It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, but let's not forget that independent theaters continue to drop like flies, while the few that remain often make such predictable programming choices it's hard to tell them apart. You can bank on Brideshead Revisited showing up on every screen from New York's Angelika to Burns Court to Tampa Theatre, while even a good movie like La Vie en Rose becomes harder to love knowing the multiple screens it monopolizes means many equally worthy films will wind up disappearing into the void.
One local spot that's doing things a little differently these days is the Beach Theatre, the vintage St. Pete venue purchased last year by screenwriter Michael France. You'll find pretty much all the expected bases covered at the Beach, from ubiquitous indies like Flight of the Red Balloon to The Dark Knight, but you'll also discover some surprising movies and film-related activities that give this theater a refreshingly unique personality. Even when this place indulges in the expected, it does it with style, from the Cosmopolitans offered in the lobby bar for Sex and the City to the shark sandwiches that were served during Jaws.
Just this week there are nearly a dozen films appearing at the Beach, from a free kids' matinee of Return of the Pink Panther to a midnight shriek-a-long of The Rocky Horror Show to a WMNF benefit screening of CSNY: Déjà vu, directed by the esteemed Bernard Shakey (aka Neil Young). Part behind-the-scenes exposé, part political soapbox and part good ol'-fashioned concert flick, Déjà vu chronicles the band's 2006 Freedom of Speech tour — when the four self-described "balding hippie millionaires" took material from Young's controversial Living with War CD on the road to serious cheers and jeers. The CSNY guys look and sound noticeably worse for the wear these days, but they hit enough right notes to make the trip worthwhile, and Mr. Shakey gets points for his passionate, warts-and-all approach.
But wait, there's more. The Beach has also cooked up something called Indie Fest, a series of interesting and overlooked films that includes multiple screenings of no less than eight feature films in the space of a single week. Besides the aforementioned Flight of the Red Balloon, this eclectic mother lode of movies includes CJ7, an E.T.-in-Hong-Kong comedy-fantasy by Kung Fu Hustle director Stephen Chow; an amusingly ridiculous French spy spoof called OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies and the acclaimed Holocaust drama The Counterfeiters. There are also documentaries galore — on the very young (Girls Rock, a look at a rock 'n' roll camp for kids in Oregon), the very old (Hats Off, about a feisty 93-year-old character actor) and the mildly crazy (Surfwise, which introduces us to an eccentric clan of Jewish surfing fanatics).
One of Indie Fest's most entertaining offerings is Full Grown Men, a homegrown product that slipped under the radar of most local venues even though it was shot entirely in Florida. This loopy coming-of-age comedy gives us an unlikely hero in 35-year-old arrested adolescent Alby (Matt McGrath), who packs up his action figures, abandons his wife and child, and sets out on a pilgrimage to Diggityland, where childhood dreams come true.
Along the way, Alby hooks up with his boyhood pal Elias (Judah Friedlander), and in the tradition of all classic road movies encounters a variety of American eccentrics before coming to the inevitable conclusion that you can't go home again.
The movie's colorful cameos are probably the best thing about it — Alan Cumming as a psychotic hitchhiker, Amy Sedaris as a bartending clown and Deborah Harry as an aging ex-mermaid from Weeki Wachee — but there's a calmly measured cohesiveness here that keeps the film from feeling like just a collection of loosely connected scenes. Things sometimes get a little too precious or self-consciously quirky, but it's clear that director David Munroe (who'll be in attendance at the Beach's Aug. 2 screening) cares deeply about his characters, and that keeps this little oddball fairy tale nicely on track.
The other don't-miss at this week's Indie Fest is OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, featuring Jean Dujardin as a half-suave, half-clueless French spy on a mission to "make the Middle East safe." Dujardin channels early Sean Connery to eerie effect (right down to the eyebrows and taste in suits), but his bad puns and occasional social awkwardness are more Maxwell Smart, while the film's lurid '60s colors and styles owe a lot to Dean Martin's Matt Helm movies.
Everything about Agent OSS 117 is exaggerated in this witty spoof, from his attempts at devil-may-care charm to his oily chauvinism and a colonialist mindset that has him treating third-worlders as children. "You're very French!" scolds one angry native fed up with the man's unwitting but consistent dismissiveness of Islam. To which our hero can only smile and nod, "Thank you."
The fun plays out against the real-life socio-political context of late-'50s Egypt (rising Arab nationalism, Muslim re-awakenings, et al), but that only increases the absurdity of all the groovy fashions, sporty cars, lounge-y music and double entendres. It all ends in a deliriously convoluted hairball of double crosses, fireworks and an earnest assurance that peace is at hand in the Middle East for centuries to come. Our hero's next stop: Iran — "where they really appreciate Westerners."
This article appears in Jul 30 – Aug 5, 2008.