A Love Letter to the Film Festival...

This was the year I finally decided that movies were better presents than books.  For his birthday, I gave my dad two DVDs.  Not Blu-ray – plain old DVDs.  One was the Mel Brooks adaptation of The Twelve Chairs, and the other was the Woody Allen film Broadway Danny Rose.  I told him it was the best I could do - the recession and all.  For my brother’s birthday, which is later this month, around Thanksgiving, I’ve picked out a weird French film set in war-torn France called Triple Agent, and the amazing Noah Baumbach film The Squid & The Whale.  I hope my brother’s not reading this. I have a history of going out of my way to see movies.  Going into the city, or to an out-of-the-way cinema co-op in some town nobody ever heard of, delving verrry deeply into the collections of the local video rental stores – before they all died – and, of course, drifting in and out of the autumnal film festival.

This habit really got into my bones in college - dropping in on New Jersey Film Festival screenings on my way home from class – or on my way anywhere – and seeing a lot of cool stuff.  Crucial stuff.  Stuff like the Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back, Terry Gilliam’s relentless take on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress, every Spike Lee Joint that came out, and those really crazy black and white Surrealist films.  Between the seasons of the New Jersey Film Festival and the occasional jaunt to Manhattan, I had it covered.

I like Tribeca, and I like Sundance – on the Sundance Channel, that is – but I also like the random classic thrown in for mysterious, curatorial purposes.  Even the way-too-arty ones that make you feel like… going to a bar and forgetting them.  Even they have their place.  It’s also neat to be there for moments like the Q&A session in which an audience member at a screening of the Todd Solondz film Happiness – which is not really about happiness by the way – asked the director if something very bad had happened to him during his childhood.  (The answer was - and I’m paraphrasing - “No.  I had a pretty normal childhood growing up in suburban New Jersey.”)  A good film festival is a great public utility.  A moving Library of Alexandria.  Storytelling is one of those special tricks that only us humans do, and a film festival celebrates that in a way the multiplexes are not obligated to.

Of course, we now have an equivalent tonnage of content available to us through our cable boxes.  The new Steven Soderbergh film, available “on demand”, as they say, the day it premieres in theaters?  The unrated cut of Will Forte’s ingenious MacGruber?  And for less than the price of one ticket?  That’s pretty awesome.  The way things are going, it seems like this could all end up working like online poker.  Is that what we want?  Sometimes, I guess.

But, Netflix notwithstanding, sometimes I feel like walking out the door and hanging out with people, going to a movie, and then talking about it – or at least complaining about it.  And without dealing with the Fast and the Furious franchise’s demographic.  Sometimes, I like my movies the way I like my beer – unfiltered and brewed by artisans who put no stock in focus groups.

For me, the edge that film festivals still have over the other organs of distribution is not that the movies they show are always better, but different, and from a richer variety of sources, including local ones – which should appeal to the macrobiotic demographic.

Hmm.  Christmas is coming.  Maybe a dual membership to a good film festival is a better gift than a short stack of DVDs...