Ebertfest 2009: Days Four and Five

Ah, the weekend. I hear things got stormy in Chicago, but in Urbana we enjoyed beautiful weather and beautiful films. In fact, I was enjoying the films (and the parties and the conversations) so much that I didn't stop to blog. But now I'm back in Chicago, and though I'm still a bit sleep-deprived, I can sum up the rest of my Ebertfest experience. To use a word that became a critics' punch line during the fest (because it's the lazy critic's go-to word for good films): awesome.

Saturday kicked off with Tarsem's The Fall, a film I like better than some critics I know, but less than my colleague Joshua Rothkopf. I think it is ravishingly beautiful (Tarsem found incredible locations for the fairy tale part of the story), and I actually find the underlying themes about storytelling as shared experience and as curative quite moving. At times it feels underdeveloped to me, but on the whole I like it. And I liked it more projected on a massive screen.

One interesting note about the film: On Sunday, the fest screened Baraka, the nature doc that explores, as the director explained in a Q&A, "man's relationship to the eternal." It was great to see it in close proximity with The Falls, because it becomes clear very fast where Tarsem got some of his ideas. Several shots in The Falls seem to be direct lifts of ideas from Baraka. Not that there's anything wrong with that. As they say, steal from the masters.

Saturday's second film was Sita Sings the Blues, Nina Paley's jaunty personal retelling of parts of the Ramayana intermixed with an autobiographical tale of a marriage coming to an end. As I've noted in earlier posts, Paley is an anti-copyright activist who was radicalized on this issue largely because of her struggles with song rights for the film—she uses recordings from the 1920s, and finds it insane that corporations can still control the rights to songs written in the 1910s and 1920s and recorded in the late 1920s. She gave a good Q&A about the film and about rights, though I was surprised at how hostile many of my colleagues and fellow guests were to any suggestion that copyright at large is a flawed system. People I respect suggested that she is only able to maintain such a position because she got money from the Guggenheim Foundation, or described her as "drinking the Kool-Aid on anti-copyright radicalism," or suggested that her values would change if someone gave her enough money to distribute her film conventionally. I don't think any of those things are true and find her ideas, if too extreme for me, at least very provocative on the subject of freeing all art from copyright restriction.

After Sita Sings the Blues, we had a dinner break, which meant for me another wonderful set of companions in the "VIP lounge" for a meal. Guy Maddin and I got into a funny exchange of drolleries about celibacy voluntary and involuntary (it's hard to explain how we got there, but trust me when I say it was funny), and I got another chance to chat with Karen Gehres, whose film Begging Naked I mentioned in a previous post.

The evening's first film was Nothing But the Truth, with director Rod Lurie and star Matt Dillon on hand to chat after the screening. Unfortunately, I had to miss it. Or maybe fortunately, since people I know and trust are lukewarm to cold on the film, and the audience leaving the theater didn't seem too hot on it either.

The evening finished with a screening of Let the Right One In, the Swedish vampire/coming of age film. I like this film a lot, though I remain undecided on the film's sexual politics, which equate queer sexuality with vampirism in tricky ways. A lot of the audience loved the film, though some of them seemed to have totally missed the queer moment, as suggested by some confusion when, during the Q&A, the producer talked about a key twist in the film, which is revealed in just one shot lasting a few seconds. Some people were literally saying "Huh?" when he referred to it.

After the show, there was a lovely party for the fest's guests, and I got more time to chat with Tia Lessin and Carl Deal of Trouble the Water (such nice people!), and with my colleague Steve Prokopy, better known as Capone of Ain't It Cool News.

Shoehorned somewhere into the day was a lovely conversation over coffee with Movie City News critic Kim Voynar and filmmaker Karen Gehres. We talked about everything and anything but film, which offered a nice break and a refreshing reminder that critics and filmmakers can actually talk about things that aren't film-related. I'll cherish that conversation as much as anything that happened at the fest.

So, yes, I went to bed at around 4am, very glad that Baraka was at noon. And though I was pretty sleepy anyway, I have to say Baraka, a film shot using Todd AO cameras on 70mm film, looked crisp and stunning. The filmmakers have just recently struck a new print, and so we were seeing it super-fresh, without wear and tear, projected as it should be on a huge screen. I'm not a giant fan of wordless docs like this, but in its genre, Baraka stands out.

And that, my friends, was enough fest for me. I napped intermittently on the shuttle bus back to Chicago, dreaming of next Ebertfest's first confirmed film for 2010: the Alloy Orchestra has agreed to bring its live score for Dziga Vertov's experimental silent film Man with the Movie Camera. Awesome.