WFF10: The Blog

“Dear Lemon Lima” won over the audiences. Suzi Yoonessi’s film about a child fitting in won the Best Narrative Feature Audience Award.

“After the Storm” - which looks at survivors of Hurricane Katrina - won the Best Documentary Feature Audience Award.

Full winners:

Best Narrative Feature
First place: “Dear Lemon Lima”
Second place: “Don’t Let Me Drown”
Third place: “Harlem Aria”

Best Documentary Feature
First place: “After the Storm”
Second place: “Mighty Uke”
Third place: “William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe”

Jason Reitman. You’re starting to see his style permeate in his works — the quirky nuances, the heady ruminations, the brash young adults, the corny emo folk anthems. In “Juno,” they worked because above them were well-grounded performances by the adult leads, mainly Jason Bateman. For “Up in the Air,” Reitman was handed George Clooney and Vera Farmiga, along with Bateman. No need to worry, then.

And well grounded is the right term, even for a movie called “Up in the Air.” We’re led to believe by Clooney’s isolated Ryan Bingham that he’s just that: Completely isolated. And yet as a corporate downsizer whose life’s mission is to collect a hundred million frequent-flyer miles, he deals every day in the life of the grounded: Comforting and warming people at their most naked, their most hurt. Not only is he great at his job, but he’s practically invented the modern-day handbook for firing people the right way. Nobody is better at making someone feel better quicker than Clooney’s Bingham.

Clooney gives Bingham a depth that could’ve been easy to misplace. He truly wants to feel accepted by someone, and when Vera Farmiga’s Alex enters his life via the hotel bar, his world begins to unravel. In typical Clooney fashion, it’s never forced, always believable.

Farmiga is fresh as Clooney’s doppleganger sex partner, before showing her character’s enormous depth via a twist in the plot. Like Clooney, you root for Farmiga’s Alex, and despite the easy opportunity to turn against her, Reitman adds the right notes to understand the moment.

Behind the airline love story are splendid moments of superior Reitman power. The young adult lead is Anna Kendrick, who as the hot-shot idea woman at Clooney’s downsizing firm plays like the corporate Juno. She’s sassy and smart, but vulnerable and soft like anyone in her shoes. If Clooney deserves Best Actor buzz, so does Kendrick in the supporting lane.

Fun parts come for Melanie Lynskey and Danny McBride as Clooney’s sister and soon-to-be in-law. They’re the anti Bingham — a grounded couple hoping for the best but dealing with all the struggles of the men and women Clooney’s character so easily sets aside and attempts to rebuild.

Everything comes back to the idea of being grounded. And in the end, Reitman ties up everyone’s juggling matches very neatly — maybe too neatly. That aside, you get classic Clooney (his scenes with Farmiga are fabulous), a sexy and natural Farmiga, and the type of cute and cuddly head games Reitman is now playing on a regular basis.

3.5 stars

Guy Jacobson spent years of his life documenting “Redlight,” the story of victims of child sex trafficking in Cambodia. A worthy effort, to be sure, Jacobson is hoping to shed light on a tragic issue that is simply not a concentrated one: Child sex trafficking plagues multiple nations, including the United States. But take a closer look at the film — which teeters between strong storytelling documentary and mishandled VH1 style program — and you’ll see an even more interesting issue: The plight of the third world.

“Redlight” — narrated by global activist and actress Lucy Liu — cuts no corners in saying that the nation of Cambodia is completely troubled. The horrid reign of Pol Pot influenced a generation to complete ruin. Most 20-30-something Cambodians are uneducated and plain filthy, but without knowing why in the global sense. To these adults, selling their children is like selling a used CD collection — anything to make a buck, since life is unbelievably tough. Jacobsen finds a grandfather so sick that he cannot walk; moreover, he sweats profusely and must be rubbed constantly to dull his pain. This grandfather’s plight was used as a lie by his daughter, who sold her daughter to a brothel. Resuced by her aunt, this girl still must face the demons of the brothel life, but is doing better by the day.

The brothel life takes up much of “Redlight,” and it does get repetitive. The girls are sold at a young age — some even at age 6 — to houses where they are taught to please the scum who pay for their services. Some men pay extra to deflower a girl, and the brothel owners check this, sometimes even stitching a girl to show her off as a virgin a second, third or fourth time. Yes, it’s that disgusting.

If rescued from the brothels, girls are sometimes turned over to activist champions such as Somaly Mam and Mu Sochua. “Redlight” uses them to expand the story, giving political depth and greater understanding of the ugly underbelly that is Cambodia.

If Jacobson rounded out his research, speaking with the criminals and the government of Cambodia, it would’ve been an eye-opening document of a country backwards in human rights. Instead, it’s a one-sided chronicle, so at times it reads like an extended adoption commercial. The issue is worth much more, of course.

Some post-production could also be done to help “Redlight.” Talking-head edits are horribly done, while some graphics seem odd and sometimes unnecessary.

Still, “Redlight” is powerful in its storytelling ability. You do feel for these young victims, and so much that you might want to take action against child sex trafficking. It has done its job — to promote necessary activism. And that’s where it stands.

Critic Matthew Connolly enjoyed “After the Storm,” giving it 3.5 stars. Here are some impressions of the film’s Q&A:
The crowd was visibly moved by the film, and some gave a standing ovation when director Hilla Medalia and especially producer James Lecesne (who also worked on the production within the film) appeared at the front of the theater.

“Part of the idea of the film was giving New Orleans a face and a place that people will connect to. It’s not just, ‘Oy, New Orleans! What are we going to do?’ You can do something,” said James Lecesne, on the intent behind the film.

“We so could have used you,” said Lecesne, when an audience member began her comments by saying she was a trained psychiatrist.

People asked about how they could help during the Q&A.

Film will next be screening for a week at MoMA, from Oct. 5-11; all of the play’s cast of teenagers will be at the screening tomorrow, along with Madelia, Lecesne and other members of the film, and some of the kids will be there for other screenings during the week.

It’s rare that films — independent films included — completely exist outside generic norms and conventions of some kind. A movie might not look or sound like mainstream fare, but make enough of a similar kind of “different” film, and suddenly a new sub-genre blooms, complete with its own set of clichés and expectations.

“Don’t Let Me Drown,” Cruz Angeles’ film about a romance between a Mexican boy and Dominican girl in post-9/11 Brooklyn, is a solidly-acted and warmly-observed portrait of blossoming affection amidst the aftermath of tragedy. From its gritty, shaky-cam aesthetics to its schematic subplots, however, it also follows the generic dictates of a certain breed of indie film. Call it the urban romance: two young people form a tentative connection and must overcome some aspect of their rough-hewn milieu (familial pressures, societal prejudice) to be together, with an ending note of cautious, open-ended optimism. There’s nothing wrong with this, but it also means that “Don’t Let Me Drown” — the winner of the Woodstock Film Festival’s Best Feature Narrative — feels at once satisfying and a little old-hat.

The film’s best and most honest moments come from the simmering chemistry between leads E.J. Bonilla and Gleendilys Inoa, whose characters, Lalo and Stefanie, navigate the uncharted terrain of teen romance with charming emotional candor. They bond over mutual instances of embarrassing bodily excretion — he is caught by her urinating against her building; she is told of the menstrual blood on the back of her jeans by him — and their halting courtship reaches a tender climax when a photo booth documents the build-up to their first real kiss (Lalo clumsily attempted a peck on the lips earlier). Bonilla’s scenes with friend Ramon (Damián Alcázar) also have an appealingly ribald humor.

Still, one can feel the plot mechanics whirring throughout “Don’t Let Me Drown.” A secondary story following Lalo’s father in his work as an undocumented worker at Ground Zero occasionally gains force as implicit social critique, but is too underdeveloped to feel like anything more than a convenient way to weave the tragedy directly into the narrative. The death of Stefanie’s sister in the Twin Towers has more emotional heft, but also provides a thin dramatic justification for Stefanie’s grief-choked father (Ricardo Chavira) to act as a rage-filled impediment to Lalo and Stefanie’s romance. Though Angeles and Maria Topete’s script give him an occasional sympathetic moment (as when he stops to listen to saved voicemails from his deceased daughter), he’s too much of a one-note volcano to really gain our understanding and empathy.

I don’t want to get too down on “Don’t Let Me Drown.” Its ambitions are modest and heartfelt, and there are moments where Angeles’ filmmaking instincts feel just right (as when he keeps the camera focused tightly on Stefanie’s stricken face after Lalo inadvertently makes an insensitive comment about 9/11 victims). That this is not enough to shake a nagging sense of familiarity is less a criticism than a simple acknowledgment that “Don’t Let Me Drown” is, in its own way, a enjoyable genre film: nothing less and nothing more.

3 stars

- Matthew Connolly

Hurricane Katrina haunts “After the Storm.” Memories of its cataclysmic impact and devastating consequences lap against its characters’ minds and hearts like a steady tide.

In interviews with teenagers from New Orleans’ decimated Lower Ninth Ward two years after Katrina, documentarian Hilla Medalia records truly sorrowful and infuriating accounts of families and communities ravaged by nature and ignored by government. It’s strong and sobering material, with footage that pointedly reminds us that large swaths of New Orleans remain in utter disrepair.

Yet there’s another story that gradually eclipses—though it does not dispel—memories of Katrina. At heart, “After the Storm” is a story about theater: a let’s-put-on-a-show crowd-pleaser with all the requisite scenes of revelatory auditions, stressful rehearsals, and opening-night jitters. In 2007, three New York theater artists traveled to the fading St. Marks Community Center in New Orleans to put on a production of Once on This Island, a musical whose plot resonates with the city’s post-Katrina landscape. They cast a group of mainly teenagers from in and around the Lower Ninth, and begin a hectic six-week rehearsal process before the show opens at the center.

The connections between the musical and New Orleans are clear enough. They both deal with massive storms, and the musical’s emphasis on storytelling and self expression loops into the director and producer’s hopes of using the theater as a means of working through sublimated anger and sadness within their cast of Katrina survivors. The film doesn’t interrogate these issues with any real depth. And honestly, that’s okay, since the juxtaposing of the high-energy, high-drama rehearsals with the actors’ heartrending stories of loss and survival after the hurricane turns out to be a truly inspired choice by Medalia.

If these kids are unquestionably haunted by their experiences, they’re also theater-geek extroverts who are funny and yearning and often ridiculous, and Medalia showcases their personalities as much as she explores their tragic stories. As their struggles and passion for the production become increasingly central to the film’s plot, we’re not just seeing a loose-limbed and high enjoyable backstage drama. Their flamboyance becomes the ultimate act of defiance against their tragic circumstances. By the time the film reaches the climatic opening-night performance, it’s as much a cathartic shout of communal healing as it is inspired theater. It’s this double-punch that had me wiping tears from my eyes: tears that Medalia richly earns.

3.5 Stars

- Matthew Connolly

Here’s a quick pic.

There’s a drum circle practically every weekend in Woodstock, on the Town Green. Here it is, on a simply gorgeous Sunday, the final day of the 2009 Woodstock Film Festival.

- Sandy Tomcho

They must be band members.

Christine Dominguez and T. Xiques played on the front lawn of the Varga Gallery and were back for more Sunday.

“It’s great. All the hustle and bustle. There’s famous people everywhere,” Xiques said as Nathan Harlan from “The Overbrook Brothers” stood a few feet away. “Although I wish I had the time to see some of the movies.”

- Sandy Tomcho

“The Overbrook Brothers”: The Overbrook Brothers is about two brothers who deal with sibling rivalry during a road trip to Texas to find their birth parents. In the end, they eventually end up bonding.

Three stars

- Sandy Tomcho

We’ve seen them all weekend, and here they are after their second screening of “Dear Lemon Lima”: Director Suzi Yoonesi and producer Jonako Donley.