The Rest of Ebertfest, Part II

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—Hopefully after this post, I will finally be done with Ebertfest stuff (sorry if I sound less than completely into this, but I'd really rather move onto other things; Ebertfest was, like, a whole freakin' month ago. Damn you, Blogger and your epic service hiccup a few weeks ago!).

DAY FOUR

This was a big day: four films in one day, culminating in the highlight of the festival as far as celebrity appearances go. If you don't know by now who I'm referring to, you'll see soon enough.

After a better night's sleep than what I had gotten in the previous two evenings, I rolled out of bed early that Saturday, April 30, and took a special shuttle bus with accompanying police escort—to help navigate us through a marathon that was passing through Urbana, Ill., that morning—to the Virginia Theatre for the first film of the day, Jennifer Arnold's documentary A Small Act (2010). 

The film follows the efforts of a Kenyan activist, Chris Mburu, to try to help children in Kenya get a better education and thus put themselves on the path to a better life. Mburu himself was inspired by a selfless act of charity at the hands of Hilde Back, a Swedish Holocaust survivor who, when Mburu was a poor child in Kenya, donated enough money through a sponsorship program to ensure that he could continue his education. Mburu's own philanthropic efforts, then, could be seen as his way of paying it forward.

Things gets complicated, though, when Kenya becomes torn apart by violence after the much-disputed 2008 presidential elections—and Mburu's fight to keep his efforts going as his country is thrown into such turmoil become the most interesting part of Arnold's film. What looked to be a self-congratulatory back-patting documentary about the power of charity suddenly develops a measure of real drama that, I would assume, is something that Arnold & co. could not have anticipated at the outset of shooting this film.

Elsewhere, A Small Act is certainly well-intentioned, and the pro-charity sentiments it expresses are more or less unassailable. Personally, though, I wouldn't have minded a bit more interrogation of Mburu's brand of philanthropy, in which the determination of whether a Kenyan student will get the funding needed to continue his/her education hinges entirely on one single test. And why only select a handful of students rather than, say, a whole village of them? Arnold's documentation of Mburu's charitable efforts strike me as a bit too much hero worship for my taste—though certainly that isn't to deny the laudable heroism behind his efforts. [The film is currently available on DVD through Docurama.]

A better film about Africans struggling through adversity followed A Small Act: Life, Above All (2010). Like last year's Winter's Bone (2010), Oliver Schmitz's film focuses on a young girl, a South African 13-year-old named Chanda (Khomotso Manyaka) as she singlehandedly tries to hold her family together in spite of serious obstacles: the death of a sibling, a drunken father and deterioriating mother, the looming specter of AIDS, the suspicions of a backwards village. The plot outlines may be rather familiar, and stylistically the film is never particularly adventurous; unlike Debra Granik's Gothic depiction of life in the Ozarks in Winter's Bone, for the most part, one wouldn't mistake this film's depiction of South Africa for anything but grounded and realistic. Nevertheless, Schmitz and screenwriter Dennis Foon, adapting a young-adult novel by Allan Stratton, manage to craft an affecting human drama out of Chanda's struggles without lapsing into melodramatic hysterics (a trap that eventually ruined Debra Granik's overpraised drama), and Manyaka's toughness and generosity of spirit keeps you watching. It has a problematic finish that can be read either as the heroine's own wish-fulfillment or as a forced attempt at a happy ending—but it's not enough to mar an otherwise solid film. [Life, Above All is set to get a theatrical release on July 15, 2011; New Yorkers will have a chance to see it on June 30 as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival.]

A more surprising revelation came in the next film on that day's roster: Tim Blake Nelson's Leaves of Grass (2009). I didn't get a chance to see this when it got a small, much-delayed theatrical release in New York during the second half of last year, so this screening at Ebertfest represented my first encounter with it. If I had seen Leaves of Grass last year, it might have cracked my Top 10. It's that good.

Leaves of Grass, on a broad level, is about the ways all of us human beings try to reconcile our intellectual and emotional sides. Nelson starts out by presenting us with two twin brothers, both of them played by Edward Norton in perhaps one of the great dual performances in cinema. One of them, Bill, is a Brown University philosophy professor who approaches life in an overly logical manner; the other, Brady, is a small-time pot grower in Oklahoma who lives a life of carefree excess. You could say Bill represents the Apollo to Brady's Dionysus, to borrow Friedrich Nietzsche's famous formulation in The Birth of Tragedy. Eventually, though, the film's Apollonian and Dionysian impulses clash as Brady lures Bill back to Oklahoma and the Ivy League professor finds himself embroiled in all sorts of Fargo-like shenanigans when Brady's attempt to rip off a local drug lord ends in disaster. But it's not only Bill who is forced to adopt a more impulsive approach in the wake of so many dead bodies; the film's narrative also, in a way, starts to go haywire, with its second half's sudden turn toward darker, more violent and more outrageous terrain.

Leaves of Grass reminded me of one my most cherished films of recent years, Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang's 2003 film Last Life in the Universe. Though Pen-ek's sensibility is far more lyrical and elusive than Nelson's, his film also pits two contrasting characters—one a shy Japanese librarian who lives a life of neatness and restraint, the other a free-spirited Thai woman in thrall to her emotions and aspirations—against each other and watches the sparks that fly. The narrative in Last Life in the Universe also takes a (far subtler and stranger) turn toward a kind of intellectual abstraction, but I think the general idea that animates both these films are, at heart, the same: a humane embrace of the messiness and confusion that sometimes envelops all of us in our own lives. Sometimes life itself just doesn't operate in any logical way, however much we might try to mold our own experiences in something intellectually satisfying; it may be better to just go with the flow and see where you end up. In those ways, Leaves of Grass proves not only be to be shocking and funny, but also rather profound. [The film is available on DVD and Blu-ray from First Look Studios.]

But the main event of this penultimate day of Ebertfest came in the form of...

Yes, that's right: the one and only Tilda Swinton came to Urbana, Ill., to talk about her work in conjunction with a screening of I Am Love (2009). For many at Ebertfest, this was clearly the big event of the festival, the climax of which the next day's one final screening would be little more than an agreeable epilogue.

I've already written a bit about Luca Guadagnino's melodrama here; seeing it again on the Virginia Theatre's large screen—a perfect medium for a film of such extremes, visually and emotionally—only made me appreciate even more not only how beautiful it consistently looks, but how its beauty—rather than being merely decorative or pictorial—works in concert with the emotions of its main character, a Russian housewife in Italy named Emma (Swinton). Guadagnino's camera roams around the various spaces she inhabits, whether coldly sterile or lushly passionate (he is, of course, assisted invaluably by cinematographer Yorick Le Saux), and finds all sorts of visual correlatives to the feelings she is unable to verbally articulate—and Swinton herself lends the character a tactile emotional transparency that helps push the film, especially during its second hour, into the realms of near-silent cinema. (I know most people think her performance in Julia (2008) is one of the greatest feats of screen acting in recent years, and it's impressive, don't get me wrong—but I rather prefer her performance here, maybe because of how internal it is by comparison to her relentlessly, if necessarily, showy turn in Zonca's film.) 

It was an inspired choice on Ebert's part to juxtapose I Am Love and Leaves of Grass, because Guadagnino's film, it turns out, also explores the same intellect vs. emotion dichotomy that Nelson's film tackles. Here, that "intellectual" side takes the form of the repression brought on by upper-class privilege, an emotional prison that threatens to contain Emma's more passionate side. When she meets her son Edoardo's friend and business partner Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini), she throws caution to the wind and starts a torrid love affair...but is it love that spurs her on, or merely the thrill of breaking a societal taboo? Emma has just received a letter from her daughter, Betta (Alba Rohrwacher), in which she admits to carrying on a lesbian relationship; the intrigue that this inspires in her can be seen in Swinton's face. Is the conclusion—in which, aided by the raucous conclusion of John Adams's Harmonielehre, Emma defiantly casts off her classy high-end wardrobe, puts on less glitzy suburban wear, takes one last approving look at her daughter, and escapes that prison of a fancy house—a pure feminist triumph or an ambiguous one? It's telling that, in the middle of the end credits, Guadagnino includes a final, dreamlike image of Swinton and Antonio in a cave, with Swinton slowly peering out of it. Her defiance has, in essence, brought her back into some kind of metaphorical womb, looking into a deeply uncertain future.

Nothing uncertain about what happened after the screening, though: Tilda Swinton arrived onstage to a standing ovation and treated us all to an approximately hour-long Q&A session that never flagged in fascinating anecdotes, bits of artistic philosophy and such.

Apparently the livestream still exists online, if you're willing to put up with what I assume is consistently lackluster video quality:

I would have tried to crash a VIP-only after-party afterwards to try to meet Swinton in person, but I couldn't even begin to summon up the energy to think about such a thing as I staggered out of the Virginia Theatre at around 1 a.m. after this whole long day was over.

DAY FIVE

Being that only one film was shown on the last day of Ebertfest—Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel's rousing documentary Louder than a Bomb—and that I already wrote about it here...well, I guess I can move on to my postscript.

POSTSCRIPT

The one thing I treasured most about my first Ebertfest experience wasn't meeting Roger Ebert in person or making the new friends that I did. No, Ebertfest did what not even South by Southwest was quite able to accomplish: reawaken my awareness of the pleasures of the cinematic theatrical experience. It had been a while since I felt real tingles of anticipation whenever the lights went down and the curtains went up as a film began...but every film at the Virginia Theatre—even films like Metropolis, Umberto D., Tiny Furniture and I Am Love that I had seen previously—felt like an honest-to-God event. It helps that every film looked spectacular on that screen; high marks to ace projectionists James Bond and Steve Krauss. Ebertfest helped remind me of what I love most about seeing movies in a theater—and in the age of movies being watched on smartphones, this strikes me as no small accomplishment indeed.

But, of course, it was tons of fun in the social department as well, the highlight coming on the night of Thursday, April 28, when I tagged along with a whole group of people to indulge in some hot karaoke action at a nearby bar. Having become quite the karaoke fiend recently, I naturally seized upon this opportunity to get in front of that large group of people to sing one of my new favorites tunes, The Cars' "Just What I Needed" (off their great 1977 self-titled debut, of which I may devote an entire blog post to in the near future).

Alas, this time around, I didn't think to record myself in the midst of what I was told was an impressive performance. So instead, here's a video of another memorable performance from that night, this one courtesy of...Chaz Ebert!

And finally, one last long, wistful look at the historic landmark of a house in which I stayed:

I never did find out, by the way, which room President Lincoln actually slept in—though that's because the host wasn't even entirely sure himself. It was nevertheless a nice place to stay for Ebertfest; if I return to Urbana, Ill., for next year's Ebertfest, I might stay here again. Hey, the price is right, at least!

And now the Ebertfest 2011 chapter of my life is closed. Moving along...

The Rest of Ebertfest, Part I

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Here is some of the rest of my foreshortened Ebertfest recap—basically a bunch of capsules with a few odds & ends to finish it off.

DAY TWO

Umberto D. What's left to say about Vittorio De Sica's late-neorealist 1952 masterpiece that hasn't already been said? Only that the key word to understanding the film's everlasting power is "dignity," and that while newer filmmakers like Kelly Reichardt, Lance Hammer, Lee Daniels and Courtney Hunt prefer, to varying degrees, to stage undignified horror shows out of poverty, De Sica humanely focuses on the title character's quest to remain dignified even as he finds himself in increasingly dire living conditions. The result isn't exactly uplifting—Umberto Domenico Ferrari (Carlo Battisti) does eventually lose his home by the end and contemplates suicide with his dog in tow. And yet, with that emphasis on a man trying to hold onto his personal dignity, the film is somehow life-affirming in its own way.

My Dog Tulip. Here's another film featuring a dog as a human's closest companion. The human in this case is writer J.R. Ackerley (voiced by Christopher Plummer), who has gone through a lifetime of disappointments with female companions and decides to turn his affections to the titular German shepherd he adopts. Even when Tulip turns out to be a handful, though, Ackerley recounts his experiences with a nostalgic wistfulness in his omnipresent voiceover narration. Meanwhile, husband-and-wife directing team Paul & Sandra Fierlinger illustrate Ackerley's tales with lustrous watercolor animation that actually does suggest paintings come to life. My Dog Tulip—based on Ackerley's own memoir—is especially admirable, in the midst of all these Disney nature documentaries that shamelessly anthropomorphize the animals they present onscreen, for its general refusal to assign Tulip human characteristics to explain her behavior. Ackerley is too thoughtful to fall into such a trap; his voiceover narration occasionally detours into ruminations on the nature of human attraction to dogs and other such broader topics. Tulip, in Ackerley's memoir and in this film adaptation, remains an eating, pissing and shitting animal to the very end—and he loves her more than he's ever really loved anyone else. That's a funny thing, when you think hard about it.

Tiny Furniture. No dogs in this movie, but this does feature its writer/director/lead actress Lena Dunham telling seemingly everyone around her that she's in a "post-graduate delirium"—but doing it in a way that makes us—or maybe it's just me, judging by the very vocal response from this film's detractors that I've encountered on Twitter—wonder whether she's merely using that as an excuse to indulge in self-pity, aimlessness, etc. It's that kind of willingness to lay bare her own faults that suggests to me that mere "narcissism"—the common knock against the film—is far from Dunham's mind. I suppose one person's self-examination equals another's narcissism—but if self-examination equals "narcissism," then what of Federico Fellini's 8½? Dunham's film isn't that one's equal, obviously...but frankly, I find I can relate to Dunham's personal issues more than I can Fellini's, who gets so tied up in his own private obsessions that he threatens to push the audience away.

Anyway, this was my second time seeing Tiny Furniture, and for the most part, my enthusiasm for it remains undimmed, especially seeing it at the Virginia Theatre's large screen. (Who knew Jody Lee Lipes's impeccably framed widescreen compositions could look so gorgeous?) For me, its depiction of a young adult who, after graduating from college, is struggling to find her way, remains poignant—doubly so in the case of main character Aura, who has all this privilege at her disposal and yet has no idea what to do with it, especially on the heels of a fairly useless film-studies degree. But who says this is merely an issue of privilege (examined or not)? Surely this is a crisis most of us have faced at one time or another in our own lives. Hell, I may still be in my own post-graduate delirium...but I'd like to think I'm doing a better job combating it than Aura is.

DAY THREE

45365. Actually, I skipped Bill & Turner Ross's documentary in favor of writing my never-to-be-published Ebertfest dispatch for The Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog...but I had seen it previously in preparation for an interview with the two brothers that actually did get published. So I'll let that interview and this extra commentary stand for a review here. Great movie.

Me and Orson Welles. I did come back to the Virginia Theatre for Richard Linklater's 2008 drama, which I had not seen before Ebertfest. I had heard a lot about the film, though, particularly about Christian McKay's performance as Orson Welles...and folks, when I first heard Welles's familiar, beautifully confident baritone coming out of McKay's mouth, I was immediately stunned into submission at just how uncannily he is able to channel this larger-than-life character—or, more accurately, someone who wasn't afraid to act larger than life, to ruthless extremes.

The rest of the film isn't too bad, either. Based on a novel by Robert Kaplow, Me and Orson Welles looks at this great artist through the eyes of a brashly confident (and fictional, I assume) up-and-comer named Richard Samuels (Zac Efron), who randomly catches Welles's eye and is immediately hired to play a small role in a new production of Julius Caesar with his Mercury Theatre players, including Joseph Cotten (James Tupper), Norman Lloyd (Leo Bill) and George Coulouris (Ben Chaplin). Richard has dreams of theatrical stardom himself, and he sees this as a road to his big break. Predictably, it doesn't work out that way; Welles's ego-driven manipulations turns out to be more than he can handle. But even as this coming-of-age drama hits its familiar marks, Linklater offers us the pleasures of a lovingly detailed depiction of life in the theater: the hard work that goes into putting on a production and the joys that lie at the end of it all. You could call it an American equivalent of Mike Leigh's equally loving Topsy-Turvy (1999). And seeing some of the reenactments of the production make me think I must have missed out on one hell of a production. As Robert Schumann once said about Frédéric Chopin, "Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!"

Only You. Yes, this is Norman Jewison's 1994 romantic comedy with Marisa Tomei in full cutey-pie mode and a disarmingly young Robert Downey, Jr. Who the hell remembers this movie? Apparently, as Chaz Ebert said in her introduction to the film, she and Roger wanted to program a good love story in the festival, and so they decided on this one, an out-of-left-field choice that reminded me that Ebertfest used to be called "Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival." It is what it is: a sunny, fluffy throwback to 1950s Hollywood entertainments of the Roman Holiday vein, with charming leads, witty dialogue, quirky supporting characters (Bonnie Hunt does most of the scene-stealing honors here), beautiful Italy locations (shot like picture postcards by the great Sven Nykvist) and a complete lack of cynicism or condescension. As such, it's diverting...and Downey once again proves that he can do just about anything, including imbuing fresh, jittery life into formulaic rom-com shenanigans with his own distinctive vocal cadences. Does anyone else, though, find the lengths Downey goes to win Tomei over to be a bit, um, problematic—creepy, even?

More Ebertfest summarizing to come...soon...

In Theaters Now: Louder than a Bomb

NEW YORK—The closing film of this year's Ebertfest, Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel's documentary Louder than a Bomb, is now getting a theatrical release here in New York at IFC Center. To my mind, the film misses greatness by sticking so closely to its conventional sports-movie structure that it generally crowds out any number of deeper topics that the broader subject matter—inner-city youths finding a powerful means of expression through slam poetry, cast against the backdrop of the largest slam-poetry competition in the U.S., held right in Chicago—suggests. Thankfully, the film is chock full of superb slam-poetry performances, and even when Jacobs and Siskel (the latter of whom is the nephew of the late film critic Gene Siskel) curtail some of those performances to move on to their next plot point or interview, the brilliance of even the foreshortened performances are enough to carry the film along. If nothing else, Louder than a Bomb induces in a viewer the excitement of seeing real young budding artists expressing themselves with abandon; they really are something to see.

How electric is the slam poetry in the film? This might give you an idea:



A few of the students featured in the film performed their poetry after a Q&A session, so I figured it'd be worth capturing on video. Rest assured, though, there is plenty more to witness and stand in awe of in Louder than a Bomb. (See here for IFC Center screening info.)

An Epic, Multi-Part Ebertfest Recap: Day One

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—

DAY ONE: OPENING NIGHT (AND DAY)

The first screening of the 13th annual Ebertfest was scheduled for 7 p.m. (though, as I was soon to discover, none of the screenings ever actually started on time)...but, even as I made my way to Champaign's historic Virginia Theatre at around 4 p.m. to meet up with a few Twitter friends in person for the first time, I noticed a long line away going around the corner outside the theater. People were braving the rain to try to get the best seats in the house. The anticipation was in the wet, misty air!

My first day of the festival didn't begin with that evening screening, though. Instead, it began hours earlier, at around noon, when, upon Ali Arikan's invitation the night before, I decided to walk over to the Illini Union—University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's student center—and meet up with him and a bunch of others to do what anyone visiting Champaign apparently is supposed to do as a matter of course: go to a Steak 'n Shake to consume burgers and milkshakes! Which I did, in the company of, among others, three more of Ebert's Far-Flung Correspondents: Michael Mirasol, representing the Philippines (even though he and his family currently live in Malaysia); Gerardo Valero, from Mexico City; and the 17-year-old wunderkind Krishna Shenoi, who comes from India but who currently lives with his family in Dubai. I was especially interested in meeting Michael, with whom I have had frequent online interactions over the past year since first hearing him speak, along with a bunch of other FFCs, at last year's Ebertfest via live-stream.

When we got to the Steak 'n Shake on Neil St., Michael was telling me about how, last year, the local media had swarmed onto that particular restaurant after Ebert had alerted people to that location on his Twitter feed. This time around, however, the coast looked clear...until we all noticed the one cameraman setting up near the entrance of the restaurant. 

Upon seeing this, Michael turned to me and his wife, Claire, and said, "Oh no, not again!" (He eventually did speak to this cameraman for an on-camera interview, though with vocal reluctance.)

As far as the lunch went...well, I wasn't totally blown away by the Western BBQ 'n Bacon Steakburger I had (though it was certainly far better than anything you'd get at McDonald's, to be sure), but the strawberry milkshake? Just look at the size of this thing!

This first day of Ebertfest would be marked by introductions to people I knew only from online interactions, in fact. Only a couple hours later, I would find myself standing in front of the Virginia Theatre, umbrella in hand, meeting with one Donald G. Carder—who heretofore had been known to me only as @theangrymick on Twitter—who was attending the festival with his wife Anne. I also met, for the first time, Moira (@PlaidGirl), Visha (@vanyc) and Greg (@litdreamer)—all of whom I would see again at various points in the next five days. (If nothing else, Ebertfest, by holding his festival in this one festival, helps foster lasting movie-connected friendships in ways that much larger festivals such as, say, South by Southwest can only dream of doing.) Along with Odie Henderson—the man the blogosphere knows best as Odienator—we all went to a nearby bar and hung out for a couple of hours before returning to the theater to try to get our seats for Ebertfest's opening night. Just before I went in, I was greeted by film critic/blogger Craig Simpson, who some of you may know as The Man from Porlock. (One of my regrets about this festival is that I didn't get as much of a chance to chat with him as I did with others. Sorry, Craig! Maybe next year?) And once I was in the theater about a half-hour before Ebertfest's first film began, I finally met in person film critic Mark Pfeiffer, who was sitting with a friend of his in what he said was his usual spot up in the balcony. (Mark turned out to be the one I relied on to offer some interesting historical context regarding past Ebertfests, I may end up sharing some of his tidbits of information later on.)

Noticeably absent from this roll call of film critics and Twitter buddies, by the way, were the estimable film critics/bloggers Jim Emerson and Marilyn Ferdinand, both of whom I was most excited to meet this year, and both of whom were unable to show up this year for various reasons. Sad face. Again, maybe next year?

And then, 7 p.m. struck. Roger Ebert and his wife Chaz came onstage about 10 minutes afterward and made some introductory remarks. Ebert himself came onstage with a white scarf; to me, he had the look of a high priest—a high priest of the cinema, at least for this event. They introduced film scholar Kristin Thompson—sans her equally distinguished husband David Bordwell, alas (laid low due to pneumonia contracted during his recent trip to the Hong Kong Film Festival)—to make some remarks of her own regarding the festival's first film. Then, the three members of the Alloy Orchestra—a group that is known for performing original scores to silent-film classics—took their places in the orchestra pit, and Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) began.

Naturally, we watched the recent "complete" version that premiered last year at Berlinale and which I saw during a two-week run at Film Forum. Thompson, as one would expect from a film scholar of her caliber, got into the nitty-gritty about how the extra footage that was discovered in Buenos Aires in 2008 ended up there in the first place (apparently, Argentina and many other South American countries were considered a big market by the German film industry at the time, so they often sent prints of their films there). For me, the extra footage—which includes one extra scene that adds an extra level of menace to a side character that, in previous versions, didn't seem play all that important a role to the action—neither diminishes the film nor makes it a much greater work; it's just longer now, but by no means is it any more sprawling. For a work of this scale, it's astonishing just how tightly constructed it is, really—especially in its third act, appropriately dubbed "Furioso" in this complete version.

The big news with the screening of the complete Metropolis at the Virginia Theatre that night was two-fold:

1. The digital print furnished by Kino International struck me as far more superior to the print I saw at Film Forum last year. With the latter, I was always aware I was watching a digital print; the one I saw at Ebertfest struck me as sharper and far more convincingly film-like. It can't be the larger screen deceiving my eyes, it can't be!

2. This is my first time seeing the famed Alloy Orchestra perform one of their of original silent-film scores live. Oh. My. God! My memory of seeing Gottfried Huppertz's original score accompanying the digital print seen at Film Forum is admittedly fuzzy, but I don't recall it having the same starkness and vividness of sonorities as this particular score conceived by members Terry Donahue, Ken Winokur and Roger Miller. In the film's first shot of the underground workers joylessly marching out of their jobs, all that their score called for were steady timpani thwacks—but the effect was as chillingly empty as the image surely calls for. Even more romantic moments that might have called for a more sweepingly upbeat approach—the moment the real Maria (Brigitte Helm) kisses Freder (Gustav Frohlich) after her rousing speech to the workers—still maintained an unsettling, almost doom-laden modernistic flavor to them. It was thrilling to hear this score accompany this, one of the grandest follies of the cinema, and still as amazing an achievement of the human imagination as ever...and if you missed it at Ebertfest, or last year at the TCM Film Festival in Los Angeles, you most likely won't be able to hear it! (That said, in a Q&A session after the screening, Terry and Roger said that this score was available on the Alloy Orchestra's website, but separately, not as an added soundtrack on home video. You'll have to sync the soundtrack to the film all by yourself.)

Apparently, it's rare for Ebertfest to feature two films on its opening night. But Ebert was one of the judges of the Narrative Feature Competition at South by Southwest in March, and apparently he was so smitten by Robbie Pickering's award-winning Natural Selection that, according to Chaz, he felt he had to try to get this film into his festival, without question.

I was not as big a fan of Natural Selection as Ebert and the other judges were, and I wrote so in this House Next Door dispatch. Nevertheless, when I discovered that Ebert had made this a last-minute selection in this year's Ebertfest, I figured I might as well sit through the film again to see if I could perhaps warm to it more. Let me put it this way: It wasn't an entirely unfruitful endeavor.

Perhaps the best way to look at the film is as a story of one woman's female empowerment (and it's real female empowerment, too, not the Zack Snyder/Sucker Punch male-fantasy bullshit) rather than as the facile satire of religious hypocrisy that it threatens to be in the film's choppy opening 15 minutes. Even in those opening moments, you can sense, in Linda West's behavior and facial expressions, a deep dissatisfaction with her lifestyle that she's possibly been repressing for years. Of course, even around supposed long-lost son Raymond (Matt O'Leary), Linda tries to hold onto that good-girl Christian image...and part of the fascination of Natural Selection, on a character-based level, lies in trying to determine just how much she truly buys into the goody-goody image. Is she secretly ready to cast it off, and is Raymond the one to help her finally do so? The brilliance of Rachael Harris's deservedly praised performance as Linda lies in her empathetic refusal to condescend to her character (unlike the way Pickering often condescends to the rest of her clan—though he said he intended nothing of the sort in the Q&A with him and Harris following the screening). You might find fundamentalist Christians of her ilk insufferable—and with the public prominence of groups like the Tea Party movement, it's arguably difficult for rational people not to find such behavior insufferable, on some level—but her brand of fundamentalism seems to come out of a heartfelt desire to do good—even for those (like her husband, we come to discover) who really don't deserve her charity.

I still can't say I'm crazy about Natural Selection, but I'll concede that there are elements in it worth celebrating. It sure as hell wasn't Metropolis, though...but then, what is?

And thus endeth the first day at Ebertfest.

Coming up next on this epic, multi-part Ebertfest recap: Two movies with dogs in them, another go-round with Lena Dunham's post-graduate malaise, and a raucous night of...what else? Karaoke, of course!

TO BE CONTINUED...

An Epic, Multi-Part Ebertfest Recap: Prelude

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Okay, the idea behind the next few posts on this blog is this: Because I didn't get to update much during my recent Ebertfest experience, and because so far none of the editors of The Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog have seen it fit to publish that first dispatch I sent them on Friday—I guess news events like the Royal Wedding (really?) and the death of Osama bin Laden (all right, I concede that is a bona-fide Big Deal) will naturally trump a mere festival dispatch like mine—I will go ahead and try to recap the experience, reasonably complete and uncut, here on this blog.

This will take a few days, I suspect...so let's dive right into it, shall we?

PRELUDE

 

There was no doubt in my mind on Tuesday, April 26, that I would eventually get to Champaign, Ill., for Roger Ebert's Film Festival, the five-day film-appreciation extravaganza also known as Ebertfest (this is its 13th year). It just ended up taking far longer than expected.

As I was walking to a restroom after having gotten past the usual security checkpoints at LaGuardia Airport in New York, I overheard someone saying something about a bunch of flights being delayed as a result of brewing inclement weather in the Chicago area—Chicago's O'Hare International Airport being my destination for a connecting flight to Champaign. Uh-oh. My concerns were not ameliorated when I received a text-message alert via American Airlines at around 11:45 a.m. suggesting that the departure time of my scheduled 1:35 p.m. flight was now pushed back by 10 minutes. Then, at around 12:55 p.m., I got another alert saying that departure time was now 1:55 p.m.

At around 1:40 p.m. or so, all of the passengers were finally allowed to board the plane; eventually the plane started pulling out of its gate and slowly made its progress toward takeoff. And then it stopped...and proceeded to stay still. Then, an announcement: This flight was going to be delayed for 15 minutes until they got word from air-traffic controllers in Chicago that it was safe to take off. We waited for about that length of time...and then we got another announcement saying that they needed to wait another 30 minutes for said word!

Well, I said to myself after all this waiting, it sure doesn't look like I'll be making my 4 p.m. connecting flight to Champaign at this rate. And so it came to pass. The plane finally took off at around 3 p.m. and landed in Chicago at around 5:15 p.m.; when I landed in Chicago, I immediately booked a seat on a flight scheduled to leave at 6:15 p.m. Okay, fine, I thought, these things happen (though this was the first time, in my memory at least, that I had had to deal with a delayed flight). But then that connecting flight got delayed! The reason? Apparently, they were waiting for the crew to arrive from a previous flight. So this time, no weather-related delays—just a missing crew!

This was taken by Ali Arikan on his BlackBerry

A silver lining to this particular cloud arrived, though, in the form of Ali Arikan, a friend, fellow film critic/writer and one of Roger Ebert's Far-Flung Correspondents; it turned out we were on the same flight from Chicago to Champaign! Funny how things just seem to work out that way in life. So I didn't have to be lonely while waiting for the delayed flight; instead, I ended up having drinks with him and chatting before we were finally allowed to board the plane at around 7:40 p.m.

The trip from Chicago to Champaign took a mere 30 minutes once in the air, so we landed at Champaign's Willard Airport at around 8:50 p.m....but my extended-length voyage to Ebertfest wasn't quite done yet! When Willard's one baggage-claim carousel (it's a tiny airport) had gone around a couple of times, I realized that I didn't see my checked bag anywhere! When I checked with an employee there, he looked up my information on a computer and discovered that my bag was on the Chicago-to-Champaign flight after the one I was just on! Seriously??? (In talking to a couple of random people at the airport, I discovered that this kind of thing is not a rare occurrence at that airport.)

I was given the option of either waiting for that next flight to land in order to look for my bag, or to have it delivered to the place at which I was staying. All right, I figured, if it's just one more flight, and if that next flight is coming within the next hour, I can wait. So, after Ali was forced to part ways with me as he was rushing to get to a Q&A session for Ebertfest's pre-festival screening of Chris Smith's 1999 documentary American Movie (which I would have loved to have seen—given that I haven't seen it yet—if those blasted delays hadn't prevented me from being able to make it in time for the beginning of the film), I sat around until 10 p.m. or so, when the next Chicago-to-Champaign flight landed. When I stood around the baggage-claim area and looked closely for my bag, lo and behold, there it was!

My luggage having finally been procured, I took a cab and noticed the general emptiness of the Urbana streets. (Hey Fever Ray, this might have been just as fitting a venue for your haunting "Keep the Streets Empty for Me" video as...Sweden, I'm guessing?) I was warned that this was mostly a pretty dead town, and so it appeared to be. I really did feel like I was driving through a ghost town; it was eerie...and rather seductive, in its own way. (There is one lively stretch in the town, though, of which I will explain in a future post.)

Through these empty streets, I headed toward the home of my host, a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign literature professor whose place I had discovered thanks to the site Airbnb.com—kind of a variation on couchsurfing.com, except people actually get paid for offering up a room for travelers like myself. It was a nice place, and the room I had was comfortably spacious (not that that made a huge difference, in the end, considering how little time I spent at the home). But there was something even more special about this place than I had realized, something I didn't know about until a week before this trip: Apparently, the house was recently designated a historic landmark because none other than former American president Abraham Lincoln slept in one of its rooms! Read this article if you don't believe me!

Oh, and George (whose wife and daughter were away in Toronto during my stay there) also had this dog:



Thanks for your hospitality, George! It was very much appreciated! Maybe we could do this again next year?

Coming up on this epic, multi-part Ebertfest recap: The festival kicks off in grand fashion with the near-complete Metropolis with a live performance of an original score by the Alloy Orchestra. Plus...Natural Selection again? Will I warm to it more the second time than I did the first at South by Southwest in March?

TO BE CONTINUED...

A Round-up of Tribeca Film Festival Links

CHAMPAIGN, ILL.—Sorry for the lack of posting in the past couple weeks or so on this blog. This time, though, I have two good excuses, I think: Tribeca Film Festival and Ebertfest!

For Tribeca, I contributed to Slant Magazine a few reviews of films playing at this year's edition of the Robert De Niro-founded festival. And when I say Slant Magazine this time around, I mean the actual Slant Magazine, not its side blog The House Next Door. So now I have reviews for that site with star ratings and everything! Despite its reputation as a wildly uneven and inconsistent festival in regards to quality of films shown, the bulk of the handful of films I saw at Tribeca this year were actually pretty good, or at least reasonably interesting. I'm happy that one of the films I reviewed, Rwandan director Kivu Ruhorahoza's uneven but intriguing Grey Matter, picked up a couple of awards at the festival, one for lead actress Shami Bizimana and another for Ruhorahoza himself.

Here is a list of all the Tribeca films I reviewed for Slant:
Black Butterflies
Cairo Exit
Grey Matter
Janie Jones
Jiro Dreams of Sushi
The Journals of Musan

And here is a link for Slant Magazine's full Tribeca Film Festival coverage.

I wasn't able to cover more of Tribeca, however...because, at about the halfway mark, I found myself here in Champaign, Ill., for the 13th year of Roger Ebert's Film Festival, or what is more commonly known as Ebertfest!

Thirteen films hand-picked by the legendary film critic himself, screened in the span of four days at the historic Virginia Theatre in this small Illinois town (his hometown, apparently), plus a couple of panels and one epic night of karaoke—all of this contributed to taking away precious time to blog about the experience. So obviously, I'll have much more to say about Ebertfest in one or two future posts (short version: it was a lot of fun, if oddly more exhausting, in less days, than South by Southwest).

Until then, though...chew on this: