Closing out my experience at this April's Independent Film Festival of Boston, three capsules from Monday and Tuesday [I left town before the closing night screening of Micmacs, a late substitution for renaissance man James Franco's SNL doc.]
Forthwith:
- Tiny Furniture. Privileged twenty-somethings and their problems, distaff division! Oh, how I resisted this SXSW-anointed darling, the first feature-length film from downtown scion Lena Dunham, choosing Tilda Swinton instead, as any right-minded person would, during its first IFFB slot. But my other options on Monday night were an Elliott Smith doc, and I'd already given at the mopey indie office at the Magnetic Fields flick; Cairo Time, featuring the luminous Patricia Clarkson, yes, but coming even as we speak to a theatre near you; and 8: The Mormon Proposition, but I hate the marriage-wanting gays. Kidding! I actually hate the Mormons! Where was I? Ah yes, Dunham is and plays a recent Oberlin grad who moves back into her artist mom's sweet Soho loft. She works as a restaurant hostess, bickers with her overachieving little sister Nadine, and takes up with a moocher played by Alex Karpovsky, mumblecore's own Parker Posey in terms of sheer ubiquity. The highlight for me was the stream of quips from Dunham's friend Charlotte, an acidic Brit, and I laughed at other scenarios celebrating the filmmaker's own abjection. Dunham has something, sure, but I keep coming back to the "self-aware" dialogue in which Dunham's mom asks, "Do you have the same sense of entitlement as my daughter?" "Oh, believe me, mine is much worse." That something may just be money and time. We'll see. [Subjects for Further Study, after Sarris]
- Lagniappe! Later Monday night I watched The Good, The Bad, The Weird, a kimchi Western, I guess, whose inclusion in the festival I took as a particularly pure manifestation of the organizers' tastes. I laughed at the goofy action set-pieces and took no notes.
- Tuesday took me to the still fairly new Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, for another SXSW winner, the doc Marwencol, which just nabbed more honors at Comic-Con. I'm not surprised. The subject, Mark Hogencamp, deals with the aftermath of a traumatic barroom beating that left him brain-damaged by creating a World War II village in his Newburgh, NY, backyard and populating it with action figure characters with extensive back stories. There's a bit of Henry Darger in the obsessively detailed tableaux he photographs to ensure continuity in the stories he devises as well as in his own shattered life. [That's good.] Filmmaker Jeff Malmberg juggles the two narratives, the one created by Mark and the one about him, in an impressive feat of editing that surprises and moves the viewer while never condescending to the subject. The Cinema Guild distributes Marwencol this fall. See it, it deserves every accolade and was a wonderful way for me to close out IFFB 2010.
