LAFFING WEEKEND

There were a few highlights for me at the LA Film Festival this weekend. In order of occurrence…

I was heading home on Friday night after seeing an interesting doc, Paper Dolls, that came up a little short. The story of five Filipino immigrants to Israel who care for the elderly by day and do a drag show at night sounds great on paper. But the truth is, once you got past the shock value of the story, there just wasn't anyplace to go. You care about these people and that is to the director's credit. But it's basically a one act story with a coda at the end.

So I went and checked out the Target Red Room, the LAFF's hospitality suite, which is loaded with popcorn, cookies, candy, and an ocean of Absolut Vodka. There, I ran into Luke Y Thompson, New Times' tallest, most tattooed, most multi-color haired critic and he told me about the film he was most anticipating on the entire schedule… Hot Chicks.

Somehow, as I was jamming through the online catalog for the festival, I just went right past Hot Chicks. But had I been paying closer attention, I would have been almost as enthusiastic as Luke. The screening was of 9 short films, each based on one of what are known as Chick Tracts. They are those little cartoon booklets that you have probably had handed to you on the streets of some part of town where souls are in need of saving. These mini-comics were all written and drawn by Jack T. Chick. According to his website, over 500 million of these things have been sold to groups and distributed across the globe. 500 million!

My memory is of getting these from Jews For Jesus followers. Others remember other religious groups handing them out. The clever thing is, they are so cheap to purchase (15 cents) that they make an impressive handout. And they are all stories of salvation that end with an admonition to accept Jesus into your life.

So I settled into my seat at The Crest to see the films and quickly found out that the folks who made the films were all friends and had all spurred each other on to make these films over the last 5 or 6 years. Each film has a distinctly different style, including two of the films that were made by the same team. One of these films by Rodney & Syd recreated the Chick Tract "Titanic" using the Jim Cameron film, Titanic. Their second film, based on the tract, Somebody Goofed, was one of my favorite of the nine. They essentially take the drawn images in the Chick Tract and bring them to life in very clever animation.

The films that stuck closest to the tracts were probably my favorites. All of the films adhered to the idea that Chick's words would be the script and that the tracts would serve, to some degree, as storyboards. But styles varied widely. What was fascinating was how each filmmaker (many are first time filmmakers) decided to do their interpretation. For instance, the first film, Bewitched? (by Tim Kirk - Chick Tract), used puppets to tell its story of how television infects the culture. One of the films, Wounded Children (by Todd Hughes - Chick Tract), is based on a tract that has been taken off the market because the morays around child abuse have changed. In that film, the victimized child is played by a mannequin while everyone around him is played by adults. Angels? (by Tommy! - Chick Tract), the story of a rock-n-roll dream attained and then destroying the dreamers, is done in a style best described as post-modern Super 8 by way of Kenneth Anger.

Cleo (by Bryce Ingman - Chick Tract) is a story about a lost dog who narrowly escapes a dog pound needle and somehow, amazingly, its owners see this as God's intervention and it moves them to being born again. Doom Town (by P. David Ebersole - Chick Tract) tells the story of Sodom & Gomorrah. And La Princesita (by Jamie Tolbert Franklin - Chick Tract) tells the story of a sick young girl who desperately wants to go trick-or-treating on Halloween and does and has her soul saved when one of the neighbors drops a Chick Tract into her candy bag.

My favorite of the films, probably because it is most precisely a Chick Tract come to life, was Party Girl, directed by Anonymous. Why anonymous? Because there is some fear that Jack Chick, who is still alive at 82, might get all litigious on their collective asses.

The filmmaker actually gave me permission - after some pleasant harassment - to publish her name. But after seeing how often the Chick Publications sends out cease and desists, I have decided to keep it to myself. She is an actress, remarkably beautiful, very sharp, surprisingly unflinching about the truth, terribly well married and, by amazing coincidence, did a guest spot on a Sunday night primetime TV show that I Tivo'd.

(In another odd showbiz small world coincidence, a guy playing in an old friend's charity poker tourney on Sunday was pitching a local stage show starring this woman's husband. And almost more oddly, I had dinner with this woman's ex-husband just a week ago - and I had never before met this woman or had any social conversation with this man until these two meetings. High school with money indeed!)

I don't know if she has a future as a director based on this short, satirical film but, like I said before… concept is everything on these and, to me, she got the inherent joke of Chick Tracts best of all, so much so that the film could really be seen as a positive and believing take on a Chick Tract if your beliefs went that way.

The bottom line is, this group has no interest in distributing their films for any revenue. (Fact is, very few of them could get clearances on their pre-recorded music or images from other media.) They aren't even posting their films to their website. They screened at LAFF and will show again at Outfest at midnight on July 8. From there, who knows.

Anyway… I am going to go out on a limb and post a short clip from Anonymous' film, Party Girl. It is four pieces from her work, slapped together shoddily via QT Pro. But it'll give you some idea… and it makes me smile like crazy. Here is the 3mg QT file…

NEXT!

On Saturday afternoon, I had the chance to catch Julie Anderson, CC Goldwater and Tani Cohen's Mr. Conservative: Goldwater On Goldwater.

The film is, of course, about Barry Goldwater and in this telling, is given some perspective by Goldwater's granddaughter CC, who initiated, co-produced, and stars in the film. As regular readers may have realized, I am not a huge fan of doc filmmakers being their films unless it is very much a part of the style of the film. But the film, which is headed to HBO in the fall, has a lot of screentime taken up with home movies from the Goldwater family, many shot by Barry himself.

The film reminded me, in the big strokes, of Henriette Mantel and Steve Skrovan's An Unreasonable Man, the excellent and undercovered Sundance doc about Ralph Nader. (The film certainly suffered from the death of Nader's sister, which led to his absence at the festival, which led to a relative paucity of coverage of, perhaps, the most important doc at Sundance this year.) Both films are about men seen as political extremists and both films are about the men being iconoclastic and unrestrainedly honorable and above the fray. (As I have written before, An Unreasonable Man does an excellent job of explaining the mythology of Nader costing Al Gore the 2000 election and the scapegoating that followed and continues.)

Goldwater to the right and Nader to the left could not be much more dissimilar in personal style. Goldwater was a handsome, almost movie-staresque, Arizona icon who reeked of personal charisma. Nader was hard-edged and abrasive. But both men were more than they appeared. And both leave a trail of achievements that have been forgotten by most people. Moreover, both men have survived massive changes in the political spectrum so that the perception of where they stood changed. But the truth is, they both stayed firm as the world changed… firm not as stubborn, but firm based on a moral position.

Mr. Conservative leans heavily on footage of Goldwater in the place he loved most dearly, his native Arizona. He traveled by air, in the cockpit by himself, visiting the smallest nooks and crannies of the land, anywhere he could land a plane. He was a hands-on supporter of the Native Americans, embracing them, offering them medical help, and being surprisingly open to their lives and their plight.

The film interestingly suggests, though does not confirm clearly, that two of Barry Goldwater's most surprising turns in his later career, his stands on abortion and gays in the military, were turned in some ways by family events. On the other hand, there are indicators throughout the film that Goldwater was never interested in putting restraints on gays, blacks or women (though he did feel gays should not be in the military while he was in the service).

Personally, I would have liked a lot more information about what he did with his 30 years in the Senate. The film speaks to the highlights of his political career and does a great job with the 1964 presidential election. But he spent more than 5000 days of his life going to work on Capital Hill. There are a lot of details there.

Still, the movie is a great watch. And at its best, it reminds us about the best of what politics is supposed to be about… what we still want to believe our American system is all about… what we still want to be believe is possible. Watching the film, I realized… I am a Goldwater Democrat. An oxymoron? No. Because the name Goldwater had wider breath and width than our politic parties now do. I am with that guy. And when we disagree, we will argue it out like adults who respect other adults. Ah, to sleep, perchance to dream…

FINALLY…

Saturday night, I was at the premiere of Amy Berg's Deliver Us From Evil, the documentary I wrote about at The Hot Button last Wednesday.

I had seen the film before (obviously), but it was quite something to see it on a big screen with a full theater at The Crest. Not only that, but with two of the victims of Ollie O'Grady and their families.

I haven't really seen a crowd reaction at a film festival like this one opened to since the rock concert atmosphere around Jon Demme's Neil Young film, Heart of Gold, back at Sundance in January. Before that, I really can't recall. There were three standing ovations for the film, the filmmakers, and the participants. And it took a lot of work by the staff of The Crest and LAFF to get the audience out of the theater. Everyone seemed to want to linger and discuss what they had just experienced.

When I stood up to go, I saw that a feature director I know and quite like, was in an intense discussion about the film with his wife… and I just walked away, not wanting to interrupt.

As for myself, I am hardly a shy person, but I couldn't quite bring myself to have a conversation with the victims or their families. What do you say? How can you express the power of their willingness to tell their stories. Seeing the film again, I realized how much I personally identified with the father of one of the girls, who is also, pretty much, the most emotionally expressive of all the people in the film. And even that night, as he was handed the microphone to speak, he started cracking as he described his daughter's courage and his admonition that if the family was going to make this film that they not be hidden behind some screen or blur… if they were going to speak out, they would speak out freely… no hiding. Courageous.

More distributors are heading to the Monday afternoon screening of the film, which will not be nearly as full as Saturday night's screening. It will be interesting to hear how that goes. I often recall our five screenings of the frat house rape doc, Raw Deal: A Question of Consent in Miami and how each audience took it differently. It will be pretty close to impossible to find an audience who will not be sympathetic to these victims and horrified by Oliver O'Grady. But smaller variations seem likely. And some distributor seems poised to have the opportunity to offer the world one of the great screen villains of all time… who isn't George Bush.

- by David Poland