{"id":15112,"date":"2020-10-12T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-10-12T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=15112"},"modified":"2020-10-11T21:50:39","modified_gmt":"2020-10-12T04:50:39","slug":"crooked-marquees-new-york-film-festival-2020-diary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/crooked-marquees-new-york-film-festival-2020-diary\/","title":{"rendered":"Crooked Marquee’s New York Film Festival 2020 Diary"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

With two fall festivals down, I have this to say about covering \u201cvirtual film festivals\u201d: I do not like it one bit. I am, of course, lucky to even be accredited (many deserving folks were not), and lucky to even do this for a living, etc. etc. But the fact of the matter, as Monica Castillo detailed in her TIFF diary<\/a>, is that you simply can\u2019t cover a film festival from home with anything resembling focus or immersion \u2013 there are distractions at home, of course, but more importantly, there\u2019s a sense of discovery that\u2019s simply impossible to recreate under these circumstances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When you\u2019re at a film festival, you see things because that\u2019s what you\u2019re there to do; when you\u2019re covering a film festival from home, there are all these other things<\/em> \u2013 work and family and life <\/em> \u2013 to do as well. And thus you never find yourself with a three-hour hole to fill between something you\u2019ve been assigned and something buzzy, and end up stumbling into something that blows your mind. I suppose it\u2019s possible for this to happen in a virtual setting. It just didn\u2019t happen for me<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nevertheless! I took in as many films as I could at this year\u2019s New York Film Festival, which offered up plenty of fine titles \u2013 new and old \u2013 and came up with some pretty inventive ways<\/a> to screen them as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAre you still doin\u2019 the van thing?\u201d her sister asks. \u201cCome and stay with us, we\u2019re worried about you.\u201d But Fern (Frances McDormand), the woman at the center of Chlo\u00e9 Zhao\u2019s Nomadland<\/em><\/strong>, doesn\u2019t want them to worry  \u2013 \u201cI like<\/em> work,\u201d she insists, and Fern and the other \u201cnomads,\u201d people \u201cdoin\u2019 the van life,\u201d live simply out of their vehicles and travel the country, running a circuit of seasonal temp work. As with her earlier The Rider<\/em> and Songs My Brothers Taught Me<\/em>, Zhao is fascinated by scenes and subcultures, embedding herself and her camera into these worlds, and casting real people as slightly fictionalized versions of themselves. It\u2019s a generous way to make a movie, and she\u2019s a generous filmmaker; she knows exactly how much (or, more precisely, how little) we need of each scene, and McDormand and co-star David Straithairn are such natural, grounded presences that they blend beautifully with the rest of the cast. And its closing passages are absolutely breathtaking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Speaking of generosity, let\u2019s talk about Lucas Hedges in French Exit<\/em><\/strong>. It\u2019s a film that seems constructed to showcase the talents of Michelle Pfeiffer, who is (predictably enough) phenomenal in it. And a lesser actor might\u2019ve been intimidated by that, and tried to pull focus or show her up in some way. Hedges goes the other way, with a quiet and inverted performance, appropriate for a character who has spent much of his life in his flamboyant mother\u2019s shadow, and grown comfortable there. The film around those performances, written and directed by Azazel Jacobs (The Lovers<\/em>), is darkly funny and delightfully loopy, harnessing both genuine wit and pathos, and turning on a dime between them, with nary a stumble.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mexican filmmaker Yulene Olaizola takes a potentially discomforting exploitation movie premise and turns it into something wild and unpredictable in Tragic Jungle<\/em><\/strong>. Set in the 1920s in the Rio Hondo \u2013 the border between Mexico and what is now Belize \u2013 it tells the story of young Agnes (Indira Andrewin), who barely escapes the British landowner she is to marry, and flees into the jungle. There, she stumbles upon a group of gum tree workers, hiding out with them as they slowly fall under her spell. Though there are many more of them (most of them armed), the power dynamics don\u2019t shake out as expected. The results are riveting, as blood is spilled (among other fluids), a class struggle is mounted, and her would-be husband attempts to claim what\u2019s his. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

David Byrne\u2019s American Utopia<\/em><\/strong> <\/strong>is set up as a home run; the Talking Heads front-man honed it as a touring show before its Broadway run, cooking up a nicely balanced mixture of classics and newer material, pacing the crowd-pleasers wisely, and putting together a completely wireless, mobile band (or, as he calls them, \u201cuntethered\u2026 it\u2019s very liberating\u201d). But director Spike Lee can always bring more to a project like this, and the fluidity of that staging is where Lee shines; he\u2019s always finding new and interesting ways to shoot Byrne and his band, and he\u2019s interested in everyone on that stage, not just the star. Lee\u2019s connection to the material is palpable (Stop Making Sense<\/em> was an early influence), and you get the feeling he had as much fun making the movie as you\u2019ll have watching it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It says much about J. Edgar Hoover\u2019s FBI that in the wake of the March on Washington, the day in which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously delivered his \u201cI have a dream\u201d speech, a memo circulated in the department that insisted of the civil rights leader, \u201cWe must mark him now as the most dangerous Negro in the future of this nation,\u201d and thus, \u201cWe must destroy him.\u201d Sam Pollard\u2019s scorching, furious documentary MLK \/ FBI<\/em><\/strong> traces that campaign into all its nasty corners, as Hoover, the self-appointed \u201cguardian of the American way of life\u201d lambasted King publicly (responding to King\u2019s Nobel Prize by calling him \u201cthe world\u2019s most notorious liar\u201d) and launching a probe into his private life \u2013 with go-aheads from RFK and LBJ \u2013 that culminated in a notorious anonymous letter suggesting King commit suicide. Pollard started as an editor (Spike Lee\u2019s, in fact), and you can tell; he deftly wields and weaves not only archival footage but newsreels, educationals, fiction films, and FBI \u201ccopaganda\u201d to contrast its public image of by-the-book methodology to the lawlessness of the investigations. Most pressingly, Pollard connects the story to our current moment of peaceful protest and respective idolatry, with copious archival footage underscoring the hostility with which King was treated, and not only in the South, and not only by \u201cracists.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the Revivals section, William Klein\u2019s 1974 documentary Muhammad Ali, the Greatest<\/em><\/strong> makes a fine double-bill with MLK\/FBI <\/em>(or with Regina King\u2019s TIFF drama One Night in Miami<\/em>, which is set on the night where Klein\u2019s film begins). Klein, who took some of the iconic still photos of the champ, tells his story in four chapters, spanning Ali\u2019s heavyweight championship win in 1964 to his reclaiming of it a decade later in Kinshasa, Zaire \u2013 the \u201cRumble in the Jungle,\u201d so that footage (which comprises much of the second half) will prove fairly familiar to those who\u2019ve seen When We Were Kings. <\/em>But much of what comes before is both new and astonishing, observational footage capturing the wild characters of the boxing world and the tiny, unseen details in the hours leading up to those bouts. Best of all, Ali was comfortable enough with Klein to let him capture candid, private moments, joking around with friends and hanging out with his corner crew, creating a multifaceted portrait of the private man, the public man, and the space in between.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story of how the city of Philadelphia bombed the headquarters of MOVE, a Black Marxist collective, was told and told well in the recent documentary Let the Fire Burn<\/em>; Ephraim Asili\u2019s The Inheritance<\/em><\/strong> revisits that history in a much more abstract fashion, within a scripted story of a young man attempting to reanimate that movement in contemporary Philly. The stylized 16mm cinematography gives the film the look of an archival documentary (it takes some time to realize it\u2019s not), and Asili cleverly folds in these elements, blurring the line between fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and education. A prominently displayed La Chinoise<\/em> poster serves as the broadest of winks, while also underlining that it\u2019s difficult for anyone to do Godard except Godard. Asili assembles plenty of commendable pieces that never quite snap together, but it\u2019s worth watching him smash them together anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Documentary and narrative fuse somewhat more smoothly in I Carry You With Me<\/em><\/strong>, in which documentarian Heidi Ewing (Jesus Camp<\/em>) tells the story of Ivan and Gerardo, two young Mexican men who meet and fall in love, but know they cannot make a life together there. We meet the current iterations of these men in documentary sections, but their backstory is told in narrative flashbacks; in lesser hands, this could\u2019ve failed spectacularly, but Ewing straddles the forms with aplomb. And the subject matter \u2013 which involves not only gay love and marriage but undocumented immigration \u2013 couldn\u2019t be more timely. \u201cWhen you dream, it all happens so fast, in flashes,\u201d explains Ivan. \u201cThe American Dream moves in slow motion.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The consensus pick for the most enjoyable documentary of the festival seems to be Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw\u2019s The Truffle Hunters<\/em><\/strong>, a portrait of the (mostly elderly) men who track truffles in the forests of Northern Italy. It\u2019s a fascinating little mini-culture, and they are a colorful bunch of characters, fiercely protective of their methods (\u201cIf you had a child, you would teach him.\u201d \u201cNo I wouldn\u2019t!\u201d). They spend most of their time talking to their dogs (\u201cI have Birba! I don\u2019t need a woman!\u201d), and to be fair, they\u2019re great dogs \u2013 and the go-pro footage those canine cameramen capture is priceless. Beautifully composed and slyly assembled, it\u2019s one of those movies that doesn\u2019t seem to be going much of anywhere, until the moment it arrives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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When Orson Welles was working on his long-awaited final feature The Other Side of the Wind<\/em>, he sat down for a two-plus hour conversation with Dennis Hopper, who plays himself as one of the guests in the film\u2019s central Hollywood party sequence. He only appears in the final film for a minute or two; the new documentary Hopper\/Welles<\/em><\/strong> <\/strong>presents the entirety of that conversation, complete with slates, crew chatter, and various ephemera left in \u2013 it\u2019s kind of like a bootleg release of rare studio tape. Hopper does most of the talking; Welles inquires, pushes, and prods, \u201cplaying\u201d John Huston\u2019s character of Jake offscreen, but underscoring the degree to which Jake is Welles. Hopper is clearly very high, so the conversation takes some turns, moving from shop talk to philosophizing about politics (\u201cYou\u2019re the first person that\u2019s called me a leftist since John Wayne\u201d), persona, activism, religion, and revolution. It\u2019s a real treat for film buffs, funny, wise, sometimes contentious, always engaging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By this point in his career. Bill Murray has accumulated so much good will that you\u2019re giggling from his first frame. That\u2019s certainly how he\u2019s received in Sofia Coppola\u2019s On the Rocks<\/em><\/strong>, where his character \u2013 a rich and successful art dealer, clearly not far removed from Sofia\u2019s own father Francis \u2013 is full of charm, theories, anecdotes, jokes, and bullshit. He and daughter Laura (Rashinda Jones) have a complex relationship, and Coppola\u2019s film spends a few nights with them, as he confirms her worst fears about her husband\u2019s (Marlon Wayans) possible infidelities; Murray and Jones have an easy, winning repartee, but it\u2019s not all fun and games; when the time comes to talk straight about their history, they do so with refreshing (and difficult) candor and honesty. It\u2019s a film full of little moments of truth \u2013 and Philippe Le Sourd\u2019s casually gorgeous cinematography makes this the kind of New York valentine that the festival really needed. One day, this city will look like this again, all shiny and warm and flush with jazz music and cocktails and witticisms, and I\u2019m glad they found a way to remind us of that elusive fact. \"\"\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As an outside-the-box New York Film Festival draws to a close, some thoughts on its highlights, including \u2018Nomadland,\u2019 \u2018On the Rocks,\u2019 \u2018French Exit,\u2019 \u2018MLK\/FBI,\u2019 \u2018I Carry You With Me,\u2019 \u2018Hopper\/Welles,\u2019 and more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":531,"featured_media":15113,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1416],"tags":[1419],"class_list":["post-15112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-festivals","tag-film-fests"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/531"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15112\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}