FILM : Festival lineup shows aplomb
Posted on Sunday, May 11, 2008
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The Little Rock Film Festival, which returns Thursday for its second year and with a slate of more than 50 films, ought to be in its sophomore slump. This time around, there’s no novelty and no Knocked Up, the summer 2007 blockbuster that, through some shrewd negotiating on the part of festival programmers, received an early sneak-preview screening by opening the inaugural event.
By contrast, the opening night selection this year, a more thoughtful and sedate characterdriven film called War Eagle, Arkansas, centers on the friendship between a star high-school athlete with a stuttering problem and a boy with cerebral palsy. It doesn’t seem poised to make big stars out of anybody, as Knocked Up did for Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl, but instead has ambitions more oriented toward intimacy and establishing a sense of place, featuring actors like Brian Dennehy, Mary Kay Place and Mare Winningham who are already comfortable with their resumes.
In a similar way, organizers of the Little Rock Film Festival, which will commandeer rooms of the Riverdale 10 Cinemas, the Clinton Presidential Center and the Little Rock Chamber of Commerce from Thursday through May 18, seem to not be experiencing a sophomore slump so much as something like senioritis — the sense that the hard part is behind them, and they can now coast and have a little fun.
After all, the organizers are self-assured enough to have rejected three films that ultimately were accepted into this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, where they breathed the rarefied air of Robert De Niro, that festival’s founder, and Speed Racer, which closed the New York event. As a loose-limbed and unofficial pre-party for the coming long weekend of film appreciation, the festival, through special arrangement with Universal Pictures, will host a screening at 7: 30 p. m. Tuesday of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, attended by Judge Reinhold, a festival panelist and a star of the era-defining movie. (Though Reinhold played the relatively straightlaced role of Brad, somewhat of a foil to the iconic stoner Jeff Spicoli played by Sean Penn, he will presumably wear a straighter face May 18 at 1 p. m. when he will discuss the economic importance of film industry tax incentives at the Chamber of Commerce building, than he will at the Fast Times screening at Riverdale, where he will introduce the film and, one hopes, offer behind-the-scenes, self-deprecating dish involving swimming pools, voyeurism and Phoebe Cates. )
SILLY SEX The state of mind a Spicoli might bring to Tuesday night’s screening would likely serve festivalgoers well for the Friday and Saturday late-night screenings (9 p. m. Friday and 10 p. m. Saturday, both at Riverdale ) of festival entry Blood Car, a horror film made in the self-aware, close-to-the-ground guerrilla style about a car that runs on human blood rather than gasoline, which in the near future has reached $ 32 a gallon.
The film’s press notes read thusly: “Archie soon becomes the only person driving a car and attracts the attention of a slutty, sex-crazed sex slut named Denise. Unable to turn down her advances, Archie gets attached to her filthy sex and the only way to continue getting that filthy sex is to keep the car running.” (To be fair, repetition aside, Blood Car’s more restricted material is more akin to silly sex than filthy sex. )
And the ultimate example of the larky, freewheeling swagger festival programmers — consisting in part of the documentary filmmaking brothers Craig and Brent Renaud; Jamie Moses, son of Little Rock realestate visionary Jimmy Moses; and Owen Brainard, a veteran of the Austin Film Festival scene — appear to be bringing to this year’s lineup might lie in a special event Saturday afternoon. The festival will bring together Harry Thomason, the Arkansas native and film and television producer, and Charles B. Pierce, the filmmaker from Hollywood’s 1970 s outlaw era, now living in a Winnebago on the banks of the Arkansas River near Redfield, who is known for producing and directing horror films like The Legend of Boggy Creek and The Town That Dreaded Sundown.
Those films (and non-horror flick Bootleggers ) will be shown — Sundown at 9: 15 p. m. Friday at Riverdale and Boggy Creek at 8 p. m. May 18 in Riverfest Amphitheatre, as part of the city’s Movies in the Park series. Bootleggers will be screened at 5 p. m. Saturday at the Clinton Presidential Center.
An entire festival schedule, including film screening as well as pitch sessions for aspiring screenwriters and the final round of a music-video competition, is available at www. littlerockfilmfestival. org. A festival pass is $ 25, or screenings may be attended individually for a donation — festival organizers suggest $ 5.
Thomason, who recently saw his series Twelve Miles of Bad Road canned by HBO before a single airing, is known for holding a showbiz grudge and being willing to talk about it, and Pierce is known for taking a $ 100, 000 investment from an Arkansas trucking company and turning it into, through dogged promotion of Boggy Creek, $ 22 million. The two men worked together on the set of Winterhawk, a western which Pierce shot in Montana in the mid-1970 s, during a less corporate or reined-in era of filmmaking. The festival is touting their tete-a-tete as an Inside the Actor’s Studio-style experience, but, given the personalities involved, it more promises to be that show if James Lipton drank bourbon and named names.
PARTY HEARTY Oh, and lest ye forget the velvet-rope aspect of any film festival that takes itself seriously, or at least as a purveyor of serious fun, “there are a ridiculous amount of parties,” Jack Lofton, a coordinator of the festival, hastens to add. In fact, the parties number eight in all, including a filmmaker reception at 5 p. m. Friday at Crush, an afterparty to a day of film-viewing at Copper at 10 p. m. Friday, as well as, at 9 p. m. the same day, a film festival gala at the Clinton Presidential Center, with separate tickets priced at $ 75. “That’s one thing we always want to say about the film festival, is that we have the longterm mission of being very institutionalized, and really having enough sway to influence the community, to help the alreadythriving arts scene and stop younger people with an interest in film from feeling like they have to go to L. A., New York or Austin,” Lofton adds. “But we also just want to have a good time.”
However, in the next breath, Lofton hastens to add that there were several more somber film festival entries to which he was personally directing friends and fellow film enthusiasts. These include Crawford, a documentary to be shown at 11 a. m. Saturday at Riverdale that explores the town that is home to President Bush’s family ranch, and Tracing Cowboys, a narrative feature that follows an Englishman and aspiring country singer in a road-trip search for the girlfriend who left him. The film, which screens at 7 p. m. May 18 at Riverdale, loosely follows the same arc as the John Wayne classic The Searchers.
And the festival’s ripening from year one to year two has only burnished the imprimatur brought to the proceedings by the Renauds, who are hardly a George Clooney-Brad Pitt-esque tag team of affable charmers on film-connection autopilot. This time last year, the brothers were not only heading into their first festival but also finishing up work on the documentary Little Rock Central: 50 Years Later, which has since premiered on HBO.
They are now following the story of a group of injured Iraq war veterans who have qualified for the Summer Paralympic Games much sooner than anticipated, and will accompany them in a few months to competition in Beijing. They are also self-producing a documentary about the family of a boy who recently underwent a heart transplant at Arkansas Children’s Hospital after enduring one of the world’s longest attachments to a Berlin Heart, a device which functions as a heart while outside the body.
The Renauds hope to place the completed film in contention for an Academy Award for Best Short Documentary Feature.
Brent Renaud adds that what might look like guilty pleasures and other popcorn fare at this year’s festival were still held to a standard of providing a link in the chain connecting the Little Rock Film Festival to the independent film community at large.
While Pierce’s films can be enjoyed as midnight-movie escapism, “this is a guy we should be recognizing,” Renaud says. “He’s really a pioneer of independent cinema.”
“And when you talk about Blood Car,” he continued, “it’s really just guerrilla filmmaking that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s more than the fact that it’s horror. There’s a real independent spirit in those films.”