Digital Nation by Gary Dretzka

While the media continue to obsess over such glamour-puss festivals as Cannes, Sundance, Venice, Telluride, New York and Toronto, tens of thousands of ordinary folks flock each week to similarly essential gatherings in every far-flung corner of the globe.

Last week, the action in southern California centered on the IFP/West Los Angeles Film Festival. This week, it moves to the Pacific Palisades Film Fest and Stanford Alumni Film Festival. In Toronto, where the big film fest has been kidnapped by studio publicists, the Bloodchalker International Horror Festival is unspooling for genre fanatics. Film buffs in Marseille, Rome, Melbourne, Charlotte, Fort Worth and Dahlonega … Georgia … U.S.A. … also are attending festivals this week.

I've just returned from CineVegas -- where, along with Mike Goodridge, of Screen International, and Holly Willis, of RES Magazine - I was enlisted to judge a dozen or so features and documentaries still lacking distribution. Meanwhile, panels in in L.A., Newport, Maui, Atlanta, Austin and San Francisco were doing the same thing. A visit to www.filmfestivals.com reveals dozens of other festivals - from San Antonio's Golden Shower Video Festival, to Newport's alternative Clamdance - taking place in June.

Lost in all the glitz, hype and forced glamour surrounding the major festivals is the simple fact that many of the movies in competition never find distribution, here or abroad. Those lucky few filmmakers, who are able to cut a deal often, are forced to sell away all of their rights to future profits, and, even then, are given no guarantee their pictures will ever be shown.

Because of the proliferation and popularity of festivals that aren't likely to attract the cameras of ET and Access Hollywood, the demand for product has strained the relationship between distribution companies and event programmers. Some now require organizers to pay through the nose for pictures they used to get for a pittance. These guarantees can be unrealistic and, in some cases, counter-productive.

It isn't as if audiences in the boonies are saturated with festival-quality movies, after all. If these events didn't exist, very few Americans would be exposed to the vast array of indie, foreign-language, student, experimental and documentary work being made today.

Las Vegas, a city of more than a million souls, has some terrific places to watch movies, but only one theater dedicated to art films. CineVegas provided many Sin City residents with their only opportunity to see Whale Rider, The Magdalene Sisters, Sweet Sixteen and Owning Mahoney, which already have opened in New York and L.A. Other markets are far less blessed.

The only way buffs in smaller markets can see obscure indie, documentary and foreign films is to order DVDs from Netflix or Facets Multimedia, and wait for them to be delivered by mail. As far as I'm concerned, these businesses deserve a special Academy Award, just for existing. (Despite all the publicity surrounding Wal-Mart's planned entry into the DVD-by-mail business, it's unlikely anyone will be able to rent a hard-R or NC-17 from the service, unless, of course, the filmmakers consent to the kind of self-censorship demanded by Blockbuster).

Because of Las Vegas' proximity to L.A. -- and the sexy amenities it offers its high-profile visitors - promoters of the nine-day CineVegas were able to ensure holders of all-access passes, at least, they would be able to rub shoulders with celebrities and filmmakers.
Panel discussions included such artists as Dennis Hopper, Allison Anders, Keith Gordon, Clark Johnson and Grace Slick. (Hunter S. Thompson was a no-show for a panel staged in his honor. He begged off after engaging in some back-wrenching "honeymoon" gymnastics with his 30-year-old bride, upstairs, in the Palms Hotel).

Most of the movies our panel was assigned to survey, I suspect, probably won't find distribution any time soon, unless it's on a cable channel. I say this because the vast majority would need to be re-edited, even for a select-market release, or trimmed by 20 minutes. (Except on very rare occasions, first-time filmmakers ought to leave editing decisions to trained professionals, who don't have a vested interest in every cut.)

Despite their shortcomings, however, all of the movies we saw shared the promise of better things to come. Indeed, I wouldn't be all that surprised if, come January, if a few of them didn't receive recognition at the Independent Spirit Awards, with or without distribution deals.

This year's Critic's Prize went to a muscular L.A.-based buddy drama, Dallas 362. Written, directed by and starring Scott Caan, it is a wonderfully inventive study of the relationship between two volatile muscle-heads, who, when we're introduced to them, appear to be on a collision course with a brick wall. The maturation process one of the lead characters undergoes is depicted without cliché or any of the emotional shortcuts taken by most Hollywood filmmakers.

Caan gets terrific performances from a cast that includes Shawn Hatosy, Selma Blair, Heavy D, Jeff Goldblum, Kelly Lynch, Freddie Rodriguez (Six Feet Under) and Val Lauren, whose portrayal of a frantic, paranoid dope fiend could turn out to be a real career-maker. The direction is steady, confident and generous, especially toward co-lead Hatosy. The credit sequences are as innovative as any I've seen since Se7en.

If Dallas 362 doesn't find a distributor before Independence Day, someone ought to be taken out to the woodshed and beaten with a rolled-up copy of the script for Dumb and Dumberer.

The jury also awarded a special Newcomer Actor Award to Juliette Marquis, star of Ash's This Girl's Life. In the steamy shot-on-HD drama, Marquis plays a remarkably self-assured porn actress named Moon, who's come to a sudden, unexpected crossroads in her life.

According to the director, Marquis is a survivor of the Chernobyl disaster and, until very recently, living in Florida. Tall and pretty, in a Molly Parker sort of way, Marquis was a last-minute addition to the cast, which includes James Woods, Rosario Dawson, Kip Pardue and Tomas Arana.

When Moon isn't strutting her stuff in front of the cameras installed throughout a voyeur-dorm apartment, she patiently tends to the needs of her homebound father. That a first-timer is able to hold her own against Woods - who, as a widower with Parkinson's disease, is acting with his pedal to the metal -- is nothing short of remarkable. (Oh, by the way, This Girl's Life made the journey from DV to film better than any non-animated feature I've yet seen. It's practically impossible for untrained eyes to tell the difference.)

Audience Awards went to Monika Mitchell's imaginative ensemble tragic-comedy Break a Leg, which owes quite a bit to Robert Altman's The Player. It tells the story of a frustrated actor (John Cassini) who realizes his dreams only after he embraces his dark side. The cast includes Rene Rivera, Molly Parker, Jennifer Beals, Danny Nucci, J.J. Johnston, Sandra Oh, Eric Roberts and Eric McCormack.

In the documentary category, the audience sided with 4th and Life, which, as directed by Simeon Soffer, asks, "Should incarcerated men be allowed to play football?" It goes on to examine the circumstances surrounding a championship football game between two of the largest penitentiaries in the South. 4th and Life was narrated by Burt Reynolds, who played a jailyard athlete in The Longest Yard.

I was very impressed by James Ronald Whitney's consistently surprising Games People Play, which kept audiences guessing as to whether they were watching the pilot for a new reality-TV show, a carefully staged mockumentary or a torture test for actors willing to bear their souls and bodies for a shot at a measly $10,000 prize. Besides the demands placed on the actors in his "extreme reality" show, Whitney forces viewers to come to grips with their own willingness to accept voyeurism and self-flagellation as entertainment.

My stagecoach left town a few days before the festival was completed, so I missed quite a few of the films not in competition. What I saw, though, made me feel a lot better about the state of the Industry than I did after sitting through a recent screening of Rob Reiner's flaccid Alex and Emma.

To think that this uninspired romantic comedy had found a distributor, while so many other deserving films are left sitting on a shelf somewhere, depressed me. That Alex and Emma would enjoy a marketing campaign that almost certainly would cost the studio more than it could make at the box office was even more disheartening.

I probably would have felt even worse if I'd bothered to see Hollywood Homicide and Bruce Almighty.

Even though most of the movies at the still young and growing CineVegas - and, by extension, the half-dozen other festivals that took place last week - would screen without the benefit of television ads, audiences were willing to take a chance on a film that didn't involve comic-book characters or inspire Demi Moore to walk down a red carpet with her new flavor-of-the-month boyfriend. The fans paid full price for their tickets, stayed for the Q&A sessions, and voted as if their opinions counted for something … because, to the winners, those votes meant everything.

It wasn't Cannes - or Chicago, for that matter -- but CineVegas sure made me feel good about movies again.