IFF Boston

Cuz We're B& From Stickam

By Cara Bayles

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The IFF's significance is snowballing. It offers the opportunity to check out premium indie fare (in 2006, the IFF previewed Half Nelson, the effortless narrative of drugs, race, class and education), and with recently imposed state tax breaks for filmmakers, Boston is even more relevant to the independent scene. Reviewing a festival screening more than 90 films from all over the world is problematic. You can only watch so many screeners in a week, and there lurks this guilty, sinking notion that you're missing out by not stealing screeners from IFF HQ and pulling several all-nighters to watch every single one, instead of reviewing a mere fraction.

Harmony Korine (Gummo, Julian Donkey Boy) presents his newest offering, Mister Lonely, in which a Michael Jackson impersonator is lured by a Marilyn Monroe impersonator to a commune for their ilk. Watching pop culture icons like James Dean, Madonna, Sammy Davis Jr., and the Three Stooges romp through the pastoral landscape is utterly surreal (as are some of the romantic pairings—the Queen and the Pope? Monroe and a German Charlie Chaplin?). The main narrative is interwoven with a subplot about a fleet of flying nuns led by a goofy priest (played by New German Cinema director Werner Herzog). The actors are more photographic subjects and caricatures than real characters, which is half explained in the slow plot's gestures toward questions of identity. But you can imagine the eye-candy: colorful habits fluttering in flight, Little Red Riding Hood walking along railroad tracks in yellow galoshes, Michael Jackson dancing on the streets of Paris and on a rocky hilltop overlooking the ocean, a flock of sheep tended by Abraham Lincoln.

Savage Grace traces a deeply dysfunctional bourgeois family-of-three's decline across countries and decades. It's fun to watch Julianne Moore, long type-cast as a repressed 1940s/50s housewife (The End of the Affair, Far From Heaven, The Hours), try on a destructive roll. This film pops with the color and costume of a 1950s melodrama, but unlike directors of the day Douglas Sirk and Nicholas Ray (who used understated framings and gestures to reveal motivations), everything is overt (unless there's a film out there in which Jane Wyman asks "Does he fuck you up the ass?"). But even this was too subtle for the explosion of disturbing drama in the last 15 minutes of the film.

The documentary Crawford traces national politics through the spectrum of the small Texas town where George W. Bush bought his ranch and his cowboy image. The film shows a spectrum of discourse among the townspeople: opportunism, patriotism, rebellion against pervasive Republican values, cynicism toward reporters and chaos from antiwar protestor Cindy Sheenan's arrival. While much of the war rhetoric is stale, it's (unfortunately) still relevant. But the fascinating part of the film is the changing face of Crawford—a ranch town outside of Waco with boarded-up storefronts—which is both the unwitting victim of a media storm and the perpetrator of intolerance against its more left-leaning residents.

At the Death House Door is also a political look at the personal, in this case, Rev. Carroll Pickett of Huntsville Prison. The chaplain tries to bring dignity to the lethal injection of 95 inmates, one of whom was innocent. Perhaps questions of innocence or guilt should not be at the forefront of the death penalty debate, but director Steve James (Hoop Dreams) still delivers a haunting look at the ugly implementation of state-sanctioned execution.

The documentaries range from Death House Door to glances into Harry Potter followings and online role-playing games. There is also a short film program, which offers a lyrical selection (while I haven't seen Glory at Sea, knowing its director, it will boast a bizarre plot and startling visual dreamscapes). The diversity of the films is amazing; every trailer on the IFF website looks intriguing. It's probably best to see as many as you can.

IFF BOSTON 2008

WEDNESDAY 4.23–TUESDAY 4.29

FOR TICKETS AND SHOWTIMES VISIT

IFFBOSTON.ORG