LAFF Tracks: Los Angeles Film Festival Kicks Off the Summer
By Tom White
And LAFF itself arrived at the heels of Summer Solstice, launching for the third year in its
The docs at LAFF were plentiful—30 in all, with four screenings at the Ford Amphitheatre, including the much lauded Anvil! The Story of Anvil (Dir.: Sacha Gervais; Prod.: Rebecca Yeldham), which copped the Documentary Audience Award with just one screening.
This being Los Angeles, LAFF programmed, as it always does, a handful of LA-specific docus, including Largo, an homage to the venerable nightclub whose owner/impresario, Mark Flanagan, also happened to direct, with DP Andrew Van Baal, and produce the film. Van Baal’s black-and-white cinematography lends an elegiac texture—fitting, since
Largo the club does provide a forum for artists to work out material, and this year’s LAFF, via a trio of docs and an accompanying panel with the respective docmakers, honed in on the creative process and the making and cultivating of the artist within and without. Jeff Stimmel’s The Art of Failure: Chuck Connelly Not for Sale, which airs on HBO this week, addresses the fall from dubious grace of the eponymous subject, who was lauded and feted on the same pantheon with the likes of such ’80s downtown
Dirty Hands: The Art & Crimes of David Choe, by Harry Kim, is an amiable, well-intentioned and exhiliarating mess of a film, given that, according to producer Elizabeth Ai, Kim was faced with the documentarian’s dilemma of not knowing when to stop filming and start editing. It might not have helped matters that Kim and Choe were lifelong friends. Dirty Hands had begun as a short, then evolved over the next nine years into a feature. Choe is a mesmerizing and at times infuriating subject, his work informed by the underground, guerilla culture of comics and graffiti. He’s a thrill-seeker and a danger-seeker, and sometimes his manic energy lands him in jail. Unlike many artists who rebel against their parents, Choe is driven by the Korean culture that had discouraged his father from pursuing an artistic career. Time in a
Rounding out the “artistic struggle trio” is Mark Mann’s Finishing Heaven, also slated for an HBO broadcast. Heaven is the unfinished work of Robert Feinberg, who, in 1970, was a student at NYU film school and a hanger-on in the fabled Warhol Factory scene. But he never finished the film, and for the next 37 years, he carted the reels around with him—to Italy, where he found work with Antonioni; to Brazil, where he worked in various capacities in the film industry there; and finally to Northern California, where he now lives alone in a ramshackle hovel, and scrapes by working for a cruise line. Amazingly, despite the Rube Goldberg means of preservation, the 16mm footage is in pristine condition. Ruby Lynn Reyner, his star and girlfriend from the Heaven period, called him one day, after several decades, and encouraged him to jump-start the long-abandoned project. And Mann, in full disclosure, agreed to help convert the film footage of digital, in exchange for Feinberg’s participation.
Feinberg is an amiable sad sack—self-deprecating, rueful, yet charming in a cranky sort of way. Reyner, his foil and sparring partner, goads him to dust off his long-dormant creative passion and realize their long-deferred dream. She herself had been through the mill—never quite emerging from the Factory days to bigger things, struggling with heroin addiction, caring for a husband stricken with AIDS-related dementia. You get a sense that finishing Heaven is redemption for both of them, and in one Gloria Swanson moment, Reyner says, “I was beautiful then,” as her younger self performs on the monitor behind her. For Mann, “The whole project was a delightful torment,” as the process of finishing Finishing Heaven proved just as arduous, maddening and rewarding.
Politics is an art of sorts—a nefarious one, to be sure—and in this election year, LAFF programmed Stefan Forbes’ Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story, a tale of the notorious political operative who plied his trade like a warlock. As Forbes skillfully illustrates, the key players in today’s roll-in-the-mud style of politics—Karl Rove, George W. Bush—owe a debt of gratitude to Atwater, who caught the political bug back in high school in his native South Carolina, then learned at the feet of arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond. Atwater joined the College Republicans, then, through a series of Nixonian dirty tricks that would foreshadow the 2000 Presidential election, helped Rove secure the presidency of that group in a closely contested race that was ultimately decided by the chair of the Republican Party—George H.W. Bush. From that point forward, Atwater insinuated himself in political campaigns, local and national, working all the way up to the White House, leaving a horde of enemies and former friends in his wake. Then came divine retribution:
Under Forbes’ skillful direction, as well as the steady producing hand of Noland Walker (whose previous credit as producer and writer, Jonestown, must have given him an education in the dark side), Boogie Man gathers an impressive cast of characters—campaign managers and politicians on both sides of the aisle, journalists, pundits, longtime friends, and Atwater’s most maligned victims, Michael and Kitty Dukakis—as well as footage of Bush pere and fils, Rove, Dick Cheney and many others to tell the story. But what works best in the film is the subtext—the long, deep, dark history of the Deep South; the ever-festering scar of race in
Politics has been called the second oldest profession. As for the oldest one, Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal documents the fallen hooker-to-the-stars’ comeback attempt: as the proprietess of Heidi’s Stud Farm, due north of