Art by Francisco Kjolseth for the Salt Lake City Tribune.

Tomorrow I leave for Salt Lake City to attend the Sundance Art House Conference (where special guest Michael Moore will address the 100+ exhibitors in attendance). After that it’s off to Park City to attend the Sundance Film Festival and watch as many films as possible. As I can only stay for four and a half days before leaving in the afternoon, I put together an alphabetical flow chart by day of my options to help me prioritize the screenings. Here’s my crib sheet with excerpts from the program:  READ MORE

There are thousands of film festivals out there, and most of them are small D.I.Y. affairs that lean heavily on digital projection and extremely low-budget projects that happily take up any host that will notice them. And that’s fine. But I’ve also seen an abuse of local media by some of these overzealous festival promoters who know that the over-worked and harried journalists at shrinking newspapers often times won’t question their outrageous claims at being the “Cannes of the (your location here)” or other such nonsensical hyperbole. So it’s with great pleasure that I announce the return of a “reel” film festival that’s been around for several decades and that ambitiously brings in ten days of very eclectic programming, most of which is still on 35mm film: The 2009 Starz Denver Film Festival (Nov. 12 – 22). READ MORE

The coverage of this year’s New York Film Festival was weirdly tendentious, culminating in A.O. Scott’s bizarre NY Times dispatch in which he claims (I paraphrase), that there is a cabal of scheming festival programmers who hate humanity and eagerly promote films which espouse a “principle of innate depravity.” I’m (slightly) exaggerating his argument, but he adopts a strikingly strident tone for a diverse slate of movies, grandly sweeping complex works of art into his “festival” category so he can haughtily ignore them. What he yearns for, it seems, are films of “high-minded middlebrowism.” Don’t we have the next two months of Oscar-bait to satisfy that particular need? I’d much rather have a rare screening from an experimental young Filipino filmmaker like Raya Martin than the latest Sam Mendes chin-scratcher that will be released nationwide the following week.

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What do André de Toth, Michael Curtiz, and Leo McCarey have in common? These three directors were represented at the last Telluride Film Festival thanks to Alexander Payne, a Guest Director who introduced films from these cinematic stalwarts as part of his presentation on Forgotten Hollywood. Payne got his start with Citizen Ruth (1996), and then gave Matthew Broderick a memorable role in Election (1999), he cast Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt (2002), and followed this with an Oscar win for Sideways (2004). Payne’s selection of films for TFF was, as he was the first to admit, a selfish one: these were all rare films that he, personally, wanted to see on the big screen. In his introduction to Curtiz’ The Breaking Point he mentioned how TCM was to blame, because one day he woke up, turned on TCM, and only managed to see the last third of the film, which blew him away. But he’s always wanted to see the rest of it, and it’s not on DVD. Toth’s Day of the Outlaw? That 35mm print had to be secured by the TFF staff from Martin Scorsese’s personal archive. McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow? Well… if you have a PAL player and don’t mind buying the DVD from France, you’re in luck. But if you were in Telluride last Labor Day weekend, you had a chance to see rare 35mm print screenings of all three films that were sure to put you in the clouds. READ MORE

Last week I talked about the exceptional Red Riding trilogy the debuted at the 36th annual Telluride Film Festival. Now that the festival can be seen receding in my rear view mirror, it’s time to reflect on some of the other films that were also screened there. Let’s start with The Road.  READ MORE

“Maybe all that I am in this world and all that I have been and done comes down to nothing more than being a touch of color in a prosaic world. Even that is something.” ~ Errol Flynn, writing in My Wicked, Wicked Ways

Well, no. It can’t be possible. Errol Flynn at 100 is unimaginable. Yet, as of Saturday, June 20th, the great swashbuckler of the sound era passed the one hundredth anniversary of his birth in 1909 in Tasmania. It may seem impossible that such a milestone has been reached without a bigger celebration in Flynn’s adopted homeland of America. However, ask yourself: For true classic movie fans, haven’t we continued to celebrate and rediscover Errol Flynn and his evergreen films over and over in the years since he left this world?

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This week, Facets Multi-Media, where I work, is hosting the Chicago African Diaspora Film Festival, one of many festivals and series that our intrepid programmer, Charles Coleman, books each year.  Only a handful of venues around Chicago — or, around the country for that matter — can boast such diverse programming. Last Friday, I watched a documentary from Nigeria titled Glorious Exit, and this coming Tuesday, I plan to stay after work to catch a film about Haitian novelist Jacques Roumain.  Over the weekend, I was lucky enough to see an American independent film as part of the festival.  A small-scale drama with a big-name cast, Gospel Hill is struggling to find bookings in the theaters — any theater.

                Gospel Hill features an ensemble cast of major Hollywood faces, including Angela Bassett, Samuel L. Jackson, Danny Glover, Nia Long, and Julia Stiles, veteran character actors Giancarlo Esposito, Adam Baldwin, and Tom Bower, and newcomers Taylor Kitsch and RZA. Set in the South, the story involves the legacy of a civil rights leader murdered in 1968 and his impact on his small hometown of Julia, South Carolina. Like many small towns across America, Julia is economically depressed because local industries have dried up or moved away. The townspeople are divided over whether to destroy a historical district for the sake of a new development, or to hang onto land that has been owned by local families for a hundred years. Will it really bring jobs to the town, or will residents sacrifice their history for nothing as out-of-state developers take advantage of the low real estate prices?

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Elementary school teacher Alma Bartlett was never famous, she never made a movie, or dazzled others with her wit and beauty. Yet, in her first years as a teacher in an El Paso, Texas school, she built a rapport with a gangly boy whose frequent absences from school frustrated her. The friendship they forged would last for over forty years. Her former student returned to El Paso in years to come, as he would many times. Then he would be a world famous man, renowned for his good looks and for squiring great beauties. When encountering a reporter, he would often unfold an ancient, creased report card he carried in his wallet to display with affection the time that Mrs. Bartlett had enough faith in him to pass him from sixth to seventh grade, despite his neglect of his studies. The seventh grade was as far as his formal education would take him.

Born Luis Antonio Damaso de Alonso, in Cuidad Juarez, Mexico on December 11, 1905, (some sources say 1903), this boy had what most of us would characterize as a glamorous life, but he would never forget this inspiring young teacher. Alma saw something more in the Mexican-born scion of a family of Spanish matadors, and urged him “to do something with his life.” It would not be easy.

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As my fellow Morlocks help celebrate 15 years of TCM programming since its April 14, 1994 channel launch, I’d like to tip my hat to TCM for helping another organization whose name is also synonymous with quality film programming: the Telluride Film Festival. I’ve been attending the TFF since 1995, and in just a few months it will be holding its 36th festival. For most of the time that I can remember, TCM has been a TFF sponsor.  TCM was also instrumental in the making of key films that premiered at Telluride, such as the 1999 four-hour “virtual” restoration of Erich Von Stroheim’s Greed (1924) and the documentary of Lon Chaney: A Thousand Faces (Kevin Brownlow, 2000). But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. READ MORE