The Florida Film Festival, now in its 12th year, takes place March 7-16 in Orlando. Produced by Enzian Theater, the festival showcases, American independent and foreign films and features a huge array of parties, forums, celebrities (including Ed Burns and James Caan), performances, and uh, oh yeah — film screenings. In 2001 the Florida Film Festival was named one of the top 10 festivals in the world by Chris Gore in The Ultimate Film Festival Survival Guide.The festival offers jury and audience awards and is now a qualifying festival for the Oscars in the category of Live Action Short Film. The following reviews represent a selection of the best competition films. The reviews, written by Steven Schneider, film critic for Orlando's alternative paper, Orlando Weekly, are reprinted by permission from that paper. For more complete critical alternative coverage, visit www.orlandoweekly.com.
For a complete schedule of festival events, visit www.floridafilmfestival.com or call 407-629-8587.
Lance Goldenberg returns next week after a much-needed and -deserved vacation.
Ball in the House
Directed by Tanya WexlerIn her 2003 Florida Film Festival entry, director Tanya Wexler — the niece of cinematographer and past Florida Film Festival guest Haskell Wexler — mines the black-comic potential of addiction and recovery in the American Midwest in this feature film. Seventeen years old and just home from rehab, J.J. White (Jonathan Tucker of The Deep End) finds his attempts to stay clean seriously compromised by the grotesque cast of characters he calls a family. Mom Phyllis (Deidre O'Connell) is an indulgent boob, and she's about the best of the lot: Stepdad Bull (Dan Moran) and aunt Dot (Jennifer Tilly) have a plan going to benefit financially should the kid not survive the transition to "straight" life.
J.J.'s peers aren't much better. Old dope buddy Bobby Raven (Ethan Embry) is shaking him down for a $3,500 debt, and girlfriend Lizzie's (Aleksa Palladino) allegiances run only as deep as where the action is. With friends like these, it's tough for J.J. to follow the platitudes of his rehab counselor, Dr. Charlie (David Strathairn), who deposits him back into open society with the proclamation, "It's time for the healing to begin."
Much of Ball in the House takes place under a blanket of snow, a wicked coke metaphor that helps Wexler establish her sardonic aims. In many ways, the movie comes on like a blue-collar cousin to one of last year's best pictures, the snarky coming-of-age piece Igby Goes Down. But scripter Matthew Swan (who studied under playwright Christopher Durang) tones down the glib verbal parrying that many viewers found a stumbling block to entering Igby's world. J.J.'s vulturous friends and relations are only as witty as reality supports; in the film's satisfying final half, the comedic angle is dispensed with entirely, giving way to solid drama that's all the more effective for how quietly it sneaks up on you. This is a serious work, and it'll be a shame if its depiction of familial back-stabbing is taken for burlesque. As the movie demonstrates, extreme self-abuse comes from extreme circumstances.
Long Gone
Directed by Jack Cahill and David EberhardtThis is what it looks like when a documentary crew fully commits itself to a topic. The product of seeming years of effort, Long Gone puts ordinary life on hold to travel the countryside with the train riders (better known as "tramps" or "hobos") who see the U.S. by boxcar — some due to extenuating personal circumstances, but many merely because they've been seduced by the wide-open grandeur of the lifestyle. The movie pursues multiple intersecting storylines in its quest to vindicate the nomadic men and women (and their dogs) who form a perennially misunderstood substrata of American society.
A black Vietnam vet named New York Slim serves as unofficial group spokesman, his eloquent monologues our map to an unfamiliar world. Having known from an early age that he wanted to be part of the train-riding culture, Slim has settled into a role he defines as "90 percent baby-sitter" to his hard-drinking, sometimes helpless brothers. The new generation of rider is embodied by three wayward teens making their way to New York City; the old guard by Josh and John, a pair of traveling buddies whose firm friendship is threatened by encroaching illness. If Long Gone treats any one of its subjects as a spiritual cause celebre, though, it's Dogman Tony, a troubled soul whose fragile integration into society turns on a make-or-break relationship with a girl far younger than he.
The earliest portions of the movie wisely play up the riders' camaraderie, decency and abiding love of nature, earning our sympathy and respect before delving into the more unsavory aspects of their lives — like drug addiction and violence. It's a great-looking film, too, offering plenty of stirring outdoor panoramas and switching picture formats just often enough to stave off visual monotony. Most important, every salient development is either captured or otherwise represented on camera, no matter how involved the prospect. Filmmakers Cahill and Eberhardt show an unquellable passion for the precepts of their art: to get that footage, tell that story, make that point. The result is a film that's as true to its audience as it is to its subject.
My Flesh and Blood
Directed by Jonathan KarshI normally award top marks to any documentary that can make me emit an amazed cry of "Jesus!", whether I intended to or not. It happened a mere five minutes into My Flesh and Blood. What got me was the sight of a young girl, born without legs, showing off her Halloween costume. The outfit included fake appendages, later to be "sawn off" as part of a magic trick. It was strange, this apparently unflappable adolescent admitted, to look down and see limbs where she wasn't accustomed to finding them. And she smiled.
That vignette speaks volumes about the fight to maintain normalcy in the face of disability, and it tells you everything you need to know about My Flesh and Blood, an HBO/Cinemax production that will make you sit up and take notice as surely as if a steel rod had been implanted in your spine. It's the shocking and magnificent story of Susan Tom, a single mother with 13 children — most of them adopted, and most living with challenges that test the limits of the P.C. term "special needs." The aforementioned legless girl has an adoptive sister with an identical condition; there's also an intellectually ambitious 8-year-old whose features have been ravaged by fire. An older boy suffers from a degenerative disease that makes even the simple act of bathing a painful ordeal. Problem child Joe considers himself the least freakish of the bunch: Cystic fibrosis has him in and out of the hospital, and he needs to take Ritalin to control his violent rages. But at least he's not missing any body parts.
A lesser film would limit itself to the obvious thesis that mama Tom is a saint for structuring her life around these children at the expense of her own security. (She claims to have no job, savings, Social Security insurance or retirement plan.) But the portrait that emerges is instead of an intrinsically lonely woman with an admitted compulsion to play caregiver. She also displays a troubling readiness to castigate herself as "fat," as we hear her do while searching for available men on the Internet. The mantle of deformity, it seems, is anyone's to adopt.
Our deepest identification, though, is with daughter Margaret, an outwardly unafflicted teen burdened with an inordinate amount of responsibility toward her extraordinary family. Poor Margaret is stretched to the breaking point with obligation, compounded by guilt that her own problems are "so small" in comparison. Through her story and especially that of Joe — whose transparent misery is exacerbated by an attempted reunion with his birth mother — My Flesh and Blood demonstrates that afflictions of the heart and mind are in fact the most terrible abnormalities to suffer.
Power Trip
Directed by Paul DevlinThe more of Paul Devlin's films I see, the more I believe that every documentarian should be forced to work in professional sports before shooting anything of his or her own. A video editor who has generated TV coverage of three Olympics and a Super Bowl, Devlin brought his sportsman's eye to the world of spoken-word poetry in 1998's SlamNation, one of the most thrilling motion pictures the Florida Film Festival has ever presented. In Power Trip, Devlin applies his kinetic style to a topic with even less inherent visual appeal: the advent of paid electrical power in the former Soviet Union.
Since Georgia declared independence in 1991, Devlin's film teaches us, its citizens have had a hard time adapting to the idea that electricity must be contracted on an individual basis, not donated by a communist state. In the capital city of Tbilisi (population: 1,225,000) the energy rights are held by AES Corp., a U.S.-based multinational with the atypical mandates to serve the world and "be the most fun workplace ever." There's little visible fun in AES' dealings with the Tbilisi populace, most of whom cannot afford the company's services and resort to stealing it. A whopping 40 percent of customers have an illegal line — an epidemic represented in the film by tangles of illicit, potentially deadly cords that snake out of windows and across yards.
The task of normalization falls to Piers Lewis, an idealistic AES manager who has to ensure customer compliance while battling a corrupt government that dispenses free power to favored industrial applications as political patronage. But Lewis is not the film's main character: It's power (both electrical and political), and there's no better testament to Devlin's filmmaking skill than the ease with which he grants main-player status to something you can't see or hear. Acting as producer, director and editor, as well as operating one of two cameras, Devlin again shows his mastery of sports-TV sensibilities: when to cut, when to bring in music, and when to pan across a static subject to imply movement. The gradual nature of social progress doesn't always suit his game-time storytelling structure, nor does it grant him the kind of sweeping denouement a Sunday-afternoon armchair habitue might expect. But if you're looking to be reminded how much excitement any filmed conflict can and should entail, Power Trip is a big event indeed.
This article appears in Mar 5-11, 2003.