Admittedly, Reeler HQ is abuzz with the Tribeca vibe even as it is deluged with what has become a succession of dodgy and dodgier program selections. As such, I have been branching out to other local writers’ perceptions of what this year’s festival has to offer; Tribeca represents the coin of the critical realm at The Times, New York Magazine, the Voice and Time Out New York, and while the overriding ethos behind the coverge seems to be cautious optimism, some publications’ hometown pride fakes the funk a little more than others.
Take TONY’s ubiquitous Anthony Kaufman, for example, who found time between his RES 9.2 feature about Rachel Boynton and all that life-draining blogging at indieWIRE to write this week’s Tribeca cover story:

Indeed officials praise the festival for fueling the city’s economy and advertising New York as a Hollywood on the Hudson for filmmakers. “Last year, the festival generated $77 million in economic output for the city as a whole, says Katherine Oliver, commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting. “This is a draw not just for the five boroughs, but people from all over the world.” Proving that point, more than 2,000 volunteers from as far away as Brazil and Singapore, will work at this year’s gathering.

But then there are the Tribecans who worry about screening venues’ diffusion uptown, anonymous distributors bitching about films’ quality and festival executive director Peter Scarlet actually calling Tribeca “a retail, not a wholesale festival.” And whither Robert De Niro? Despite TONY handing over its cover and feature well to the actor and his festival, his only appearances are a few minor quotes via e-mail. Co-founder/producer Jane Rosenthal chimes in a little more ebulliently, “The city’s been through a lot, it’s spring in New York–let’s celebrate.”
Yes, let’s!, writes the Voice’s J. Hoberman:

Like the city it celebrates, Tribeca has proven resilient, but like New York, it’s far too sprawling and abrasive to ever attain the grooviness of SXSW or the exclusivity of Telluride. Marketing—yes. Market—we’ll see. Tribeca is very far from rivaling Sundance (or Toronto) as the place at which to sell or launch a movie. True, Oscar nominee Transamerica did have its premiere at the last festival—but only God and Harvey Weinstein know if the Weinstein brothers weren’t already planning to make that acquisition. …

Perhaps such inside baseball is irrelevant. Tribeca executive director Peter Scarlet, longtime head of the San Francisco Film Festival and former director of the Cinémathéque Française, has brought an urbane, genuinely cosmopolitan quality to the selection—choice restorations, an amazing assortment of documentaries, any number of movies wrested away from New Directors/New Films and the Human Rights Watch Film Festival …

The Voice’s critical cabal has at a few specific selections, recommending 40 of the festival’s 174 features while Dennis Lim favorably reviews United 93 and director Paul Greengrass, “who may yet emerge as the Maya Lin of cine-memorialists.” Meanwhile, in other helpful comparisons, Jim Ridley (!) pegs the Luna documentary Tell Me Do You Miss Me as “a grubby indie-rock scale down of The Last Waltz” and Michael Atkinson classifies The Yacoubian Building as “a Cairo-based Gone With the Wind.” Scarlet makes another appearance, actually saying “We don’t break kneecaps” when Lim asks about Tribeca’s proximity to other high-profile festivals:

There are festivals that take place just before us: Full Frame, South by Southwest, New Directors. I think the cards are on the table for the filmmakers to decide what the advantages and disadvantages are.

Yeah, gang, so don’t fuck this one up. And hey, look! There’s Scarlet again in The Times, actually comparing Tribeca to Berlin:

“New York is a big town and has the biggest of everything, so it should not be daunted by having a huge festival,” said Peter Scarlet, the executive director, who pointed out that Berlin, a much smaller city, has a festival with twice as many movies. By sheer numbers TriBeCa can be a bit of a crapshoot: choose unwisely and you could end up in the cinematic equivalent of a table in crowded restaurant next to a really obnoxious, self-impressed grad student who doesn’t know how to tell a story.

That second half, of course, is the Father of The Reeler, David Carr, who contributes a more scattershot, sensuous survey of the festival (“If you’ve had enough of the industrial-strength stuff,” Carr writes, “get a folding chair and a bottle of beer in front of the Ear Inn in SoHo; on a warm spring night it is one of New York’s seminal experiences, with or without a film festival”) while NYT tour guide Ben Sisario provides helpful hints on navigating 15 venues flung from Tribeca to the Upper West Side.
And finally, The Reeler got its hands on New York Magazine critic Logan Hill’s “Tribeca by Numbers.” The piece arrives on newsstands next week, but in the meantime, it provides a useful glimpse at a festival where ambivalence and ambition share a near-blinding spotlight. While Hill heartily recommends Jonestown, Driving Lessons, Once in a Lifetime and the “must-see” restoration of Lionel Bogosin’s On the Bowery, he reveals a more disheartening truth about the “retail festival” that Scarlet praised to TONY:

0 When Tribeca announced that it was adding [Tom] Cruise’s M:I:III to its premieres of Poseidon and United 93, Daily Variety blasted the news across its front page, noting that the fest would be “putting Tribeca’s regular auds through some wrenching emotional gyrations—from viewing real-life tragedy on-screen to watching manufactured disaster and derring-do.” Variety needn’t have worried, because there are exactly zero public tickets available to the premieres of these films. Meanwhile, only M:I:III has made talent (director J. J. Abrams) available for a panel talk.

But amid all of this–all of the mixed reviews before the festival has even begun, all of the hype and red-carpet anticipation, all of the eagerly awaited independent titles–there really is only one essential Tribeca factor to remember. One quality that subsumes the rest. Just remember, no matter how breathlessly excited you are–Robert De Niro is thrilled.

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