CS Weekly Archive > The Big Picture > 07/06/07

Winners' Circle:
2007 Los Angeles Film Festival
Wrap Up

By danny munso

The second week of the Los Angeles Film Fest focused mainly on its narrative competition, where the films were incredibly different and moving, teaching its audiences about the importance of family, the role of children in our lives, and even how to rob your local bank.

The 2007 Los Angeles Film Festival came to an end on Sunday night, closing the door on an event that certainly offers one of the world's more diverse slates. As the awards were announced on Sunday, August Evening, written and directed by Chris Eska, took the honor of the Best Narrative Feature award. While awarding him the prize, the jury remarked, "Our award goes to a film whose sustained thematic and visual execution, and whose focus on the human condition—on the responsibility of parents to their children and children to their parents—fulfills its adherence to the traditions of classic world cinema."

Eska's film followed an undocumented farm worker, Jaime, on his journey across Texas to seek help from his estranged children. The relationship between Jaime and his kids is eerily mirrored not only in his relationship with his own parents, but in his relationship with his sister as well. (The ensemble cast was deservingly awarded the Outstanding Performance in a Narrative award.) Eska received a cash prize of $50,000 from Target in order help bring his next film to the big screen.

Though August was a worthy choice, it was hardly the only great film entered in the Narrative Competition. My personal favorite was the heist film How to Rob a Bank. Film festivals generally award the heavy-handed dramas replete with possible life lessons, and perhaps rightfully so, but the unabashed good time had by all in Bank was too infectious not to enjoy. To detail the plot would be giving too much away, but suffice to say that a customer and a bank teller (Nick Stahl and Erika Christensen, respectively) are locked together in a vault, and money soon goes missing. Though we aren't given too many characters to suspect, the film always keeps the audience guessing, for there may be more than one robbery going on around us. The film is the debut effort of writer-director Andrew Jenkins, who, at the very least, seems to have proved that he will be able to make the leap to an accessible studio picture with little trouble at all.

Another strong effort was Scott Prendergast's Kabluey, which follows loveable loser Salman (Prendergast) as he moves in with his sister (Lisa Kudrow) and gets a job as a dot-com mascot—a job that entails donning a ridiculous blue suit and which, curiously has some unexpected advantages. Prendergast seems to be a disciple of Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums) and Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale), as his film is filled with the kind of family dysfunction that they would be proud of. Of course, the message ends up being the same: that, no matter how different we are, we're still family and we still love each other. That predictable conclusion aside, Kabluey inspires because of its ability to balance some great physical comedy with some quiet character moments. Some unnecessary political undertones are hinted at, but they only distract from Prendergast's story, which is powerful enough on its own.

Two more narrative-competition films made a lasting impression. Twenty-four-year-old writer-director Jess Manafort entered her take on teenagers circa 1999, when she herself was still in high school. The Beautiful Ordinary's story is a little too thin, and the film begins to feel a tad tedious near its conclusion, but Manafort's script is still pretty impressive. Without resorting to shock value, she lets the audience in on what it's really like to be a teenager. There's no sugarcoating going on, but no exaggerations, either. The film is sporadically funny, but focuses on the drama that the ensemble goes through, following each social clique until they all eventually intertwine.

Stephane Gauger's Vietnamese drama Owl and the Sparrow was the typical feel-good dramatic film that ends up winning an audience award, and this one proved no different as the movie was the recipient of this year's Narrative Audience Prize. It's easy to see why, though. After causing some trouble at her overbearing uncle's factory, 10-year-old orphan Thuy (Pham Thi Han) runs away and takes refuge on the streets. There she meets Hai (Cat Ly), a lonely zookeeper, and Lan (Le The Lu), a beautiful flight attendant, and soon tries to engineer a meeting between the two in the hopes of creating the family she never had.

It wasn't all heists and dramas at the fest this week, though. There was the massive event in celebration of Michael Bay's Transformers that shut down entire city blocks. Though the film may not be worth all the trouble, it is this balance between art and commerce that makes the LA Film Fest so unique in the first place. Similarly, the festival played host to two special events featuring Industrial Light & Magic, the famed effects house that is responsible for such groundbreaking achievements in Star Wars, Jurassic Park, and many more. One featured the legendary effects guru Dennis Muren, who has received eight Oscars for his work. Muren was there to discuss ILM in general, but specifically how they created the vibrant future depicted in Steven Spielberg's 2001 film AI: Artificial Intelligence. The film, though not one of Spielberg's best, is nothing short of a visual wonder, and it was fascinating to hear Muren give his views on the future of CGI in Hollywood.

An even bigger treat, for me anyway, was to hear effects artist Scott Farrar discussing the groundbreaking work he and others did on Robert Zemeckis' Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the live-action/animated hybrid that took the box office by storm in 1988. Roger Rabbit is easily one of the more underrated films of all-time, and it is ironically somewhat due to those amazing effects. The blend of cartoon characters with live-action sets and actors was so visually stunning, it's hard to remember that there's actually a quite clever story at work, something that Farrar was quick to point out.

Events such as these are what really sets the LA Film Fest apart, and it's nothing short of refreshing to walk out of a screening of a visual feast of this nature into one of the more thought-provoking narrative films listed above.

Click here for part one of our coverage!

Danny Munso graduated from film school in 2004 and can currently be found on his computer working on one of his many half-written screenplays. Or, more likely, he's on the Internet checking the scores of his beloved Bay Area sports teams.

August Evening, Kabluey courtesy LA Film Festival
A.I.: Artificial Intelligence courtesy DreamWorks Video

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