Next year, I might take a couple of days off during the Little Rock Film Festival.
Why not? I never use all my vacation anyway, and it's a week-long festival now. It would have been nice to slip over for a couple of afternoons just to see a couple of things that I might not ever have to write about. But that I might write about anyway.
Next year, the festival will be 10 years old. I remember the first one -- that we were nervous for the organizers, that we were afraid no one would show up. I remember that people came. That the lines were long. Screenings were added. It worked, when some people thought it wouldn't.
I know I should have a little more distance on the festival. I should be able to stand back and assess it critically. But it's too late for that, and our town -- our state -- is too small for that. All I can do is be transparent about my feelings toward the festival. I love it. I root for it. I want it to thrive. I want it to continue to contribute to the quality of our lives.
Full disclosure: I'm not an objective observer.
With that in mind, understand that my sense of this year's festival was that it was quietly excellent in that I didn't see a film I didn't like. Granted, I probably saw fewer movies this year than at any previous festival -- filmmakers, maybe with good reason, have become more paranoid about supplying screeners and links. A couple of years ago, I watched maybe 20 of the festival's films in the weeks before the festival. This year I saw a handful.
That's not all bad. There's a qualitative difference in watching a movie in a crowded theater as opposed to an open browser window. You're not really supposed to consume movies the way I sometimes have to, and I'd have preferred to watch Austin, Texas-based Bob Byington's 7 Chinese Brothers or White God (especially White God) on a big screen, but compromises were necessary.
Byington's movie is the sort of intimate, low-key affair that works all right on a smaller screen. It's also the sort of indie amuse-bouche that doesn't benefit from synopsis. It stars Jason Schwartzman as Larry, an underachieving alcoholic who seems to have no ambitions other than providing for his French bulldog (played by Schwartzman's real-life pet, scene-stealing Arrow) and dutifully checking in on his grandmother (Olympia Dukakis). After losing a dead-end job, Larry finds semi-fulfilling employment at a Quick Lube location, where he's smitten by his boss (Eleanore Pienta).
The cast is loaded with hipster in-jokes such as Alex Karpovsky, TV on the Radio frontman Tunde Adebimpe, singer-songwriter Ben Kweller and Alex Ross Perry, who directed Schwartzman in Listen Up Philip. It all sounds terribly self-reflexive and cute.
But it's actually a gentle and soulful movie with some very funny moments. It was picked up for distribution by Screen Media Films after it played SXS, and is currently scheduled for a day and date release in August. So if you missed it, you'll have a chance to see it then. Maybe in a theater.
I was also knocked out by the festival's opening night feature, King Jack, which won the audience award at last month's Tribeca Film Festival. I reviewed it over on the blood, dirt & angels blog, calling it "a film of uncommon power that, better than any movie I can remember, evokes the no-man's land of early adolescence." I said it feels "a little like a less lascivious version of Larry Clark's 1995 film Kids" -- and at the post-screening talk-back, director Felix Thompson agreed with me. He said two touchstones for the film were Kids and Rob Reiner's Stand By Me.
Its young star, Charlie Plummer, is certainly one to watch for -- he has been compared to the young Leonardo Di Caprio. (No pressure there.)
I missed Krisha, which was one of the festival's most talked-about films, but that was a tactical maneuver. The film has been picked up for distribution by red-hot A24, and I suspect it'll have a reasonably wide release later this year.
I did see H., a provocative science fiction mystery by the writing-directing team of Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia that felt a little like a mash-up of Under the Skin and David Lynch's Mulholland Drive.
Probably my favorite film at this year's festival was Onur Tukel's Applesauce, a dark comedy that won one of the festival's top prizes, the Golden Rock Award for Best Narrative Film. It's a fantastically funny movie, filled with sparkling naturalistic dialogue contrasted with surreal, heightened sequels of cartoonish gore. I hope it gets a wide release because it's a smart and enjoyable movie that plays with the conventions of mystery films, crime procedurals and horror movies while remaining rooted in recognizable reality.
A couple of years ago I saw Tukel's vampire horror-comedy Summer of Blood, and while I enjoyed it, I took it for a minor movie that could have benefited from some behind-the-camera professionalism. But Applesauce is a revelation: a movie that feels like a collaboration between the best versions of Woody Allen and Kevin Smith. I hope I get a chance to write more about this film later -- Tukel strikes me as a singular cinematic talent, and Applesauce deserves a wider audience.
I've yet to see Crocodile Gennadiy, the Golden Rock winner in the documentary category, but I did pick up all the award-winning Made in Arkansas films: Jason Miller's The Whisperers, which won the Charles B. Pierce award for Best Film Made In Arkansas; Jarrod Paul Beck 's Perfect Machine, for which Beck won Best Direction of a Made in Arkansas Film; The Grace of Jake, which features Andrew Walker, winner of the Best Performance in a Made in Arkansas Film award; and Cole Borgstad's Pyro, which won Best Youth Film.
I still have a lot to catch up on -- there were six blocks of Arkansas shorts this year, and my biggest regret is missing Sweaty Betty, which I'm given to believe is about a 1,000-pound pig a couple of teenagers raised in the hope that she'd become the next Washington Redskins' mascot. (The film, which drew raves when it played at SXSW, was awarded a Jury Special Mention Award for Cinematic Nonfiction.)
Maybe I'll do better next year. Maybe I'll take a couple of days off.
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MovieStyle on 05/22/2015