The Los Angeles Film Festival is back in town. The festival has developed a reputation as solid, albeit definitely a big tier below the big boys. There aren't many big buzz premieres or a big market at this festival, and so there isn't a ton of glitz, glamour, or buzz surrounding the festival.
I think the festival is caught in something of a tweener position - it has bigger aspirations than just being a roadshow for favorites from other bigger festivals, or being a niche genre/experimental festival, but it lacks the cachet to score big name competition entries or buzz-heavy premieres. The lack of a robust market also means even up-and-coming filmmakers tend to prioritize other festivals first for their films in need of distribution. That in turn helps sustain the lack of a robust market because the more marketable indie films tend to go to other market-heavy festivals first. It doesn't help that the festival is known to struggle getting people to even drive downtown from the film-industry-heavy westside (disconnected from downtown thanks in part to Westside NIMBYs that stand in the way of subway extension).
At any rate, after working my way through the awful traffic, figuring out where everything was located, and standing in some lines, I actually had the opportunity to watch a couple films.
Denis Côté's Joy of Man's Desiring is part observational documentary and part performance piece. The film revolves around man's (and woman's) relationship with work in a highly mechanized industrial environment. Much of the early part of the film involves shots of machines (often without humans) moving and hammering and cutting with a sort of droning rhythm. Eventually, humans begin to enter the picture, at first silent, and then coming to the foreground with dialogue as actors appearing as workers (or workers with scripts) begin delivering bits about their disillusionment, unhappiness, dissatisfaction and, yet, for some, ambition (or dying ambitions). The picture is at its most interesting when it focuses on the human characters. At times, it fascinates, but Côté refuses to provide any kind of narrative entry-way for what is, essentially, an experimental docu-drama. Sometimes it looks beautiful, and sometimes the comments by the actors are interesting, but the moments are too fleeting. Most of the time it's just boring. That might make for an interesting statement about the dull, dreary workplaces for so many people, but it doesn't make for a terribly interesting film experience.
Deon Taylor's Supremacy was apparently shot on 16mm, apparently so that it could look like it was a movie made in 1992 and recently rediscovered. It looks very much like an old-fashioned festival film, for better or for worse. The story involves a white supremacist, Tully, that gets out of jail with an assignment from his racist gang. He's picked up by a meth-addled prostitute named Doreen, who has been assigned by the gang to help Tully along. Before you know it, Tully has robbed a gas station and shot a cop. As police close in, Tully and Doreen break into a rural house occupied by an extended black family (including the kinda patriarch played by Danny Glover). As Tully and Doreen melt down and engage in confrontations with the family, the family plots a way out of their mess in the hopes they can escape alive.
Taylor's film isn't awful and it isn't poorly made. Taylor has the baseline skill to keep everything together, properly edited and constructed. And yet it still feels a little amateurish - not least of all because of the film's shaky script, some extremely inconsistent acting (especially from the folks playing the cops, who seem to have thought they were in a different kind of movie), and too many moments that ring false. The Tully and Doreen characters are caricatures and little that they say or do feels organic or makes much sense. Taylor's use of some flashbacks means we have to wait too long to understand why he isn't exactly the cold-blooded killer we thought he was. As a result, I spent much of the movie trying to figure out why this guy portrayed as a crazy, murderous racist was so reluctant to kill people (after murdering a police officer).
Supremacy is just a little too shaky to work and it ends up being not nearly as dramatic or compelling as it hopes to be. It doesn't add a whole lot to the subject of racism, but rather seems to be treading fairly familiar ground. Danny Glover and Joe Anderson, who plays Tully, manage to wring some drama out of their final confrontation thanks to their performances, but there simply wasn't enough work done building to that moment. If we're going to lead to a final confrontation between these men, we need more interaction (and confrontation) between the two leading up to it. Instead, Tully feels oddly disconnected from the things going on in the house. The film just doesn't quite work.
Screened at the theater.
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