The Los Angeles Film Festival ended Sunday and I’m not sure what I want to say about it. I saw several films and wanted to see more, but circumstances, and trying to blog about most of what I did see, kept me to a one or two movie per day average on the days I attended. Most of the films were as good as their buzz at least, but most of them had already screened at Sundance.
For me, the highlights were “Black Dynamite” — which was by far the most fun screening all around despite happening within hours of Michael Jackson’s death (which happened to be a less than a mile from where I was working on my posts) — and “We Live in Public” which was simply the most interesting film with the most interesting post-screening discussion. “Branson” was a highlight of another sort for the electrifying performer/one-man-drama, Jackson Cash. The film geek/native West Angeleno in me went moderately wild for a film I haven’t written about here, Curtis Harrington’s melange of romance and dark fantasy “Night Tide,” which was shot in late fifties Santa Monica and Venice.
Los Angeles is, of course, an extremely large city with strong neighborhoods but no true urban core (which is not to say that we aren’t trying to grow one) and a place where all kinds of movies screen all the time, if you know where to find them. It’s also, of course, the place on earth with the largest concentration of people involved with actually making movies or doing things related to making them. Getting them to spend a lot of time actually watching new films probably requires enticing them to go elsewhere and break their usual, already way too busy, routine.
So, film festivals in the heart of movieland tend to be an afterthought and tend to simply compete with the other entertainment choices in the area. Most non-film-obsessed Angelenos have little idea anything out of the ordinary is even going on, and even film nuts are fairly distracted by any number of possible movie-going choices. If Angelenos attend festival screenings at all, it’s usually just to see a particular film or two. I know this applied to me before I started writing about this stuff publicly.
As for folks from elsewhere, I don’t have any data on this, but I can’t remember talking to a single non-filmmaker/press person/volunteer at a Los Angeles festival who had come to Los Angeles specifically for a film festival. I’m sure there must be someone who has slipped a festival screening in after a trip to the Universal theme park, however.
For all those reasons, it seems to me any L.A. based festival should work extra hard at creating a sense of community. The apparently now defunct Silverlake Film Festival used the event to celebrate the very real charm of the Silverlake/Los Feliz area and actually went out of its way to treat filmgoers — and even lowly online press pass holders — extremely well. It’s harder for larger (and apparently more fiscally solvent) festivals to maintain that sense of community, but, of the few I’ve been to, I prefer the ones that try a little to at least create an aura of movie love about them.
Here’s what I mean: While few come here for our film festivals, there are some bravely obsessive souls who — rather than going the cheapskate-coward’s way out and getting a press pass if they can — will plonk down a few hundred and really commit themselves to seeing as many films as they can afford/have time for. These people are rare, but the real deal when it comes to movie love. During the one-and-only social event I was invited to, one twenty-something film lover told me about attending the Toronto International Film Festival, probably the favorite festival of true movie fanatics around the world, and one enthusiastically attended by locals despite being set in one of our continent’s largest and most diverse cities. There was absolutely nothing unusual about this film fanatic, except that he was barely eighteen years old, traveling a few thousand miles, and was pretty obviously the real deal when it comes to movie love. Seeing that, they wrote him a special note saying they’d make an extra effort to ensure he’d get into all the screenings he had selected and, he told me, they were as good as their word. One more reason film lovers love Toronto, and hard to imagine happening at a festival like LAFF.
Perhaps I’m an idealist, but it seems to me that a film festival should be as much a labor of love as a promotional vehicle, even in Los Angeles.
