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April 4 through 9, 2006
I attended 15 feature length films and saw numerous shorts in the festival's four days and 75 films total. Having attended many other film festivals in my life--notably various years of the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Silent Film Festivals and the Gay and Lesbian Film Festivals in S.F. also, as well as the Pacific Rim and Santa Cruz Film Festivals when I lived there--I have to say, first, I was a bit underwhelmed by this festival. Although I know that it is one of the approximately 2800 film fests we currently have in the U.S. and that it features only indie films, I couldn't find or figure out its focus. Locals who had attended previous fests here told me that its quality definitely varies with each year's programmers, and that the last couple years it has featured programmers who are not that intimate with film, thus its variability. It is definitely an event for Sonoma boosters and boosterism, being so far as I know the only film festival with its own wine sommelier and wine and appetizer pairings available free for every showing.
As a former teacher, I find it easy to grade this festival: B- Overall, I saw 8 good to great films and 7 mediocre to abysmal ones. You can Google any of the titles to find out more than my bare notes; several of the films have already had some release and most of the rest (with the exception, I dearly hope, of "Hog Island") will be in release in the next few months to year.
The Greats:
NOVEM A delightful mockumentary, almost midway in its freshness between Blair Witch Project and Spinal Tap about a band that supposedly died in a car crash in 1973. The attention to detail, culturally and musically, the inventiveness of the situation, and the obvious joy and passion in making this film exude from every sprocket hole. I'm sure a Novem group will appear just as Spinal Tap was an example of "nature imitating art," as Oscar Wilde had it. Definitely look for it!
STARBUCKING At least as entertaining as Supersize Me without its didactic quality, this odyssey with a guy whose goal in life is to sample all of the 1600 or so Starbucks worldwide is 21st century road trip film par excellence as well as a wacky Zen spiritual journey we are invited to participate in up close and almost too personally! Its bright and wild protagonist is a winner, as are the insights and outlooks he experiences throughout this caffeine-fueled documentary.
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO SESAME STREET This film has more than meets the eye when one looks at its title. Of course, one thinks, they had to "adapt" Sesame Street when it ventured into some of the over 120 nations where it has landed. But the stories in this documentary, especially as it lands in Bangladesh and South Africa, among others, are fascinating gems of cultural encounters and mega-learnings in the real world of the 21st century. You will never look at Big Bird the same.
WHEN I DIE perhaps you know of the monumental death wish that Hunter S. Thompson had and how his friend Johnny Depp helped that come to fruition. This documentary shows all that and somehow manages to not have it a big-names-in-your-face thing. We never really see Depp or any of the others whose presence would have made it just another media crap shoot. Filmmaker and Hunter friend Wayne Ewing, who also made the brilliant "Breakfast with Hunter" collected over the years 1978-2003, presents this final gonzo sendoff that every HST fan will want to see!
FUCK Filmmaker Steve Anderson's 2006 movie is a gem of "edu-tainment." It features left, right and center, the informed and the ignorant, live action and animated, every-which-way that I'd imagined as a lifelong wordsmith and word lover.... and more than I'd even thought about or hoped for in a film about this most controversial of English words. I'm looking forward to the DVD so I can share this gem with friends. Just seeing and hearing Alan Keyes, Pat Boone, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved on one side and Hunter S. Thompson, Kevin Smith, Sam Donaldson and Ben Bradlee among others on all sides make this a highly charged and fascinating film!
NEVERWAS You know them all as actors but you've never seen them together or apart in a first-movie like this! It will be one that wins you over if you also like the zone that is inhabited by writers from Neil Gaiman to J.R.R. Tolkein! A psychiatrist played by Aaron Eckhart, leaves an academic career to work at an institution run by William Hurt where his father, Nick Nolte, a novelist, lived before writing a renowned children's book. There he encounters a schizophrenic, Ian McKellen who helps him to discover the book's secrets and his place in the story. This was a real audience pleaser the last night of the festival, and I believe it will win over you, too!
The Goods:
KINKY BOOTS Somewhat in the tradition of other more recondite drag queen movies, this is one for suburbia. It’s a smart English flick with a lot of style and two decades after Le Cage, nothing to scare such audiences. Entertaining fluff.
AURORA BOREALIS Wonderful roles in this conflicted family flick for Joshua Jackson, Donald Sutherland, Louise Fletcher, Juliette Lewis, Steven Pasquale, and Zack Ward. It's a familiar story but the writing, directing and acting make it come alive.
The Mediocre:
A YEAR ON EARTH An earnest attempt at showing the real life plight of three teens who win an environmentalist group's prize to go abroad and report back via the web what they find with other youth about our endangered planet. A soppy feel-gooder.
MARILYN HOTCHKISS' BALLROOM DANCING & CHARM SCHOOL tries earnestly (again) and falls on its face over and over. This tedious attempt at something that, say, American Beauty did brilliantly, should just die in the multiplexes where it belongs.
THE LEGEND OF LUCY KEYES Just another New England horror ghost flick. Not bad--remember I said these are the mediocre ones--just a bit stillborn. Why? Why not have another round of ghosts?
DANCE WITH THE DEVIL: Luckily, the hot urban blues group, the Toledo Show from Harvelles in Santa Monica, who ARE truly fab, showed up with this so-so documentary made about them and their show that hardly keeps them alive on screen. Go see the show somewhere, but forget this drippy documentary!
The Abysmal:
FAVELA RISING should have been a real rouser but it dropped the ball technically and artistically in trying to tell the real-life story of a Rio gang-banger turned Afro-Reggae hero. City of God did it far better a couple of years ago, musically, dramatically and finally so far!
HOG ISLAND You'll probably never hear any more of this unless it becomes a cult favorites among unconsciously bad flicks. Made by some locals, it wasn't even up to the standard of the student film show here.
IN MEMORY OF MY FATHER Done in (gimmick one) a famous dead filmmaker's house in Hollywood with (gimmick two) actors using their real first names on (gimmick three) flat videotape, this one makes Sex, Drugs and Videotape look like an all-time classic in comparison. Full of adolescent histrionics, it hardly rises to the level of Anniversary Party (even the drugs are worse!). Somebody sure had a lot of money, big name friends, and endless chutzpah to make this dog!
I attended 15 feature length films and saw numerous shorts in the festival's four days and 75 films total. Having attended many other film festivals in my life--notably various years of the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Silent Film Festivals and the Gay and Lesbian Film Festivals in S.F. also, as well as the Pacific Rim and Santa Cruz Film Festivals when I lived there--I have to say, first, I was a bit underwhelmed by this festival. Although I know that it is one of the approximately 2800 film fests we currently have in the U.S. and that it features only indie films, I couldn't find or figure out its focus. Locals who had attended previous fests here told me that its quality definitely varies with each year's programmers, and that the last couple years it has featured programmers who are not that intimate with film, thus its variability. It is definitely an event for Sonoma boosters and boosterism, being so far as I know the only film festival with its own wine sommelier and wine and appetizer pairings available free for every showing.
As a former teacher, I find it easy to grade this festival: B- Overall, I saw 8 good to great films and 7 mediocre to abysmal ones. You can Google any of the titles to find out more than my bare notes; several of the films have already had some release and most of the rest (with the exception, I dearly hope, of "Hog Island") will be in release in the next few months to year.
The Greats:
NOVEM A delightful mockumentary, almost midway in its freshness between Blair Witch Project and Spinal Tap about a band that supposedly died in a car crash in 1973. The attention to detail, culturally and musically, the inventiveness of the situation, and the obvious joy and passion in making this film exude from every sprocket hole. I'm sure a Novem group will appear just as Spinal Tap was an example of "nature imitating art," as Oscar Wilde had it. Definitely look for it!
STARBUCKING At least as entertaining as Supersize Me without its didactic quality, this odyssey with a guy whose goal in life is to sample all of the 1600 or so Starbucks worldwide is 21st century road trip film par excellence as well as a wacky Zen spiritual journey we are invited to participate in up close and almost too personally! Its bright and wild protagonist is a winner, as are the insights and outlooks he experiences throughout this caffeine-fueled documentary.
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO SESAME STREET This film has more than meets the eye when one looks at its title. Of course, one thinks, they had to "adapt" Sesame Street when it ventured into some of the over 120 nations where it has landed. But the stories in this documentary, especially as it lands in Bangladesh and South Africa, among others, are fascinating gems of cultural encounters and mega-learnings in the real world of the 21st century. You will never look at Big Bird the same.
WHEN I DIE perhaps you know of the monumental death wish that Hunter S. Thompson had and how his friend Johnny Depp helped that come to fruition. This documentary shows all that and somehow manages to not have it a big-names-in-your-face thing. We never really see Depp or any of the others whose presence would have made it just another media crap shoot. Filmmaker and Hunter friend Wayne Ewing, who also made the brilliant "Breakfast with Hunter" collected over the years 1978-2003, presents this final gonzo sendoff that every HST fan will want to see!
FUCK Filmmaker Steve Anderson's 2006 movie is a gem of "edu-tainment." It features left, right and center, the informed and the ignorant, live action and animated, every-which-way that I'd imagined as a lifelong wordsmith and word lover.... and more than I'd even thought about or hoped for in a film about this most controversial of English words. I'm looking forward to the DVD so I can share this gem with friends. Just seeing and hearing Alan Keyes, Pat Boone, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved on one side and Hunter S. Thompson, Kevin Smith, Sam Donaldson and Ben Bradlee among others on all sides make this a highly charged and fascinating film!
NEVERWAS You know them all as actors but you've never seen them together or apart in a first-movie like this! It will be one that wins you over if you also like the zone that is inhabited by writers from Neil Gaiman to J.R.R. Tolkein! A psychiatrist played by Aaron Eckhart, leaves an academic career to work at an institution run by William Hurt where his father, Nick Nolte, a novelist, lived before writing a renowned children's book. There he encounters a schizophrenic, Ian McKellen who helps him to discover the book's secrets and his place in the story. This was a real audience pleaser the last night of the festival, and I believe it will win over you, too!
The Goods:
KINKY BOOTS Somewhat in the tradition of other more recondite drag queen movies, this is one for suburbia. It’s a smart English flick with a lot of style and two decades after Le Cage, nothing to scare such audiences. Entertaining fluff.
AURORA BOREALIS Wonderful roles in this conflicted family flick for Joshua Jackson, Donald Sutherland, Louise Fletcher, Juliette Lewis, Steven Pasquale, and Zack Ward. It's a familiar story but the writing, directing and acting make it come alive.
The Mediocre:
A YEAR ON EARTH An earnest attempt at showing the real life plight of three teens who win an environmentalist group's prize to go abroad and report back via the web what they find with other youth about our endangered planet. A soppy feel-gooder.
MARILYN HOTCHKISS' BALLROOM DANCING & CHARM SCHOOL tries earnestly (again) and falls on its face over and over. This tedious attempt at something that, say, American Beauty did brilliantly, should just die in the multiplexes where it belongs.
THE LEGEND OF LUCY KEYES Just another New England horror ghost flick. Not bad--remember I said these are the mediocre ones--just a bit stillborn. Why? Why not have another round of ghosts?
DANCE WITH THE DEVIL: Luckily, the hot urban blues group, the Toledo Show from Harvelles in Santa Monica, who ARE truly fab, showed up with this so-so documentary made about them and their show that hardly keeps them alive on screen. Go see the show somewhere, but forget this drippy documentary!
The Abysmal:
FAVELA RISING should have been a real rouser but it dropped the ball technically and artistically in trying to tell the real-life story of a Rio gang-banger turned Afro-Reggae hero. City of God did it far better a couple of years ago, musically, dramatically and finally so far!
HOG ISLAND You'll probably never hear any more of this unless it becomes a cult favorites among unconsciously bad flicks. Made by some locals, it wasn't even up to the standard of the student film show here.
IN MEMORY OF MY FATHER Done in (gimmick one) a famous dead filmmaker's house in Hollywood with (gimmick two) actors using their real first names on (gimmick three) flat videotape, this one makes Sex, Drugs and Videotape look like an all-time classic in comparison. Full of adolescent histrionics, it hardly rises to the level of Anniversary Party (even the drugs are worse!). Somebody sure had a lot of money, big name friends, and endless chutzpah to make this dog!
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