The Festival’s finale sizzles with
the lesbian centered Iranian family drama, Circumstance; the late Sidney
Lumet’s wildly entertaining Dog Day Afternoon; the surviving lover of
Yves Saint Laurent details life with a manic-depressive fashion maestro (Kabuki
5-3 & 5); plus a restored sci-fi by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and
Christopher Munch’s fictional meditation, Letters from Big Man, on a
female hydrologist and Bigfoot. (Kabuki 4-29 5-3/New People 5-5)
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Circumstance: As queer women and men come out at
religious schools like Baylor, Belmont and Abilene Christian, Maryam Keshavarz
plants her sixteen-year-old girl loving heroines firmly in the belly of the
beast: 7th Century worshipping, 21st Century pop/tech
obsessed Teheran. How do young lesbians survive in a society lubricated by
theology, bribes and arranged marriages? The wealthy Atafeh (Nikohl Boosheri)
finds a willing playmate in orphan Shireen (Sarah Kazemy). At first the girls
harmlessly bond around swimming, singing and underground dance clubs. Trouble
comes knocking in the form of Atafeh’s drug addled brother Mehran: Reza Sixo Safai
is deliciously smarmy in the manner of a young John Cassavetes pimping Mia
Farrow to the witches in Rosemary’s Baby. Mehran’s insidious video
espionage on his family reminds us of early Atom Egoyan.
Keshavarz demonstrates why a
wealthy, secular leaning family is vulnerable to the morality cops’ insidious
powers. Fear, loathing and paranoia are tempered by exuberant scenes of young
queers dubbing a pirated version of Milk.
(Kabuki 5-1/3)
Dog Day Afternoon (1975): There are serious career
peaks for Al Pacino, as a hapless, bi-sexual bank robber, Charles Durning gives
an operatic twist to screen clichés about profanity spouting Irish-American cops
and director Sidney Lumet mixes pratfalls and pathos in a true life story that
delicately tap dances around a minefield of homophobic innuendo.
Lumet -- screenplay from Festival
honoree Frank Pierson, layered with comic grace notes – sets us down in a
garbage strewn, oppressively hot Gotham just as three inept amateurs turn a
penny-ante heist, designed to pay for a sex-change operation, into a
media-fueled fiasco.
Pacino’s Sonny – filmed at the apex
of the actor’s incendiary beauty: wild-eyed, jittery and seductive, like an
adult version of one of Caravaggio’s guttersnipe boy hustlers – is tragic
clown, passive-aggressive conman, and feral chorus: a penultimate moment comes
as Sonny incites a mob to turn on the cops with the chant of “Attica, Attica.”
Vito Russo accused Lumet of
exploiting an incendiary queer story for a mass audience, for once I disagree
with the Celluloid Closet’s now sacred text. In his insightful memoir, Making
Movies, Lumet explains his efforts to protect the story from potential
audience backlash, so that when Sonny dictates his will “to Ernie, who I love
as no man has ever loved another man,” the audience will, inspired by what Lumet
describes as Pacino’s “mad courage,” see past the characters’ surface
freakiness to reach an emotional catharsis affirming our common humanity.
(Kabuki/4-30/Frank Pierson Tribute)
Mind the Gap: This mind bending shorts program has a
large queer contingent. (Kabuki 5-1)
All the Flowers in Time: Houston raised Jonathan Caouette
grew up thinking that the red eye look in snap shot photos meant he had demons
inside of him. In this funny/creepy short starring Chloe Sevigny, the creator
of the hyper-queer memoir Tarnation uses awesome CGI effects and
childish pranks to demonstrate what’s missing in Hollywood scary flicks.
Lost Lake: “Doesn’t anyone just give no
strings attached head anymore?” Zackary Drucker takes his LA based performance
act to the screen in this flirty, sassy homage to gender bending sexual
fetishes. Drucker has something to amuse and freak out nearly everybody.
The D Train: Bay Area found footage guru Jay
Rosenblatt pulls off a scintillating memory piece of an elderly man remembering
his life, while taking the famous Bronx to Brooklyn subway. The crazy quilt of
other peoples’ lost home movies makes an odd statement about the slippery sands
of time.
World on a Wire (1973): Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s
sci-fi cyber punk tale is 204
freshly restored minutes from one of the strangest and most
prolific sensibilities to emerge from the ashes of the Third Reich. (PFA 4-30)
Page One: A Year Inside The New York Times:
Andrew Rossi tours the “Gray Lady’s” expensive Big Apple HQ’s to see how our
great secular Jewish newspaper is defying the death spiral of the American
industry, or is it? An unlikely star emerges: former drug addict turned
irreverent hot charging investigative reporter Dave Carr whose expletive
undeleted lingo is not exactly fit to print. Asked if he’s afraid for his
future at the embattled Times Carr chirps, “I’ve been a single parent on
welfare – this is nothing.” As he pursues an investigative piece on the frat
house atmosphere at a rival chain, he chuckles “I have a scary voice on the
phone and it definitely scares you to gat a call from the New York Times.”
(Kabuki 4-29 & New People 5-1)
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Better This World: Kelly Duane de la Vega and Katie
Galloway offer a suspenseful, disconcerting cautionary tale of two boys from
George W’s hometown, Midland, Texas. Brad Crowder and Dave McKay find
themselves in the crosshairs of an FBI terrorist probe at the 2008 GOP
convention in Minneapolis. “When we left Austin it was like a camping trip.”
Brad and Dave grow up before our eyes as they acquire a radical mentor: the
trash talking Brandon Darby. “I stated they were going to put us in jail with
people who would ass rape us.” Tension mounts as Brad and Dave are charged with
violent insurrection and are shocked to discover the identity of the government’s
mole. The filmmakers’ access to the defendants, the prosecutor and the mole
makes this an unusually thorough and timely exploration of a high profile
“domestic terrorism” trial. (Kabuki 4-23 & 29/PFA 4-26)
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Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975: As I write this I’m
staring at one of stranger pieces of 70’s memorabilia: a J. Edgar Hoover
authorized FBI wanted poster for one Angela Yvonne Davis: for interstate
flight, murder and kidnapping. It’s one of the treats of Goran Hugo Olsson’s
dip into Swedish TV’s archive on the American Black power movement that this
may be the first time in nearly a half century that we get to sample a vital
part of the Sixties unfiltered by Caucasian paranoia. Davis’ towering fro is as
much a statement as her dialectical materialism. No serious political person
today would be caught dead or alive under such an imposing do. This splendid
doc will someday make a witty double bill with the Paddy Chayefsky/Sidney Lumet
satire Network. (Kabuki 4-30 & New People 5-3)
La Dolce Vita (1960): Fellini’s spin on Rome’s
burgeoning tabloid centered “sweet life” is an homage to the shockingly
handsome and emotionally taciturn Marcello Mastroianni, then at the dawn of a
fabulous reign as Italy’s most iconic male star. (Castro 5-1)
Life, Above All: Oliver Schmitz’s slow moving but
harrowing South African coming-of-age drama finds a young girl facing steep
odds as she confronts an AIDS infected mom, a best friend flirting with truck
stop prostitution and a rural community indulging superstitions and a shame
based culture’s dread of losing face. (Kabuki 4-28)
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Incendies: “We want revenge, and blood.” Persian Gulf
headlines can numb the senses, while fiction film can take us under the skins
of victims and perpetrators. In the opening of Quebec director Denis Villeneuve’s
emotionally complex mosaic on family ties as a prism for grasping almost
unimaginable violence, twins Jeanne and Simon hear a garrulous notary read the
baffling instructions from their mom’s will. Dead mom wants Jeanne and Simon to
travel to her birth country (a fictional Lebanon) to locate a dad who’s played
no part in their lives and even more perplexing an older brother whose shadowy
existence becomes the story’s central mystery and controlling metaphor.
While Jeanne embraces her punishing plunge
into mom’s battle to survive as a Christian woman the internecine struggles
between as many as 17 hostile tribes, Simon is still pissed at this final
obstacle to becoming a complacent Canadian.
Based on Wajdi Mouawad’s play, the
film is grounded in a galvanizing turn by Lubna Azabal as mom – who we glimpse
in shocking tableaus like a guerrilla army’s burning of a bus load of women and
kids. Incendies lures us inside an ancient culture that has made a fine
art of the slaughter of innocents. (Kabuki 5-2 & 5)