Los Angeles Independent Film Festival

Five being traditionally the wooden anniversary, this year’s edition of the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival felt a bit stiff, if only for the lack of truly standout movies and the plethora of name actors in films with high production value but stories that missed the mark. Coming out of another disappointing screening, one audience member quipped to another, "Here’s a rule of thumb for this year: movies with stars are bad, and movies with no stars are really good" — a pretty accurate assessment. The Festival opened with Phil Joanou’s pleasant but narcissistic Entropy, starring Hollywood types like Stephen Dorff and Lauren Holly and featuring U2, while it closed with George Hickenlooper’s The Big Brass Ring, a bloated political thriller based on an unproduced Orson Welles script and starring William Hurt, Miranda Richardson and Nigel Hawthorne.

Even in the body of the Festival there were too many familiar actors attached to movies with only occasional, and slight, merit: John C. Reilly and Kelly McGillis in the formulaic neo-noir The Settlement; Burt Reynolds in the boy-with-gun dramatic one-note fizzler Pups; Christina Ricci and Lolita Davidovich in the disappointing interlaced omnibus No Vacancy; and Chris Penn, Michael Madsen, Mary Stuart Masterson, Tom Sizemore, and Hal Holbrook in the overacted, indulgent and masturbatory Deer Hunter-meets-Diner dreck The Florentine. All the names were marquee-strong, but the quality was suspiciously absent.

Why the dichotomy? Too much pressure to showcase actors who attract press? "We have to deliver to a wide group of people," explained Robert Faust, LAIFF founder and Festival director. "We have to find the glitziest of films that follow our mandate. We don’t program for stars necessarily — we show films that won’t otherwise get seen. I’m proud of the way we program." L.A.-based producer’s rep and faithful LAIFF attendee Patrick Lynn agreed. "For the most part, the films were good. I wish they’d taken a bigger step forward, but they do a really good job in a fickle town."

And the truth is, a handful of standout films did deserve the attention they received, including Saturn, writer/director Rob Schmidt’s devastating tale of a twentysomething son having to care for his dying father while fighting off the temptations of his drug-ridden neighborhood; and Ed Radtke’s The Dream Catcher, a heart-wrenching account of two loners on a road trip to Reno, which won the audience award for Best Director. The other prizes also recognized quality: Best Screenplay went to Christopher Livingston’s Hit and Runway, a sly, charming New York comedy about an Italian wannabe screenwriter who wins the chance to write a big Hollywood movie and enlists a gay playwright to collaborate; and Best Short went to Chris Landreth for his mind-numbing computer-animated circus-on-acid trip, Bingo.

A first for the Festival, Best Film also happened to be a documentary: Chris Roe’s touchy-feelly travelogue Pop and Me. Produced by, co-written by and starring Roe and his dad Richard, Pop and Me chronicles the pair’s six-month trip around the world during which they stop to interview dozens of other father-and-son relationships while, ironically, letting their own start to fray. The emotional quotient is high, but it’s knee-jerk sentimentality — the globe-trotting protagonists never dig deep into their subjects’ lives and are seemingly satisfied with shots of teary-eyed men hugging. But the standing ovation after its premiere screening proved it was a crowd-pleaser, no matter how dramatically slight its concerns.

Documentaries in general were the strongest tickets at this year’s LAIFF. By far the most provocative was David Schisgall’s The Lifestyle, a no-holds-barred peek at America’s swingers scene, a subculture boasting over three million members, most of whom in their fifties and sixties, who gather into hundreds of local groups which organize giant orgies at places like The Panther Palace, the Costa Mesa home of a 73-year-old who lifts weights with his penis. (Schisgall even invited audience members to take the drive down to Costa Mesa for a swinger’s party after the screening.) Candid, bold, delightfully explicit and brutally honest, The Lifestyle was hands-down the most electrifying film at the festival.

Another dazzling documentary was Jon Reiss’ rave-scene scorcher Better Living Through Circuitry, which rocked the house Saturday night with a capacity crowd nearly dancing in their seats to its pulse-pounding beats and eye-popping digital visuals. Shot entirely on Sony DX-1000 DV cameras mostly smuggled into all-night warehouse raves, Circuitry takes full advantage of the latest video-graphic technology to deliver an anthropological kaleidoscope of youth culture’s neo-hippie fringe. If his interviewing weakness was an emphasis on style over substance, Reiss’ narrative propulsion and kinetic energy still kept the film’s enjoyment level high. Andrew Dosunmu’s hairstyling documentary Hot Irons was equally flashy in its own Middle American big-haired way, revealing the social strata of Detroit’s hairdressing subcultures and all its crazily-coiffed customers, but lacked the same inspiration in delivering some disappointingly superficial profiles.

Quietly holding its own among the non-fiction sturm und drang was The Accident, Joseph F. Lovett’s softly-paced, methodical documentary about his own family and the teenage trauma of witnessing his mother die in a bizarrely improbable car crash just outside their home. Intercutting years of collected interviews with family members as well as hundreds of family photos and home movies, Lovett patiently and objectively dissects his upbringing, searching, as he says, for "reality and perception and where memory fits," and discovering not only the universal truths about how people try to live and love but also the ways in which a person can finally forgive.

Other sections in the 33-film revue included solid work like Nisha Ganatra’s surrogate lesbian mother comedy Chutney Popcorn; Gordon Eriksen’s The Love Machine, a prescient faux-documentary about sex on the internet; and Jesse Feigelman’s well-directed but dramatically weak debut Snapped. But nothing impressed more than the Festival’s four-film retrospective of important independent films from the past 20 years, singling out classics like Neal Jimenez and Michael Steinberg’s The Waterdance, Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge and John Cassavetes’ Opening Night, and in particular Milton Moses Ginsberg’s stunning Coming Apart, a 30-year-old formalist masterpiece with Rip Torn that is revelatory in its filmic handling of sexual politics. "The problem in the indie world is that production has never been cheaper, but no one knows their history!" exclaimed LAIFF programming director Thomas Ethan Harris, who also hand-picked the retrospective selections. "The indie scene is becoming genre-ized, even though that’s what indie film has always been against." One can only hope that the LAIFF attendees will take that history lesson to heart.

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