Here's an article in yesterdays newspaper regarding the Little Rock film festival and our films. There was a picture of the Racing Dreams promo poster besides the text, but I dont think that copied over. I will be in touch with the author hopefully later today to fill him in on details regarding the distributor of our films - I dont think he knows that it is an Arkansas based company or else he would have included that in this article. We of course are proud of our local businesses and I'm sure he would have highlighted this aspect had he known. He will soon, and soon we should see a feature on HH, likely after details of getting off the pinks is revealed to us and we all know the clear direction forward.
malc
Home / Today's Newspaper / Features* / CRITICAL MASS: Good picks at film festival
By Philip Martin
Brandon Warren is one of the stars in Racing Dreams.
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LITTLE ROCK — Does it come as a surprise to learn that I know only a few people who venture into the multiplexes more than a few times a year? Think of yourself, and your friends: Who goes to the movies, and why do they go?
Movies have become expensive, and are getting more so, thanks in part to the current 3-D vogue. And if you’re over 40 or so - or you happen to have been bitten by a sort of cinemania that leads you to investigate films made before you were born - you might have noticed they don’t make a lot of movies for you anymore.
Most movies are made to excite a different demographic, one that was raised on video games and conditioned to expect their entertainments to be loud, vulgar and divorced from anything like everyday existence: “escapist” movies like Sex and the City 2 and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.
This is by and large what we expect the movies to be these days, and even if you’ve developed a taste for that sort of experience, you might occasionally feel exhausted by the ever-escalating spectacle of the Hollywood product. Cotton candy and roller coasters are fine once in a while, but a steady diet of carnival fare will make you sick.
But there’s nothing like a film festival for renewing your faith in the medium, in the possibilities of movies to surprise, delight and edify us. Festivals give us a chance to experience movies that aren’t the product of demographic research and focus groups, but the realized visions of individuals meaning to tell us stories about how we are, were or may come to be. Festivals give us a chance to see human-scale movies, offbeat and even failed movies that aren’t calibrated to Hollywood’s idea of the marketplace.
While I haven’t seen everything that’s showing at the fourth Little Rock Film Festival, I’ve seen Debra Granik’s noirish Ozarks-set Winter’s Bone, which won Best Narrative Feature and the Waldo Salt screenwriting award at Sundance. Winter’s Bone kicks off the festival Wednesday night. It’s an excellent, tough film that showcases some terrific performances and some stunning visuals. (Disclosure: I’ll be doing a Q & A with Granik, Fayetteville-based actor Lauren Sweetser, who appears in the movie, and other cast members after the screening. I’ll be doing other things there, too.)
I’ve also seen Marshall Curry’s excellent documentary Racing Dreams, about middle school kids chasing the national go-kart racing championship (think Spellbound on wheels), and The Last Survivor, a remarkable nonfiction movie about genocide by two filmmakers in their early 20s, Michael Pertnoy and Michael Kleiman. (Check the Little Rock Film Festival’s online schedule at littlerock.bside.com/2010/ schedule/week for dates and times for all films.)
I’ve seen Jeff Mizushima’s quirky, life-affirming and family-friendly hamster saga Etienne! (executive produced by locals Tim Jackson and Josh Miller of Category One Entertainment) and most of the Jackson-directed documentary Looking for Lurch, about the late Watusi steer (and Guinness World Record holder) who brought international attention to Janice Wolf ’s Arkansas sanctuary for abused and abandoned animals, Rocky Ridge Refuge. (More disclosure: I like the Category One folks a lot. I have other friends with movies in this festival.)
And while, as of this writing, I haven’t seen Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas’ documentary American: The Bill Hicks Story, the trailer looks amazing. If you’re not familiar with Hicks, a ferocious comedian who died (in Little Rock) of pancreatic cancer at the tragically young age of 32, or his frankly beautiful last days, you should be.
Dianne Bell’s antique feeling Obselidia - a gentle romantic comedy about a librarian obsessed with obsolete objects and concepts (such as love) and the movie projectionist who challenges his assumptions - is remarkably erudite and consistently charming; it also won the Alfred P. Sloan Award for the best feature with a scientific or technological theme at this year’s Sundance festival.
I’m also looking forward to Martha Stephens’ narrative feature Passenger Pigeons, Lena Dunham’s semi-autobiographic Tiny Furniture, and Alamar, a Mexican hybrid that uses real people and situations in service of a fictional plot that won the top prize at the Miami Film Festival (and has already been picked up for distribution by Film Movement, which specializes in simultaneous - day-and-date - releases of films to DVD and in theaters).
And I’ve heard a lot of good things about ArcadiaLost, with Nick Nolte as an expatriate American bumming around Greece, and Josh Radnor’s much-buzzed-about indie ensemble Happythankyoumoreplease.
There are a couple of higher profile features, the Forgetting Sarah Marshall spinoff Get Him to the Greek and the Michael Caine revenge fantasy Harry Brown, that are intriguing mainly because of their lead actors (Russell Brand’s Aldous Snow was by far the best thing about FSM and Caine is always watchable). I’m also curious abouta couple of locally produced features - Joe Dull’s Table at Luigi’s and T. Hudson Dunlap’s Lost Dogs.
As a big fan of the band, I got a kick out of Barr Weissman’s affectionate (and affecting) The Secret to a Happy Ending, a profile of the Drive-By Truckers by an unabashed fan who just happened to catch his darlings in the midst of a career crisis.
Other documentaries I’ve got circled include Jordan Brady’s I Am Comic; the Billy Bob Thornton-narrated My Run; Davis Guggenheim’s exploration of the American education system, Waiting for Superman; and Doh Hahn’s Waking Sleeping Beauty, about the revitalization of the Walt Disney animation studios beginning in the late 1980s.
This is a strong lineup - maybe stronger than the menu at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. (Though, to be fair, I only saw about a dozen films at this year’s TFF.)
And while I stand behind the suggestions, it may be that the best way to experience any film festival is to simply follow your nose - to seek out the least crowded theaters. That approach is often rewarding. Some of my best festival experiences have revolved around eccentric movies that never had a real shot at gaining U.S. distribution (there was a Jamaican reggae movie at Toronto one year that helpfully subtitled the rasta patois of its actors). Some of the best movies at festivals are always the shorts - and I can vouch for the Arkansas music videos in this year’s festival; they’re exceptional.
The best festivals are not so much about the finished films as the energy produced by the nexus of unfinished artists, hustlers and interested camp followers that film festivals attract. A film festival provides a place where talent can collide with talent;where aspiring filmmakers might catch a glimpse of the real thing. And realize they’re not so different from themselves.
E-mail:
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
This article was published June 1, 2010 at 2:21 a.m.
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