I’ve been wading in the indie festival pond for the last couple of days and it has not been a joy.  It’s great to see filmmakers, publicists and other friends of whom I never see enough.  But then there are the movies…

There’s nothing worse than a bad indie… scratch that… there’s nothing worse than a bad, over-hyped indie. If you’ve read me for any length of time, you know that I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about poor production values, unless the film is grounded in high-end production.  I’m perfectly happy with hand-held, video, grainy, ugly, tough-loved production.  I am a great fan of Manito, Eric Eason’s terrific digital movie that has a trail of awards from virtually every festival its been to… Miami was its second festival.  And while I dislike the content of Chuck & Buck, the coarse visual style was akin to a fresh rendition of an old standard… really interesting in and of itself.

I don’t mind shallow.  I don’t mind deep.  I don’t mind short.  I don’t mind long.  I don’t even mind mustaches. 

I love story movies.  I love character movies.  I love every genre.  I’ll happily watch black & white (but not James Toback’s Black & White) or sub-titled foreign language films (I hate dubs). 

So here’s what I don’t understand… why is the Independent Film Project, one of the industry’s truly great organizations, unable to come up with a line-up for their film festival… five months past Sundance and a month past Cannes… that pushes the envelope?  Why am I seeing stuff from Toronto 2001?  Why are they opening and closing with two films that have gotten lukewarm responses from even the most indie-loving critics around America? 

And what the hell is the deal with Tadpole? 

Don’t get me wrong, Tadpole is not a terrible film.   On the other hand, it is a lightweight sitcom with very good actors, a meandering script, no skill in raising the stakes, little more direction than pointing the camera, editing that excuses the shooting mistakes more than anything else and the blandest payoff possible. 

There are three ways you can go with a comedic “15-year-old home for Thanksgiving sexually obsessed with his stepmother” story.   One, you can create a high wire farce.  Two, you can create an emotionally complex character piece that gives you real insight into the characters and their lives.  Three, you can do something brilliant that no idiot critic ever considered. 

Tadpole is none of the above. 

There is one scene of farce, featuring a fancy dinner after a surprising sexual encounter, where the object of affection, the receptor of lust, the disciplinarian and the tadpole try to keep their secrets.  But it ends up playing soft.  The director does an okay job with the table spacing, but every revelation is underplayed, not in a sophisticated way, but in a “it’s time to get to the next plot point, so we need to move along” kind of way.  Again, more complications or less complications would work, but instead, it sits in the middle like a lump, throwing in sitcom-level jokes that couldn’t begin to compete with the wit of a commercial project like Martha Coolidge’s Valley Girl, which is celebrating its 20^th anniversary at this event. 

Thing is, this is a strong idea.   It was when we saw Spanking The Monkey.  It was when Andrew McCarthy seduced or was seduced by Jaqueline Bisset in Class.  It was quite something when Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson wrote a March/May desperate romance into Rushmore and balanced it with an October/May desperate romance and a dead husband’s memory to boot.

I expect more from an “indie sensation!”  Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels was, for my money, a derivative, repetitive ham fest.  But I could see the attraction.  I didn’t care for Chuck & Buck, but I could see why people felt their buttons being pushed.  Memento… interesting, complex story, well told… and no mini-major pick-up, much less any “indie sensation” spin.  Manito has no domestic distribution, which is an embarrassment. 

With all due respect to Gary Winick for getting this made, he has a shot at a career as a TV director.  Unless someone gets behind him or he hits a lucky shot out of the park with the hottest new star that happens in his next movie (Aaron Stanford is a quieter, less good looking Paul Walker), he’s not going to make it in features.  He has no visual style.  He has no great insight as a filmmaker.  He gets away with limited skills because he shoots digitally and even then, he doesn’t have the good sense to know the limitations of his digital equipment and is constantly caught doing things that flare, flash and smear.

You don’t have to like Whit Stillman, but his self-righteous, egocentric, indulgent characters and the inevitable innocent that they corrupt say something about today’s moneyed culture.  After backhanding  James Toback, I must admit that Black & White does give us an interesting glimpse of wannabeblack New York kids, as does Larry Clarke’s also-iffy Kids.  Wes Anderson and David O. Russell have succeeded in glimpsing the hearts of the deeply confused on a level that used to be owned by the Hal Ashbys and Michael Ritchies of the world.

Tadpole is a movie that you might actually give 100 minutes when it turns up on IFC on some slow night for network TV.  It’s a sitcom that aspires a little higher – though not nearly as high as Frank’s Place or the early seasons of The John Larroquette Show.  That’s all.

I’m sure there are some great discoveries to be made at this festival.  But the local papers seem less interested in the festival than they are in the Scooby Doo sequel.  And that’s too bad. 

P.S.: Kirsten Dunst attended a screening at the festival the other night… it wasn’t raining and the room didn’t seem too cold, though to be honest, I didn’t really even consider checking until I was writing this and decided to fulfill my image as a bird watching sex goof.  There also wasn’t a press photographer in sight.   (There was one underage girl – she couldn’t get into the Ball in the House cocktail party – who was “young Ali McGraw” stunning.  I mean, she will end up in the movies by mistake.   Can’t miss.)

SPEAKING OF THE L.A. TIMES:  Patrick Goldstein’s weekly column had another good week, though I do wish that he had been guided towards a film festival story by an editor who understood the significance of festivasl to the industry’s health.   Patrick takes on the idea that directors from other countries find little more than trouble – or at least, reduced quality – by coming to Hollywood. 

However (you knew there’d be a “however,” didn’t you?) Patrick leads out the two most significant contributions to these directors’ travel plans… ego and money.   Directors come here to conquer the non-musical film capital of the world and to make big, big money.  I doubt that John Woo worked on a far-eastern film with a budget as high as his salary on Windtalkers. 

I would also question the idea that Jean-Pierre Jeunet was miscast as the director of Alien Resurrection.  Quite the contrary.  It was right up his alley and Fox was brave to invite him to play.  But the screenplay was micromanaged to death by Giler & Hill, much as it was on Alien 3, where they took writing credit along with Larry Ferguson. 

In any case, it’s a good read.  Click here to take a look. 

DUMPED!:  J.R. Taylor of the NYPress, with the help of director Tom DiCillo’s brute honesty, delivers a great story about the life and life-support of DiCillo’s Double Whammy.  I am not a big fan of DiCillo’s work, but that really isn’t the point.  The dangers of the indie world is.  (Click here.)

WHAT A MESS-IER!:  I don’ t know why the slow destruction of Jean-Marie Messier isn’t more interesting to me.   Much as the transition of AOL into Time-Warner led to changes, the downturn in AOL’s value and the depression in AOL/TW stock have led to more changes.  Universal is still in a bit of flux, transitioning into French water and Barry Diller.  But the turmoil at Vivendi Universal seems sure to spark ongoing changes in the film division, whether needed or not.  The biggest trouble may be something that won’t happen… the pick-up of NBC and/or General Electric, as the last piece of the Vivendi Universal media puzzle.  After years of speculation about a NBC purchase by someone, it has become absolutely clear that the health of a studio’s television division can be directly correlated to the ownership of a network outlet.   But suddenly, there are no legitimate suitors.  Sony ain’t going there, MGM is more likely to be bought by NBC than buying NBC,  Vivendi Universal is writhing in pain and Warner Bros. belt is so tight already that they can’t seem to get any blood flowing to their collective privates.   Disney, Viacom and News Corp are already networked up. 

SOUNDS ODD:  THX is going indie.  It will no longer be a part of LucasFilm, though I imagine that George will remain the dominant stockholder.  They see a future for the brand in car audio and computer games.  Pretty impressive for what was essentially a hard-to-confirm checklist of requirements for theater sound systems.  I guess that when everyone thinks you are a hardware company, eventually you submit and rake in the cash. 

LOVE IT:  The idea of remaking Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner with a respectable black family wondering whether it’s a good idea for their daughter to marry a white boy… wonderful… if it’s done well.  35 years later, it actually makes sense.  I would imagine that the comedic aspects will have to be heightened and that the social conscious will have to fall back, much as times had to be adjusted to in the remake of another Spencer Tracey film, Father of the Bride or in Elaine May’s two-decade-later adaptation of La Cage Aux Foilles into The Birdcage.  The lesson from both of those films is to not go too far.  You don’t need Pauly Shore in order to make this work.  Owen Wilson might be interesting, though he’s kind of played this note.  Ryan Reynolds?

READER OF THE DAY:  Fast Jonny starts us off with:  “Your thoughts on Daniel Pearl, Dreamworks and The Boston Phoenix were well-considered.  I have just one minor correction to offer -- there is no difference between a movie studio and a company that sells detergent. Everyone outside of the industry knows that and the smart people inside the industry know that.  Yes, art lives -- but only for conversation's sake at the studio level.”

M&M writes:  “As noble as your view of the Pearl footage might be, I wholeheartedly disagree with your assessment of its value.

We know that Daniel Pearl was brutally executed. We know why. We've seen his family's grief. We've seen the cheering in the streets that his execution provoked. There is no further "knowledge" to be gained from the viewing of it. What is to be gained is the visceral impact of watching a real person die onscreen.

While your interest in the matter might have been noble, and your resolve strengthened, the Pearl family has to relive the horror of losing their husband/son/father over and again, thanks to the wonder of technology. What happens when one of Daniel's child's friends shows his child the tape without permission from the mother? Who has to clean up the emotional and psychological mess that will create? Certainly not the Boston Phoenix.

And I can't see any motivation for the Phoenix to print that photo and include that web link other than to increase their circulation through shock value.

The most troubling part of this is that all of this goes against the wishes of Pearl's family. They specifically requested that the footage not be made public. To have done otherwise is to fly in the face of a grieving widow and her newborn child. Can you really assert that what you gained from that footage is more valuable than what they lost that day?

You may have garnered some sort of sense of injustice and horror at watching the footage, but that doesn't make it necessary viewing. It's a snuff film, plain and simple. And I'm saddened by people's attempts to justify its existence, when our fascination with death (the more untimely the better) and our nations willingness to do near anything to make a dollar is really what's driving this train.”

And this from ColumDas:  “I agree wholeheartedly with your points on Daniel  Pearl.  Especially since most Americans do not understand the complexities and severities of what we're up against. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few and we cannot run our society solely based upon what is good for the victim's family.  A lot of people argue for the death penalty based on the need for justice (vengeance?) for victims' families.  But we are a society of laws, not a society that gives out justice on what would satisfy a victim or family.  I'd love to beat the crap out of the guy who mugged me once, but the law says otherwise. 

One other major point to include however: it wasn't just an attack on our country, but on Jews.  Daniel Pearl was forced to say "I am a Jew.  My father is a Jew.  This is why I am held" etc. Americans need to understand the degree of anti-Semitism that exists in the world and the ugliness of it.  It bothers me that the media seems to allow a bit of anti-Semitism to slide.  If Daniel Pearl were black and said, "I am black.  My father is black. This is why I am held," the outrage and condemnation would be widespread, and rightly so. 

But the anti-Semitic aspect of this murder has been generally glossed over and we are all led to believe it was purely an anti-American attack.  It wasn't.  Vast numbers, arguably a majority, of the Islamic world is virulently anti-Semitic.  But how much of this anti-Semitism has really been adequately highlighted in the mass media?  The Daniel Pearl tape is an opportunity to educate the world just how hateful and misguided our enemies our.  But instead, we're more concerned with soothing the feelings of a family, and once again, a certain degree of anti-Semitism is tolerated.  As Bill Maher himself said, "Jews & Israel are held to a higher standard, often an impossible standard, even in our own country."  Arguably, the failure to really emphasize the anti-Semitism of this tragic murder is a perfect example of this.”

McG.L.T. writes:  “I've always felt that society has the responsibility to educate themselves on the actual events of the world they live in.  Our culture does a pretty good job of insulating ourselves from it.  I've always been angered by protests towards the "realism" of movies like Private Ryan and Platoon.  As though part of our society is qualified to actually endure horrible trauma, but another group won't even bother to watch visual interpretations of these events.  It took me 3 days to watch the Pearl video after I knew of its location.  But I forced myself to.  I don't think there's any other way to understand the complexities of our role in the world w/o seeing what lengths people will go to send a message to us.”

E ME:  Sorry that the updating schedule is still erratic.  My webmistress’ computer went to a bad place.  But this too shall pass.  What do you want from a film festival?  Who should be coming to dinner?  And what do you think of DiCillo – victim or whiner?