A Detailed and Personal Wrap Up of the 2010 Savannah Film Festival (Part 2)

Be sure to read Part 1 of my film festival wrap up before reading this. Otherwise, this post won't make much sense in the grand scheme of things.

Of course, one of the most important parts of the Savannah Film Festival was the movies. During that week, I saw a crap ton of film. So much, in fact, that I'm still processing a lot of the things that I saw.

There were a lot of really great things I saw. But, out of everything I saw, a movie called The Kid was the best.

Going into the Savannah Film Festival, I had no idea what The Kid was. In fact, I almost skipped its screening because I was so tired. I'm glad I didn't.

Directed by Nick Moran (who is actually an actor as well as director; he was in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows), The Kid tells the true story of Kevin Lewis who went from an extremely abusive home to a life in organized crime as a street fighter to, miraculously, a family man and successful writer. The movie was pretty brutal. Before it started, Moran came to the front of the room and pretty much begged us to stick it out in the film, promising that things would get better and more positive. You know you are in for an experience when the director pleads for you to stick around.

The Kid was incredible. The movie's style was inspired (and, at times, almost Scorsese-like), its emotion genuine, its acting impeccable, and its pacing perfect. I don't know how to sell this movie to you. All I can say that it was a hell of an experience. It's one of those movies that, after the first five minutes, I knew I was watching something special. Everyone else around me knew that they were watching something special. It was in the air. It was real. And there was no way to deny it.

I really can't stress this enough: see The Kid. I don't know when it will come to theaters here. I doubt it will come to theaters here. But if you're browsing Netflix one day (or doing the archetic task of walking through an actual video store) and you happen to stumble upon a copy of The Kid, get it. Don't hesitate. Get it. It's wonderful.

I ran into Moran at an after party one night. Both times, I shook his hand and told him how amazing The Kid was. I did this in the span of twenty minutes. He must have thought I was crazy. I don't care. That's how damn good this film is.

Find a way to see it and see it.

There was a lot of talk about Blue Valentine before we hit its screening. At the time of its screening, it still had the controversial NC-17 rating slapped on it (something that was finally changed yesterday to a R rating, and rightfully so). Going into the film, it felt like we were going to be seeing something that was more of a steamy sex movie than anything.

But the NC-17 rating was just another example of the MPAA being a stick in the mud. The movie wasn't rated NC-17 for gratuitous sex. No, it was rated NC-17 for a sex scene that was so emotionally powerful that it was pretty devastating to watch.

Blue Valentine is a great film. It tells the story of a couple as we see how they met and fell in love paralleled to when they are married and on the verge of a divorce. Director Derek Cianfrance's style is very realistic, almost to a documentary point of view. He often allowed only for one take of each scene and for a lot of improvisation on the parts of Gosling and Williams. What results is a movie that feels very, very real. And, at times, it's very hard to watch.

By the end of the film, I feel like most of the people around were pretty drained emotionally. I know a lot of people were crying. Hell, I wanted to.

Blue Valentine is a beautiful, heart-felt movie that I feel like everyone should see. Hopefully, with the NC-17 rating now history, more people will than originally possible.

Even watching the trailer for the movie is emotionally powerful. If you haven't seen the trailer, watch it above.

It's not often that you think that one of the best movies you see at a film festival will be a movie made for television. But the Al Pacino vehicle You Don't Know Jack definitely proved that notion wrong.

Wouldn't it be cool to see Al Pacino play controversial euthanasia practitioner Jack Kevorkian? That was the idea that got me into this screening. I was expecting the movie to be okay... but mostly a vehicle for Pacino to be Pacino. Fortunately, for me, the movie wasn't that at all. Pacino's performance is understated at the most and is, honestly, one of his best acting gigs in years. And, after watching a few videos of the real Kevorkian, Pacino really did hit the nail on the head. No, this isn't the yelling, over-the-top Pacino we've been getting since Scent of a Woman. This is Pacino being a true actor again. I'd say it's his best go at the profession since his underrated performance in Carlito's Way.

While quite lengthly, this movie kept me engaged and thinking the entire time. I had never really thought about the issue of enthanasia before but this film definitely got me thinking about it as well as maybe believing that I might be okay with it.

If you get the chance to pick this up on DVD, give it a shot. You might be surprised how great it is.

There were other great features I saw such as Rabbit Hole, Earthwork, Ultrasuede, and Conviction. If you get the chance to see any of these, I'd check them out as well.

The Savannah Film Festival also had a lot of great student short films playing throughout the week.

The best short film I saw during the festival was a film called The Candidate by David Karlak. The Candidate was an intensely paced, stylized and pristine filmmaking venture with some solid acting, an intriguing concept, interesting characters and some great directing. From the moment it started, my classmates and I were hooked. It's probably the best film that I've seen anyone from SCAD produce so far.

The film follows a businessman who secretly hates a co-worker that he has been working with. This hatred culminates when he gets a mysterious and possibly dangerous offer from man representing a secret organization that deals with murder.

This movie was so great. If I ever get a copy of it or if it pops online sometime, I'll be sure to post it on here.

Another great short film I saw was Girls Named Pinky. Although not a SCAD film, this short was very impressive visually and character wise. It felt very much like a Hollywood film. The characters were rich and mysterious and images gorgeous. But it was the atmosphere of the short that was the most impressive aspect. At times, it felt to be in the vein of a David Lynch film. That is very impressive.

The film follows a meek business man who befriends a local married woman who is known around town for being quite loose. As we follow them getting to know each other, strange things begin to happen and the tension begins to rise. It all culminates in an ending that is quite shocking.

There were quite a few animated shorts that played during the Savannah Film Festival. The one I enjoyed the most was called Zero. It followed a race of people made of twine (at least, I guess that's what it was) who come out of the womb with a label on their chest. The labels range from 0-9. These labels reveal their potential in life. Naturally, the zeros have no potential and are basically treated like lepers in this society. This film follows what happens when one zero falls in love with another zero, something that is forbidden in this society.

The film had some beautiful, unique animation and was really enjoyable to watch. Overall, it seemed to be a great crowd pleaser. It reminded me a lot of Pixar's work. I even think it could translate into a feature quite well (though I think it performed wonderfully as a short).

Other shorts that I enjoyed were Missed Connections, Up Under the Roof, Wanting Alex, Masks, The Cow Who Wanted to be a Hamburger, and Samsquatch.

There were a lot of films that I had mixed feelings about. One of them was the high profile feature 127 Hours.

I liked 127 Hours. I did. But there was something off about it. I still haven't nailed on the head exactly what it was. I think it was the story. The fact is that there just isn't much to it. The guy gets his arm stuck in between a boulder and a rock wall. He's stuck there for the whole film. And he finally cuts his arm off. That's it. To compensate for this, Danny Boyle over-stylizes the film to an excessive amount. I wasn't really into all of that.

What does work for this movie is the great performance from James Franco and the great character moments he is allowed to give. He is the reason to see this movie and, if he does get an Oscar, he probably deserves it. It's his movie and he makes it known. The performance feels genuine and natural.

Still, I have mixed feelings about the screenplay and Boyle's style choices. I don't know. I want to see it again to really decide how I feel.

And, of course, you're probably wanting to know about the already infamous "arm cutting off" scene. Yes, it's five minutes long. Yes, it's brutal and awful. Not the worse thing I've seen in a movie (because I've seen some truly awful things) but it's intense. And yes, we had a guy faint, the movie stopped and an ambulance come in to bring the guy to the hospital. It's an effective, realistic scene. Not the worst thing I've seen but yeah it's graphic.

A lot of my classmates loved the movie Beneath Hill 60. Apparently others did too because it took home three awards the last night of the festival, including Best Movie. I really don't get it though. For me, it's really hard to make an exceptional war movie. And, to me, Beneath Hill 60 falls in the catergory of your typical, average war film like We Were Soldiers or Black Hawk Down. It's not bad but there's also nothing really special or artistically compelling about it.

I probably wouldn't be so hard on it if it hadn't won so many awards at the festival. I mean, this over The Kid? You have to be joking. Yes, The Kid won one award but the fact that this heap of averageness won over it three straight times is a travesty.

And, of course, there were a lot of films that I just didn't care for.

Okay, here's where I'm going to get blacklisted. I didn't care for En Route. I really didn't. And I'm not the only classmate that felt this way.

I realize that En Route was buzzed about being "the best film to come out of SCAD in years." And I know that the guys that worked on the movie are pretty popular at SCAD. But man... I was really let down by this flick. Especially after seeing it right after the stellar The Candidate.

Don't get me wrong: in a lot of ways, En Route is a great achievement in student filmmaking. The visual effects in the movie are incredible. At the budget the film was made, the visual effects are truly incredible. And I know (and boy do I know) that I could most likely never produce a film that looked like this visually. Really, it was damn impressive in this manner.

However, a movie shouldn't be all about the effects. It's gotta have a great story to go along with those shining, pristine computer graphics. And, to me, En Route was really lacking a strong story. I didn't care about the main character. There wasn't any reason to care about the main character. The acting was bad. The storytelling wasn't great. I was looking at a great, visual piece but, all the while, I was feeling hollow inside.

This is another one of those times where I'm probably harder on the film because it got so praised by the festival judges where as something much more complex in story and emotion like The Candidate and Girls Named Pinky got the shaft (and yes, I realize that The Candidate got two awards but, much like Beneath Hill 60, En Route pretty much sweeped the student film section of awards).

One of the biggest disappointments in the entire festival was the The Conspirator.

Every year at the Savannah Film Festival, a film gets selected as the Director's Choice. This is a film that is kept secret until its screening but is usually a highly anticipated fall release. Last year, it was Up in the Air. So, obviously, I was pretty excited about what it could be this year. Would it be Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go? David O. Russell's The Fighter? Hell... maybe even The Coen Brothers' True Grit?

Nope... it was Robert Redford's The Conspirator, a movie I had never even heard of despite being a movie nerd and frequenting various film news sites. Despite my disappointment of the title, I tried to stay optimistic. After all, it was Robert Redford directing, it had a big cast and it was even shot on location in Savannah, GA (which is probably the only reason it was chosen).

Well, that optimism soon faded. God, this movie was a bore. I don't know how you can make the trail on the conspirators of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln dull but Redford sure pulled it off. Nothing about the movie stood out. It was just there. And I just didn't care. And every time I would remotely start to care, James McAvoy would come out and start "acting." Then I would want to shoot myself again.

When I got out of the movie, I had a really strange moment. I was standing outside the theater, waiting for my friends, when an old man approached me. He had tears in his eyes and looked angry. Slowly, he caught his breath and began to talk.

"That movie... that movie was a f*cking lie. It was a f*cking lie."

Then he walked away. I was really confused and weirded out. I'm not sure what he was talking about but he seemed angry and upset. I was a bit peeved as well, but for different reasons.

I was angry because it was a bad movie.

Fair Game was the festival's other big disappointment.

The last movie Naomi Watts and Sean Penn did together was 21 Grams. While incredibly depressing, the movie showcased some excellent filmmaking and superb acting.

Let's just say that Fair Game is their Righteous Kill.

If you thought The Conspirator was boring, get ready to be taken to a whole new level of boredom. Fair Game is a movie that doesn't really know what it wants to be. It starts off as an awkwardly paced spy thriller. Then it turns into a drama about the infamous CIA leak from the Bush administration. While I became more interested in the CIA leak portion of the story, the whole thing was just a mess of story structure and bad pacing. Even the framing and color of the movie seemed off. My classmate Justin was wondering if it was work print version but apparently it's the real thing.

The worst movie I saw at the Savannah Film Festival was a documentary called To Whom It May Concern. The film covered the life and times of famous 1960's Chinese star Nancy Kwan, as well as the tragic loss of her only son to AIDs.

This could have been a good documentary. It had all the right elements. Nancy Kwan has an interesting story and what happened to her son was very heart breaking. However, the way this documentary was shot and put together was maddening. It literally felt like I was watching a PBS documentary in elementary school on one of these days where the teacher was out and the substitute didn't know how to teach us so she just showed us a boring documentary and made us take notes on it so we wouldn't fall asleep in the middle.

Well, I didn't have to take notes in To Whom It May Concern. So you bet your ass that I slept through it at various times. Looking back, I'm not sure why I didn't just walk out. I was bored to tears by the way the film was presented. But, for some reason, I stuck it out. I wish I didn't. I didn't gain anything from the experience.

Granted, the film did get more interesting during the section about her son but it was so poorly made, structured and packaged that, even then, it was hard to be interested.

While seeing all of these movies was a great experience, for me, my favorite part of the Savannah Film Festival was becoming better friends with my classmates.

One of the reasons that it has taken me so long to blog about the Savannah Film Festival is because I didn't really know how to put into words the experience that I went through. I think Justin's girlfriend Alana described it best. She said it was almost like we went through a study abroad program together. Not only did we spend every day of class together but, during the film festival, we spent every waking second of the day together. We experienced films together. Who we saw what film with defined what that movie meant to us. We hung out after screenings. We got quick lunches and dinners together. We stood in long lines together. We crashed after parties together.

It all created an unique experience that can't be duplicated. It was an intimacy that I don't think any of us planned on achieving but, once we did, I doubt any of us regretted it.

Some of my favorite memories include the conversations had by all of us between screenings, at lunch or in delirium towards the end of the night. Conversations that ranged from topics like movies, to sexual histories, to our backgrounds, etc. There wasn't really a buffer. Anything was up for grabs. Nothing was a taboo subject.

More than once, we would stumble down to the riverfront between screenings or after lunch. Here we would sit and talk about life. One day, we even took a tour of a boat anchored near by. You can see some pictures of this below.

One of my favorite nights of the festival involved the whole class trying to crash the after party with our professor Bear Brown. It was a pretty epic sight. Imagine about twenty of us following Bear down the street, ready to crash a party. Needless to say, it didn't work out too well. However, that was okay. Instead of getting bummed out, we went next door to Churchill's Pub, ate some bar food and had some drinks. Churchill's ended up putting us in our own private room and had us seated at a giant table. We were there for at least two hours. It was here that I realized how happy I was in Savannah.

You see, when I left Jackson, MS back in early September, I wasn't very happy. I wasn't sure if film school would work out. I wasn't sure if I was good enough. I wasn't sure I was going to make any friends. I wasn't sure if I could live on my own in another state. I didn't want to leave all my friends in Mississippi.

I didn't have a very optimistic outlook on many things anymore. I had just gotten screwed over in regards to Bags and Boards (which is a whole other story for a much later date) and no longer trusted many people. People that I thought were friends weren't really my friends. At that moment, I was so angry and frustrated, I wasn't even sure if I wanted to make films anymore. I just didn't feel much of anything. I felt like I was in limbo. I felt like I couldn't trust anyone and like I was losing touch with those still around me. Nothing felt right. Being on my old college campus felt wrong and awkward. Even seeing my real friends felt like a desperate measure to capture something that no longer existed.

And then I left. With no expectations. Without ever even visiting Savannah before. Without expecting to last a month.

And then, there I was at Churchill's that night. Just a week earlier, I had gotten to help make a movie that I had been wanting to make for two years. I had just met Liam Neeson earlier that night and gotten to see the great movie that was Blue Valentine. And now I was surrounded by my friends and everyone was happy just to be together, experiencing all of this together.

And in that one moment, I was pretty happy.

I guess that moment, for me, was the Savannah Film Festival for me. I guess it was probably the whole quarter for me. It was being with good, creative people and feeling like I belonged. Like people understood me.

As the week went on, things just got better and better. I made friends from the other class that I didn't really know that well before the festival like Michael Warshauer and Alex Harris. And had more random moments that I soon won't forget like running to the CVS Pharmacy with Kristin in the rain to get bandaids for her finger which she had just cut with her crappy umbrella and for my ankles that were still messed up from my crappy dress shoes.

But the cherry on the top after Churchill's was the last after party of the film festival. An afterparty that we had to crash no matter what.

I can remember us just walking in like we owned the place. I can remember one of the guys guarding the door asking for our passes. We just kept going. We had to make this party. And... well... it worked.

As we walked in, this was the first image I saw:

Yeah. Girls wearing little clothing, dancing in the back of a pick-up truck in the middle of a ballroom. Yeah. This was a Hollywood party all right.

Enjoy all the pictures we took at the party below.

This is my favorite picture. Adam and Jane. Artsy.

As I drove home from this party, I can remember thinking how exhausted I was. It was around 2 am. And I was hurting. But I was also so happy.

Savannah Film Festival, we had our ups and downs. But you're something I won't soon forget.