{"id":20329,"date":"2023-06-19T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-06-19T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=20329"},"modified":"2023-06-18T18:34:49","modified_gmt":"2023-06-19T01:34:49","slug":"crooked-marquees-tribeca-festival-2023-diary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/crooked-marquees-tribeca-festival-2023-diary\/","title":{"rendered":"Crooked Marquee’s Tribeca Festival 2023 Diary"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The nicest surprise of this year\u2019s Tribeca Film Festival\u2014excuse me, it\u2019s just Tribeca Festival now, heaven forbid we indicate anything as unfashionable as an allegiance to film<\/em>\u2014may well have been Blood for Dust<\/em><\/strong>, which benefited greatly from my existing presumptions and prejudices about the fest (namely, that anything with name actors that\u2019s premiering here instead of other first- and second-quarter fests must be doing so for a reason). But this is a gripping, expertly crafted thriller, set in the early 1990s and reminiscent of the neo-noirs of that time, hard-nosed crime pictures like One False Move<\/em> and Red Rock West<\/em> that blasted the optimism of the (early) Clinton era with their bleak views of a dead-end world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scoot McNairy, the kind of actor whose presence in a film like this is something of a reassuring nod, is spot-on as a classic sap\u2014desperate, bitter, and beaten-down\u2014whose dire straights make him more receptive than he should be to an opportunity presented by an old colleague (a deliciously sleazy Kit Harrington). \u201cI\u2019m afraid to ask if any of this is legal,\u201d he worries, to which his pal replies, \u201cThen don\u2019t ask,\u201d and the rest of the script is blessed with that kind of lean, to-the-point efficiency. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cinnamon<\/em><\/strong> seems like an even bleaker proposition\u2014on top of the usual suspicion for Tribeca narrative selections, it\u2019s a Tubi original\u2014so it may have been an even nicer surprise. Some of writer\/director Bryian Keith Montgomery Jr.\u2019s choices are dubious; Damon Wayans is playing this way too broadly, and it just seems like you\u2019re losing a weapon to cast Pam Grier as a mute. But Hailey Kilgore proves herself a no-questions-asked movie star in the title role, Jeremie Harris is absolutely terrifying, and the plot turns are solid. It\u2019s a taut, twisty, crisply executed crime thriller that also feels like a \u201890s indie\u2014more like the Tarantino knock-offs, but one of the good ones, like The Usual Suspects<\/em> or The Way of the Gun<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHello, this is Beth,\u201d she says, at the beginning of each call, and she waits to see who\u2019s on the other end of the line: a street kid, an incel, a vet, a suicide case. She talks to \u201call kinds of people,\u201d she shrugs, answering the \u201cHelp Anytime\u201d hotline; she\u2019s played by Tessa Thompson, and she\u2019s the focus of The Listener<\/em><\/strong>, Steve Buscemi\u2019s first feature as a director since 2007\u2019s Interview<\/em>. That was basically a two-hander, and this is even smaller, a solo chamber piece. The title is apt, and presents a once-in-a-career challenge to an actor; we hear but do not see the callers, so we\u2019re always looking at her as she listens, registers, contemplates. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Thompson (who is also credited as a producer) is quite good\u2014we\u2019re always with her, as she keeps her voice soft, probing, non-confrontational, trying (though not always successfully) to say what her callers need to hear. The film itself is less successful, though it has its virtues; it mostly suffers from feeling like a filmed play, for better or worse. The better is in the focus on performance and dialogue; the worse comes when the callers start monologuing, throwing out big ideas in big speeches that sound less like cries for help and more like carefully-scripted acting moments. It\u2019s not a bad film, just not quite up to Buscemi\u2019s usual standards.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As ever, documentaries are the safest bet at Tribeca, and one of the bigger treats for movie geeks is David Gregory\u2019s Enter the Clones of Bruce<\/em><\/strong>, a cheerful breakdown of the \u201cBruce-ploitation\u201d craze, in which Hong Kong cinemas and American grindhouses were flooded with films starring Bruce Lee imitators and (sorta) lookalikes after the kung fu phenom\u2019s tragic, early death. Gregory profiles several of the actors given this dubious task, including Bruce Li, Bruce Le, Bruce Lo, Bruce Lei, Dragon Lee, Bruce Liang, and Ron Van Clief aka \u201cThe Black Dragon,\u201d and while many went along with the rip-off ruse (Le shrugs, \u201cYou can call me what you want as long as you pay me\u201d), they maintain mixed emotions about these films and what they did to their careers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The middle stretch becomes less about Bruce-ploitation and more about low-budget martial arts movies, breaking down the production methodology with humor and affection, and that\u2019s a smart move; there\u2019s also a fair amount of thoughtful commentary on how these movies impacted perceptions of Asian men in cinema and American culture. Enter the Clones<\/em> will appeal to a niche within a niche of moviegoers, but boy, that niche is gonna eat it up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also catnip for indie fans: Sav Rogers\u2019s Chasing Chasing Amy<\/em><\/strong>, which details the role that still-controversial 1997 queer-adjacent rom-com played in the filmmaker\u2019s own coming-out, as well as the picture\u2019s complicated history and legacy\u2014why it mattered then, and the questions and concerns swirling around it now. It\u2019s intellectually honest, genuinely thoughtful and penetrating in its exploration of the arguments and ideas that plague the film in terms of perspective and representation. But the deeper Rogers gets, the clearer it becomes that there\u2019s even more to grapple with than we might have imagined (i.e., the Harvey Weinstein of it all). There\u2019s a lot of material to handle here, and Rogers doesn\u2019t always pull it off (the most personal stuff doesn\u2019t quite weave in as smoothly as it should). But it\u2019s a movie with a lot to say, and says most of it quite eloquently. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sam Pollard\u2019s The League<\/em><\/strong> chronicles, with rigor and insight, the ups and downs of baseball\u2019s so-called \u201cNegro League\u201d and and its various iterations. The name was simplistic (the diaspora of Black and Latino players, we\u2019re told, means they welcomed everyone \u201cfrom chalk to charcoal\u201d) but their mission was not, and Pollard combines history and social commentary, to great effect. Using archival footage, interviews, animations, clippings, tasteful (and, thankfully, minimal) dramatizations, he profiles the superstars, tells fascinating stories about figures you might not know, and slips off into sidebars of interest without losing focus. And by highlighting the league\u2019s intersections <\/strong>with world events and civil rights, The League <\/em>becomes a much broader history of Black culture and Black life\u2014and of both the necessity of integration, and its social and economic cost.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our mini-reviews of a half-dozen titles from the recently-completed fest, including \u201cThe Listener,\u201d \u201cCinnamon,\u201d \u201cChasing Chasing Amy,\u201d and more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":531,"featured_media":20331,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1416],"tags":[1419,1436],"class_list":["post-20329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-festivals","tag-film-fests","tag-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20329","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=20329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20329\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}