The term “buzz” refers, of course, to those hushed conversations in which the most recent tidbits of financial and other news are exchanged in film festival hallways and theater lobbies. Who bought what for how much? (“Newmarket nabbed Gabriel Range’s
Death of a President”); who passed on what film (“wouldn’t you like to know”), and who didn’t make it back to their hotel room until 7 am (“a certain blond who supposedly has a boyfriend”) are standard conversational commodities. But in the age of Treos and Blackberries such conversations are handled electronically. Every screening one notices in the theater a fluttering of glowing lights, like so many lost fire flies, filling the dark room. People reading emails, scanning Indiewire, checking schedules, and I.M.ing in the dark is now standard operation procedure. What are people saying? I often eavesdrop in the dark, reading the other people’s screens to learn that they are “in Varsity 5..boring!” Or interested in the needs of others, as in “Hungry?” or “Need cocktail?”
As such, pre-screening small talk is a actually more relaxed and more often than not on what they thought of a movie and not “what the buzz is.” Tarsem’s
The Fall, a strange, visually immaculate epic as an anti- Scheharazade, for example, has generated a range of emotions. Set in a Los Angeles hospital at the advent of silent film, a heartbroken stunt man (Lee Pace) with broken legs weaves a fantastic story for a little girl. But his tale, rather than prolonging his life, is meant to get the girl to steal morphine so the crippled lover can kill himself. What follows is a switching back and forth the between a hospital drama and a lush narrative fantasy that employs nearly every great landscape in India for its narrative purposes. The film’s look, if such a thing can be said, is too perfect. Every grain of sand in a pink desert seems intentionally art designed. On the other hand, the film’s script seems entirely incomplete seems sketchy at best.
Sarah Price and Bradley Beesley’s documentary
Summercamp! has generated the same heated debate. For some, this look into the pint-sized denizens of a Wisconsin nature camp is a poignant examination of American childhood, those shared traumas of campfires, mosquito bites, best buddies, and burning the roof of your mouth with a burnt marshmallow. For others, myself included, the film was ultimately so many quirky characters in search of story. Like a few other docs here, such as Liz Mermin’s globalization drama
Paper Tigers about an outsourcing company in India, the filmmakers have culled hours of wonderful observational footage but have never found a story to tell.
The benefit of such films is the conversations they generate. Of course, in the press room, critics still trade in the snide and the scurrilous. One critic dismissed one film as being “uplifting,” which I had to remind him is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself.
# posted by Peter Bowen @ 9/12/2006 08:19:00 AM
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