People fall asleep in movies.
It happens more often during film festivals. I see it all the time. Usually at press and industry screenings, where professional moviegoers are (usually) able to spread out over a theater that's a quarter full. It probably happens more these days, now that most theaters have upgraded their seats.
Still, it doesn't happen to me a lot.
But it happened at this year's Tribeca Film Festival. It wan't the movie's fault. I'd had a late night and had been running around New York since 6 a.m. Under those circumstances, an early-evening showing of an Italian family drama (Laura Bispuri's Figlia Mia -- which was nominated for the Golden Bear at this year's Berlin International Film Festival -- has been generally well-received by critics and which I'll have to actually watch if I want to review it) might not have been the best idea.
While it's not exactly tough duty, there's something unhealthy about watching movies all day. I've learned to limit myself to four, maybe five under extraordinary circumstances. It doesn't take long for the films to start blending together. I don't know how some of my colleagues can watch films from 9 or 10 a.m. until after midnight.
I've tried that. Just doesn't work. And there are plenty of other ways to work at a film festival -- going to the festival lounge can be productive. Last year I came home with an idea for my Spirits column. This year we spent a hour or so chatting with a producer of documentary films about her involvement with rescuing animals. And, in case you missed last week's column, we got to see Patti Smith in concert.
So it's OK to miss a few movies and movie-like entertainment products at a festival, even (fairly) high interest premieres such as Cobra Kai, the web series sequel to 1984's The Karate Kid that reunites original stars Ralph Macchio and William Zabka. That's no problem, as the series falls outside the parameters of what we generally cover here. Besides, it's already streaming on YouTube Red.
(This year's Tribeca featured 18 projects created specifically for television or streaming platforms, eight series premieres, three season premieres, one midseason premiere, two feature documentaries, and five indie pilots. While we can argue about what a movie is, the reality is that fewer and fewer people are bothering to draw a distinction. The Cannes Film Festival's decision to ban films from streaming services such as Netflix seems regressive in light of the way most of us consume entertainment.)
I didn't see Diane, which won won Best Narrative Feature, Best Screenplay, and Best Cinematography in the U.S. Narrative Feature Film section of the festival and almost universal critical praise. But my colleague and wife and founding editor of this section did see it, and she didn't care for it.
I also missed All About Nina, which stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead as an aspiring standup comic. I'd like to have caught it because it seems to me there are an awful lot of projects exploring the process and progress of standup comedians right now (HBO's Crashing, Amazon's The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Showtime's I'm Dying Up Here) and have been meaning to write about the trend.
I'm sorry I missed McQueen, Ian Bonhote and Peter Ettedgui's portrait of doomed British fashion designer Alexander McQueen, and Lisa Dapolito's documentary portrait of comedian Gilda Radner, Love Gilda, but maybe I'll have a second chance at one or both of them at this year's Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. I didn't see Ethan Hawke in Stockholm (although I did see his film Blaze, which stars former Little Rock resident Ben Dickey as the legendary Malvern-born songwriter Blaze Foley and wasn't part of the festival -- it's excellent and we'll have much more on it later) or Sarah Jessica Parker in Blue Night.
But I did see Michael Mayer's take on the Anton Chekov play The Seagull, which features a remarkable cast (led by Annette Bening, Elisabeth Moss, Corey Stoll and Saoirse Ronan). It seems an improvement on Sidney Lumet's respectable 1968 version (which features a fantastic performance from Vanessa Redgrave). I'd heard rumors that the play could be funny, but I'd before never seen it done.
And I caught the almost-too-quirky Smuggling Hendrix, Marios Piperides' set-in-Cyprus shaggy-dog story that won Best International Narrative Feature, and the intriguing if not quite coherent State Like Sleep, which starts out as a murder mystery, with an excellent Katherine Waterston investigating the suspicious "suicide" of her husband, a Belgian movie star (Michel Huisman), and turns into something more intriguing when an American businessman (Michael Shannon) shows up. While the commercial prospects for the movie are modest, it's one to look for when it shows up on cable (it feels like something you might have encountered on Cinemax in the mid-1990s).
Zoe also feels like that, though not in such a good way. Despite an impressive cast with Ewan McGregor, Lea Seydoux, Theo James and Rashida Jones, this science-fiction parable about a lonely robot and her cringe-inducing creator might be better realized in a recent two-episode arc on HBO's Silicon Valley. The actors all acquit themselves well, but the theme has already produced a slew of better movies, from Blade Runner to Ex Machina.
And thanks to friendly publicists and the miracle that is the digital age, my festival viewing is still not quite over. I have a few films still in the queue, including Gabrielle Brady's Island of the Hungry Ghosts, a documentary exploration of Christmas Island that has been getting great notices; Jeremiah Zagar's Sundance Award-Winning debut feature We the Animals; journalist Assia Boundaoui's The Feeling of Being Watched, her investigation into a decades-long FBI counter-terrorism probe of a Chicago-are Arab-American neighborhood outside of Chicago, the documentary House Two, which dives deeply into the military justice system, and quite a few others.
I'll get around to all of them. If I can manage to stay awake.
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MovieStyle on 05/04/2018