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Residing in a city with a
film festival that has trouble getting its big name honorees to
show up (failure might be impossible, but so is luring Pam Grier
and Lainie Kazan to Upstate after Columbus Day), it practically
made me giggle to hear that the 6th annual Sarasota
Film Festival, which wrapped this past Sunday, didn't even
have an honoree for their Regal Career Achievement Award until
four days before the presentation ceremony (it was The
Human Stain's Robert Benton).
That didn't stop them from
selling out the event (well in advance) and an impressive number
of their screenings (rumor has it that even a visiting film critic
was shut out of a handful of films).
Here's the dish on the notable entries, not counting films
that have played in Rochester at our various festivals (Tupperware!,
Gypsy 83), regular
theatrical engagements (Monster)
or simply sound like they were shot at Hegedorn's (Meet Market).
THE
GOOD:
The
title of Campbell Scott's Off the Map, which won the
festival’s Audience Award for Best Drama, refers to the
homestead of the Groden family of Taos, New Mexico, which is so
far from civilization, the idea of running water, telephone
service and electricity isn't even an afterthought.
Newcomer Valentina de Angelis plays 11-year-old Bo, a
precocious home-schooled tomboy who, over the course of one
summer, watches her father's (Sam Elliott) crippling depression
smashed to bits by, among other things, both a surprise IRS audit
and credit card purchase to end all credit card purchases. Joan Allen is mesmerizingly un-Joan Allen-y as Bo's trippy
mom, but de Angelis holds it all together with a performance just
as strong, coltish, and out of left field as Keisha Castle-Hughes
in Whale Rider.
Look for it in late spring.
THE
FUN:
There's
something timeless about stories involving nice, normal people who
end up in some dusty hick town and become embroiled in a whole lot
of craziness. At
least when they don't take themselves super-seriously, anyway. You get just that in The Mummy an' the Armadillo,
which made its world premiere in Sarasota.
J.S. Cardone, who adapted the film from his own play, uses
a great cast to show us what happens when a preacher's wife (Clare
Kramer) stops into a ramshackle Route 66 bar run by a family
(Betty Buckley, Brad Renfro, Johnathon Schaech) who turns out to
be just as psychotic – but slightly less violent – than the
Sawyers from The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
The
Big Empty, written and directed by Rochester native Steve
Anderson, comes off as a U-Turn-ish tale of a struggling
actor named John (Jon Favreau) who can wipe out his credit card
debt by delivering a mysterious suitcase to Baker, California,
where, predictably, he runs into an assortment of colorful
characters including, but not limited to, the crazy motel clerk
(Jon Gries), the helpful barmaid (Daryl Hannah), the friendly
hooker (Melora Walters) and the local whackjob (Adam Beach) who
thinks John is making eyes at his girl (Rachael Leigh Cook). But it's still a lot of fun, and it has the common courtesy
to take a pretty surprising turn in the last act.
THE
SHIRLEY HENDERSON:
She of tiny stature and
bushy eyebrows starred in two of the festival's better offerings.
Lone Scherfig's Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself,
co-written by Dogme mastermind Anders Thomas Jensen, is a very
effective romantic comedy of sorts. The titular Wilbur (Jamie
Sives) is perhaps the world's worst nursery school employee and
– yes – has a penchant for attempting suicide at every given
opportunity. But Wilbur has undergone a number of recent changes
in his life, including the death of his father, the inheritance of
a used bookshop and the beginnings of a crush on his devoted
brother's new wife (Henderson).
Due in Rochester this spring.
Henderson
also appears in the creepy Hypnotic (Close Your Eyes)
as a plucky,
overachieving cop who enlists the services of a down-and-out
shrink (Goran Visnjic) to help her catch a kiddie killer lovingly
dubbed The Tattoo Murderer. Miranda
Otto, Paddy Considine and Fiona Shaw co-star, as does Colin
Farrell (though if you blink, you'll miss him).
Could be shown locally this summer.
YEAR
OF THE DOC, REDUX:
Continuing their
impressive 2003 run for the record books, Sarasota's documentary
films covered a wide variety of subjects in stellar detail. There
was The Sweatbox (about Sting creating the music for
Disney's The Emperor's New Groove), recent Oscar snubbee The
Story of the Weeping Camel (about trying to get a
camel to accept its ugly calf), Paper Clips (about a
Tennessee high school's sobering attempt to create a Holocaust
memorial within throwing distance of both the Scopes Monkey Trial
and the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan), and Game Over:
Kasparov and the Machine (about the controversial defeat
of grandmaster Garry Kasparov at the maniacal hands of Deep Blue).
Something
you might see turn up at High Falls is Year of the Woman,
a documentary about the role of women at the 1972 Democratic
Convention that hadn't been publicly screened in 32 years before
playing Sarasota. Director
Sandra Hochman's intentions are noble, and Year is at its
best when she corners celebrities and political bigwigs like
Michael Moore's mother (in one scene, you can practically hear Dan
Rather, Mike Wallace and Pierre Salinger load their pants), but
the ham-fisted inclusion of Hochman's poetry just doesn't fit in
the mix. And
sometimes her point is taken a step too far, like when she accuses
a delegate from the Virgin Islands of promoting a vacation spot
with a sexist name. Art Buchwald steals the show with a bit in which he imagines
what it would be like if women took over the world, astutely
commenting on how it would lead to the death of every form of
humor.
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