By Other Voices voices@moviecitynews.com

LAFF 2009 Wrap

Posted Saturday, June 27th, 2009 - Comments Off on LAFF 2009 Wrap
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The stars and film fans were out in force for the 2009 Los Angeles Film Festival, whose slate included indie fest circuit faves, arthouse foreign fare and mainstream popcorn flicks. Fun at the fest ranged from Johnny Depp and Christian Bale on the red carpet for Public Enemies, to transforming robots in summer tentpole Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, to the anime brilliance of Hayao Miyazaki in the Americanized version of Ponyo. Here’s a wrap of reviews of some of the diverse films from the fest.

Ponyo

I realize that American audiences often find subtitles difficult to swallow, and further realize that in trying to market Miyazaki’s films to younger audiences, studios are targeting a demographic that might not be able to read subtitles anyhow, so I appreciate the necessity of dubbing Miyazaki’s films for this market. But that doesn’t mean I have to like the end result, although I can hope that seeing dubbed Miyazaki might eventually serve as a gateway of sorts to encourage older kids and adults to explore Miyazaki’s work in the original Japanese.

Weather Girl

Weather Girl is looking to explore larger issues around women past their early 30s begin to be perceived as running out of time, both in careers and relationships. Faced at the age of 35 with having completely start her life over at a time when YouTube has made her outburst about Dale’s affair fodder for public amusement and mockery (and, in the process, made a mockery of any serious job prospects for her), Sylvia’s at first at a complete loss for how to move forward. A date with a dorky accountant (Jon Cryer) pretty much lays out Sylvia’s situation: she’s past the age of being able to afford to be too picky, and her life has now been reduced to the possibility of considering a business-like relationship with guys like this. Or is it?

Mid-August Lunch

This is a simple, charming film that relies on human emotion and interaction rather than slapstick comedy, and it generates more smiles and chuckles than belly laughs, but Gianni and his elderly charges are funny and human, and the way the film deals with aging, and the respect and care afforded elders by their children is enough to give pause to audiences in America, where we keep our lives so perpetually busy that there’s little room in them for us to do anything with our own aging parents but tuck them away into “retirement” homes.

West of Pluto

Unfortunately, once it breaks away from the mockumentary style it begins with into attempting to construct an actual plot for the teens to follow, the film devolves into a not-terribly-interesting storyline that includes all the usual suspects of teen bad behavior: cruelty to peers, sibling battles, hormones, unrequited adolescent love, rudeness toward the ‘rents, and a birthday party that goes out of control. (In other words, everything we’ve seen teens do in just about every teen film ever made.)

We Live in Public

Harris was right, mostly, about what would happen within the model of this very public community setting; for his next project, “We Live in Public,” Harris and his then-girlfriend became the subjects, living their lives completely on-camera, online all the time, while the people who followed the site commented on what they were doing at any given moment and took sides in the couple’s increasingly frequent fights. Eventually Harris’s girlfriend left him and his own mental stability collapsed along with the dot com boom. He lost most of his money and ended up moving to Ethiopia to hide from creditors.

Convention

With remarkable access behind-the-scenes (particularly given the security concerns), Schack and his team capture the human moments behind the convention machine: the young reporter assigned for her first-ever political beat to cover the convention; the editorial and writing staff of the Denver Post, working their asses off to capture this historic occasion happening in their own backyard while struggling to keep up with and compete against all the journalists from out-of-state; the city officials charged with organizing things at their end while coordinating with the team responsible for the convention itself, and a merry band of protesters there to remind those watching that the first step toward losing your freedoms is failing to use them.

Public Enemies

Is Public Enemies (A) an astute exploration of the mind and soul of one of the century’s most notorious bank robbers; (B) a Robin Hood tale about a legendary folk hero/outlaw; (C) a good/evil story about an outlaw and the law man who brings him to justice; or (D) None of the above?

Transformers 2

It’s not so much that the story is inherently bad; it’s more that it seems no one bothered to put one in at all, and worse, that no one seems to have cared — which is all the more surprising given that two of the screenwriters involved also penned the new Star Trek, which had a storyline that was actually interesting. This film, though is two-and-a-half hours of special effects masturbation that didn’t need to be longer than 90 minutes, max.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon