..Leonard
Klady
..David
Poland
..Ray
Pride
..Patricia
Vidal
“Say goodbye to Frankie, Dad.”One of my condo mates had an all-purpose response to everything on Monday night: “I don’t want to hear it! I’ve been carrying this family on my back for a year!” Later in the evening at the IFC party—with their Target-branded Swag-atinis and Isaac Mizrahi gift bags with coordinated cashmere hat, gloves and scarf--two - grown-ups teared up on the smoking balcony, recalling a different line from Jim Sheridan’s 2003 Sundance entry, In America: “Say goodbye to Frankie, Dad.” (William Goldman cites it in his Variety column this week, saying it’s a line he wished he’d written.)
Me, at least, I haven’t seen a movie in my three-and-a-half-days at Slamdance or Sundance with a line or moment of such overflowing emotional weight. But I am fascinated by Mike Hodges’ I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, a steely masterpiece of mood and madness, but that’s a whole other cup of hemlock. Clive Owen holds the screen like Sean Connery and Cary Grant combined. And Hodges’ work has a brutal sentimentality, man as beast: cross my family, cross my friends, I cross you out. Cross my enemies? Give me a ring and I’ll help. An early morning interview with Hodges found him bringing up the great French film directors before I had a chance: Godard, for his invention; Bresson, for the savor of sound; and Jean-Pierre Melville, for his marvelous use of interiors to indicate psychological displacement, and for the parakeet from Le Samourai that hops through I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead.
Ugging out
Tuesday: the first feathery flakes dawdle down. Crows complain. Women’s hands and faces stand out from beneath hats and coats and Uggs and mukluks as if from behind chadors. On the shuttle from headquarters to Main Street, one more of the flying squadrons of associate producers blabs her boss’ business on a cell (“Youngest Living Development Exec Tells All,” there’s a pitch that ought not make it out the door.)
Before the Monday Egyptian screening of I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, there’s a meet-greet-and-eat for Mike Hodges. None of the handful of journos have a breakout movie, or at least to share. A woman’s about to see The Woodsman. “That’s the Kevin Bacon pedophilia movie,
right?” I have to ask. “I think you’d call Harry and Max more of an incest movie,” is another comment. Someone standing to the side strains to summarize all we’ve been hypothesizing, as in the new black: “Pedophilia is the new rape.” A silence hangs like a broken fortune cookie on the floor, one without a fortune.Occasionally, the strains of Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” sound crisply over Main Street. An animal rights group mans a van emblazoned Animal News with video screens displaying animals being mistreated. Outside the Riverhorse Café on Sunday night, a man complains to the person at the door, holding up a business card and his festival i.d., “You let my creative V.P. in, but I’m the executive V.P.”
Discovery Channel launched their first theatrical documentary, a still-untitled documentary by Peter Gilbert to be released in May on the 50-year anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling. The clips shown were striking blunt and often bitter, suggesting not so much has changed in many parts of the country in five decades.
A friend back home points out that Dan Savage’s Savage Love column will doubtless be the last resting place for the dreadful The Butterfly Effect. Spoilers ahead: when I saw the last set of shots of the movie, I actually gasped out loud, thinking that the coincidental passing of this pair on a New York street years later would deal with the larger implications of the time shift theme, ending with something both brave and near-pornographic: with medium long shots and then long shots of the two going to their jobs: he in Tower One, she in Tower Two. It was a scary shot of adrenaline: the movie already dabbled in dark doings, could they? Would they? Nah. Just me keeping myself awake.
A group called Fear
After movies on Sunday, most of the night I found myself sampling Main Street almost at random. I didn’t find out the name of the midnight show at the Egyptian until I’d been waiting for a while: Home of Phobia, which my colleague David Poland characterized as a gay subtext version of the Disney flop Sorority Boys. Yet there was a line-up, a scene. With the press of attitude and entitlement even after the theater had filled, I was expecting cries of “Don’t you know who I think I am?” Instead, while the line-up staff gamely recited the facts to the bristling faces and growing invective, someone from inside passed their priority i.d. across the line, wrapped in a large beige cashmere scarf.
“Sixteen people,” one well-known activist and former New York nightclub owner insisted. “Sixteen people just got in without tickets. The Producer! Does! Not! Have! That right.” Yes, dear reader, I believe he may even have stamped his foot.
At the door to the left of him, more slipped in, calling the names of producer Dan Halsted and William Morris’ Cassian Elwes. An older couple pass, admiring the fracas of loud-mouthed liars and thugs in winter finery. “What’s that all about?” they ask. “Free money,” I had to say with a shrug. “Like hell!” the mustachioed man says with a grin.
As the fun expires, I go toward Cisero’s, the bar that holds the Music Café by day. Turns out Tim Robbins and his band are playing. He’s scowling, crouching beneath his height, guitaring along to lyrics from the honorable tradition called protest. He introduced the next song neatly: “This is a song by a group called Fear.” Another, he sings in a Jeff Tweedy-esque rasp: “Let’s take money away from the lazy people in the slums, I’m a neocon… There’s no god-given right to see eternity.” Tim Robbins is having fun. Tim Robbins is being entertaining. Tim Robbins is not taking anything, at least sweaty under those hot lights and smirking at the beer in his hand, as an entitlement.
Most hateful personal remark of the day: Of a particular indie exec, one colleague says “(He/she)’s really sweet down deep.” “Yeah,” comes the reply, “once you get down to the lower colon.”
