving to California for a kiddie beauty pageant, was given a blue-chip promotional campaign and has since grossed almost $59 million. Right at Your Door, a low-budget thriller about a dirty bomb going off in Los Angeles, still hasn't been released.