CS Weekly Archive > The Big Picture > 7/03/09

The 2009 Los Angeles
Film Festival:
Part Two

CS Weekly's Adam Stovall and Jenelle Riley are back with a second week of coverage from the 2009 Los Angeles Film Festival.

The Centerpiece of the 2009 LA Film Festival was Public Enemies, the new film from director Michael Mann. Mann also shares writing credit with Ann Biderman and Ronan Bennett, as well as Bryan Burrough, on whose book the film is based. The film uses Mann's usual cold and objective tone to recount not only the story of John Dillinger's spree of bank robberies, but also the rise of the FBI. It is procedural and detail-oriented, but never boring.

On the other end of the spectrum is I Sell the Dead, a film written and directed by Glenn McQuaid as an homage to both the old Hammer horror films and Abbott & Costello monster movies. The film is a comedy-horror hybrid, with much more emphasis put on the comedy. It tells the story of two grave robbers who seem to stumble through every monster-movie convention imaginable, as well as a few others one might call a little less imaginable. The movie played to a packed house, and seems certain to connect with a sizable audience.

In competition, Wah Do Dem followed a young man as he goes on a cruise alone after his girlfriend breaks up with him. An important distinction between this and other films with a similar story is that Wah Do Dem never forgets to raise the stakes for the character. It's not enough that he loses his girlfriend, he has to lose his identity—and that helped this "stranger in a strange land" story stand out, and certainly helped the filmmakers Ben Chace and Sam Fleischner win the Target Filmmaker Award.

Another film in competition was Tariq Tapa's Zero Bridge. This remarkable film shows us the story of Dilawar, a young hustler on the streets of Kashmir. He picks pockets, does other people's homework, anything that will turn him a profit and get him out of Kashmir. One of the many things Tapa does so well in this film is that he trusts the audience to follow Dilawar, and so he never hits the audience over the head with exposition. He is content to just show you something happening and not comment on it or have the character explain what he is doing. Tapa showed a work-in-progress cut to David Milch, who hired him to work on a pilot he developed for HBO. With such a mentorship guiding an already strong voice, Tariq Tapa is a filmmaker to watch in the coming years.

Two low-budget indies proved that you don't need comedy superstars to make people laugh. Both Humpday and Weather Girl were made on micro budgets, yet elicited as many belly laughs from audiences as one of Judd Apatow's blockbusters. Humpday stars Joshua Leonard, finally getting a decent role 10 years after he starred in The Blair Witch Project, and Mark Duplass, one half of the Duplass Brothers, who made their own name as the writer-directors of such films as The Puffy Chair and Baghead. Ben (Duplass) and Andrew (Leonard) are two heterosexual men who agree to have sex with each other on film—not as porn, but as an "art project." What ensues are many uncomfortable conversations about the logistics of male-on-male action. Shot almost entirely with hand-held cameras, director Lynn Shelton keeps a loose feel to the proceedings by allowing actors to improvise off an outline. The result is raw and real, without a hint of the crass falseness that pervaded the similarly themed Zack and Miri Make a Porno.

Also pleasing crowds was the easygoing, likable Weather Girl, which tells the story of a 35-year-old morning-show host (Tricia O'Kelly) who has a meltdown on air after being dumped by her boyfriend. She goes through a series of predictable humiliations—including being forced to move in with her younger brother—before, wouldn't you know it, finding a new start with a younger man. While there is nothing terribly original about the film, the dialogue is sharp and O'Kelly, best known for her work on the CBS comedy The New Adventures of Old Christine, makes a charming leading lady.

A broken relationship also fuels the gay romance Hollywood, je t'aime. After breaking up with his boyfriend, lovesick Jerome (Eric Debets) leaves Paris to journey to L.A. in search of a new life. That includes transvestites and drug dealers, as Jerome also attempts to pursue an acting career. The film is not without its charms, but the pace can be glacial at times and it's hard to work up too much sympathy for Jerome, whose ex boyfriend hardly seems worth losing sleep over, let alone leaving the country.

Competing with the wonderful (500) Days of Summer for the best quirky romance of the festival, Paper Heart features offbeat comedian Charlene Yi as herself, creating a documentary about love. She is aided by her director—and here's where it gets a little weird—the film really is directed by Nicholas Jasenovec, but the character of Jasenovec is played by actor Jake M. Johnson. Also blurring the lines between fiction and reality is when Yi begins dating Superbad star Michael Cera—Yi's real-life boyfriend. As their romance unfolds in front of the cameras (much to Cera's annoyance) the story takes side trips such as Yi interviewing her famous friends (Seth Rogen, Demetri Martin) for their perspectives on love. But the film works best when Yi is talking to real people, such as a playground of young children who simply can't fake it for the camera.

The premise of Paper Heart is really fairly simple, and mainly an excuse to unleash Yi's oddball personality on the audience. Another film with a clever premise is Cold Souls, which also features an actor portraying himself. In this case, the actor is Paul Giamatti, and in writer-director Sophie Barthes' feature film debut, Giamatti is a neurotic actor who literally has his soul removed and put in storage in order to better portray a character in Chekov's Uncle Vanya. The film has earned inevitable comparisons to Being John Malkovich, but Barthes' script never quite achieves the same loopy momentum as Charlie Kaufman's work. Giamatti is game and self-deprecating, and the film is undoubtedly entertaining. But in the end, it leaves one a little, well, cold.

You might recall that Paper Heart won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance this year, making it all the more appropriate that it played the same LAFF that screened a remastered print of Midnight Cowboy. For those who have not seen the film, it tells the story of Joe Buck (Jon Voight), a country boy with big dreams of making it as a stud in New York City. Upon arriving in NYC, Joe meets Enrique "Ratso" Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), a street urchin with all the smarts Joe lacks, but none of his charisma or charm. The film was incredibly ahead of its time in 1969, and after the screening both Voight and Hoffman joined us for a Q&A to talk about the experience of making and releasing the film. One interesting tidbit is that while both actors garnered Oscar nominations for their performances, neither were originally even offered the film. John Schlesinger had seen Hoffman in The Graduate and was convinced that he couldn't play the part. Only after Hoffman met him at a Laundromat on 42nd Street dressed as Ratso did he change his mind.

Voight, however, was still primarily a stage actor, not even a blip on the radar. The part of Joe Buck had already been offered to Michael Sarrazin, but he was under contract to Universal, so they had to explore other options. They brought Voight in to placate Hoffman and the casting director Marion Dougherty, both of whom were actively campaigning for Voight. Schlesinger sent Voight off to do a screen test with Hoffman and some improvisation with Waldo Salt, both of which went very well. Still, Voight was from Yonkers and Schlesinger was concerned about his accent, so Voight went down to Midland, Texas, and spent time with JB Smith, a WWII war hero and friend of Jonathan Winters. After a few weeks, Schlesinger flew down to Texas and he and Voight drove to a town called Big Spring, where Schlesinger watched Voight pass himself off as a life-long Texan. After this, he was cast.

The process by which the script was written was in sync with the spirit of collaboration that permeated the festival. Voight and Hoffman would go off with Salt, who would record them as they improvised for a few hours. Then, Salt would go home and type up the best parts, adding them into the script. Even on set, though, things were still being written and evolved. The most iconic scene, the one in which Ratso yells at the cab, "I'm walkin' here!" came about because they had a very small budget and could not shut down the street. They had timed it out so that as they walked down the street they would get to the crosswalk just as the "Walk" signal lit up. The camera was hidden in a van, and no one recognized Dustin Hoffman so no one knew they were filming. They'd done a couple of takes, and were finally nailing the scene when a cab ran a red light. Dustin remembers seeing the cab bearing down on him and thinking, "No! We're finally getting it right! We're acting here!"

Additional highlights included Ponyo and The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia, both of which Senior Editor Jeff Goldsmith enjoyed greatly



Jenelle Riley and Adam Stovall contributed to this article.

I Sell the Dead, Cold Souls courtesy L.A. Film Festival

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