ON FILM : Film festival is cause for hometown pride
Posted on Friday, May 9, 2008
By now you should be aware that the second Little Rock Film Festival starts Thursday. You should probably go to the festival’s Web site (www. littlerockfilmfestival. org ) and check out the schedule. There are some great tools on the site that’ll help you plan your long weekend.
At the risk of sounding like a homer, I was pleased and surprised at how well last year’s came off, and I’ve been looking forward to this year’s festival for months. I feel a little proprietary about what Craig and Brent Renaud, Jamie Moses and Owen Brainard (and the staff and volunteers ) have put together. With festival passes — good for admittance to festival screenings, panels, workshops and parties — priced at $ 25, it’s not only a cultural highlight but an extraordinary bargain. (The Festival Gala, held in the Grand Ballroom of the Clinton Library, requires an additional $ 75 per person ticket. )
I go to a few film festivals each year, but LRFF is obviously different because it’s our hometown deal, with screenings at the Riverdale 10 Cinemas. While at most of the festivals we attend we tend to avoid the parties — most of them seem irrelevant to our professional purposes — I went to a lot of the LRFF events last year and was inspired by the creative energy humming through those rooms. The LRFF offers a chance for a lot of like-minded aspirants to get together with people who are actually doing things with moving pictures and sound. At most film festivals, I’m concerned with seeing as many movies as possible; at the LRFF I feel like it’s just as important to participate in the experience.
I said last year that this was one festival that didn’t feel like work — well, it’s at least highly enjoyable work. It starts at 7 p.m. Thursday at Riverdale 10 with the Arkansas premiere of War Eagle, Arkansas, a beautifully shot, gracefully acted and ultimately deeply moving film. I saw it a couple of months ago (and will moderate a discussion with some of the filmmakers after this screening ), and I was impressed not only with the movie’s production values, but with its refusal to give into what could have been easy sentimentality.
Based on a real friendship between two young men from North Little Rock, wheelchairbound Tim Ballany and Vincent Insalaco III (son of North Little Rock political consultant Vincent Insalaco, the film’s producer and prime creative engine ), War Eagle is at times a very tough film about rural boys on the cusp of becoming men and the small town whose gravity holds them in its orbit.
The elder Insalaco admits that his ad man’s instinct to go for the big heart-stirring moment was tempered by his professional collaborators, director Robert Milazzo and screenwriter Graham Gordy (a Conway native who co-wrote the coming The Love Guru with Mike Myers ), but I don’t think anyone can dispute that this is Insalaco’s movie. And it’s a triumph — grounded in the specific reality of finely observed (and wonderfully inhabited ) characters. I’ll have a full review / essay about the movie in my Critical Mass column Tuesday.
(There’ll also be a special event and private screening of War Eagle beginning at 6: 30 p.m. Tuesday at the Peabody Little Rock hotel to benefit the Francis Allen School for Exceptional Children in Little Rock. Tickets are $ 100 each, and Insalaco and Gordy will discuss the film afterward. There’ll also be a reception with cast and crew members. Will Churchill — an Arkansan whose guitar work provides the film’s score — will play. For tickets and / or more information, call (501 ) 664-2961.
War Eagle is just the beginning of the festival; I’m looking forward to wading into a lot of the documentaries. Silhouette City, a harrowing film about the Arkansas roots of the ongoing Christian Dominionist Movement, has two festival showings (4 p.m. May 16 at Riverdale 10 and 5 p.m. May 18 at the Little Rock Chamber of Commerce, after which I’ll host a discussion with the filmmakers ).
Lioness is an impressive and provocative film about women serving in quasi-combat positions with the U. S. Army in Iraq; one of them is the indelible Shannon Morgan from Mena. I saw Crawford — about the town George W. Bush selected for his Texas vacation home — at the South By Southwest Film Festival earlier this year and I can recommend it as well. Obviously I don’t have room to go through the whole schedule here, but the list of movies I intend to see includes the award-winning documentary Behind Forgotten Eyes, about Korean “comfort women” during World II; Irish director Peter McCarthy’s Fight of Flight; Mary Stuart Masterson’s narrative film The Cake Eaters, and The Ungodly, starring Wes Bentley as a documentary filmmaker stalking a serial killer. I’m also planning to catch The Promotion, which stars John C. Reilly and marks the directorial debut of Steve Conrad, who wrote The Pursuit of Happyness. And art lovers shouldn’t miss painter Warren Criswell’s Six Moments, which I understand will serve as a kind of interstitial mortar for the Arkansas Shorts program. I’ve left an awful lot out. But you get the picture. For local moviegoers, this is big stuff.
pmartin@arkansasonline. com
FEEDBACK:
Something to say about this topic? Submit a Letter to the Editor online