Industry News :: L.A. Film Festival '08: The Doc Days of Summer

07/02/08 By Stephen Saito, ifc.com

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Last year, "Young@Heart" caused ripples when it sold to Fox Searchlight to become the first distribution deal to emerge from the L.A. Film Festival, so perhaps it shouldn't have come as a surprise that the festival put documentaries front and center this year, even in a city where there's no shortage of name actors that most other festivals would deploy to lure audiences. Instead, one of the more anticipated star attractions in Los Angeles was a talk with HBO documentary czar Sheila Nevins, who participated in a wide-ranging conversation with L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein about her career of mixing high class projects like the recent doc "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired" with, well, "Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal," which premiered at the festival hours after Nevins finished up. (The latest from "The Eyes of Tammy Faye" directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, which follows Fleiss's construction of "a stud farm" for women, actually went awry to the point that Nevins steps in to interview Fleiss.)

In fact, HBO was such a presence at the festival that when one audience member wanted to compliment "Trinidad," the elegant history of the sex change capital of the world in Colorado, the woman said, "It felt like a narrative film. It felt like an HBO film." And that might actually be selling it short. The directorial debut of Jay Hodges and PJ Raval, the latter of whom served as cinematographer on the recent Sundance winner "Trouble the Water," is a film that creeps up on you, not unlike the realization that the women who have formed an unlikely community in the heart of frontier country were actually at one time men. As the film recounts, the town became a haven for transgenders when Dr. Stanley Biber pioneered the sex change operation and, since his passing in 2006, one of his patients, Dr. Marci Bowers, took charge of the local hospital where the operations now actually pay for the rest of the hospital's services. Hodges and Raval arrive in town just in time to shoot the construction of Morning Glow, a recovery house that not only provides a dramatic arc for the story, but slyly demonstrates how post-ops are just like anyone else, in moments as simple as arguing over the proper trim for the doors of the house.

If "Trinidad" was about the struggle to fit in, "Dirty Hands: The Art and Crimes of David Choe" is about busting out, which is what I thought I wanted to do five minutes into director Harry Kim's frenzied biography. Between the shaky camera work and Choe leading a chorus of Pygmy children in the Congo chanting "titties and ass," there didn't seem to be much hope for either my eyes or American diplomacy to be spared in this portrait of a Korean-American artist who rose from tagging tunnels in L.A. to getting paid millions by the likes of Scion and Nike for his unique and vibrant paintings. Amazingly, Kim is there from the beginning of Choe's unusual career, catching the tagger as he stands on the roof of a car to create a series of whales on the side of the freeway in his early twenties, then capturing an older but not necessarily wiser Choe lamenting on how he's sold out by doing graffiti for corporate presentations. The thrill may have subsided for Choe, who in one scene punches his own nose repeatedly to get the proper shade of crimson, yet watching him work, illegally or not, is invigorating. The film's messy aesthetic seems all too true to the artist, who, if he didn't insist on defying categorization, would be classified in parts as self-destructive, misogynistic, cynical and yes, immensely talented.

That last description would also apply to Lee Atwater, whose only appetite for destruction was focused towards the Democratic Party during the 1980s and early 1990s. His rise to prominence is chronicled in "Boogieman: The Lee Atwater Story." The title refers to Atwater's condition after he was diagnosed with a brain tumor that led to his untimely death in 1991 right after he ascended to the top ranks of the Republican Party, but it could just as easily be called "Rove's Brain," a nod to the man Atwater mentored to be Bush's Brain. Director Stefan Forbes efficiently lays out the case for Atwater as the more influential political mind, from when the smooth talking southerner opts to be a campaign manager rather than a candidate in high school to his funeral, where former secretary of state James Baker admonishes him by saying he was "Machiavellian — in the best sense of the word." Interviews with Mary Matalin and Newsweek's Howard Fineman illuminate how Atwater plotted the path for George Bush Sr. to get into the White House, but it's those who Atwater left in his dust that naturally provide the most compelling material — from a still-befuddled Michael Dukakis, who Atwater blindsided with a series of racially charged campaign ads, to Reagan campaign director Ed Rollins, who was set up by Atwater to take the heat for an attack on then-vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro so he could run Bush's campaign four years later. To learn that Rollins would return to be at Atwater's deathbed as a sympathizer is one of the many surprises Forbes has up his sleeve in a compelling doc that has just enough spice to do the man, who apparently doused everything in hot sauce, proud.

Cutthroat competitors could also be found in "Paper or Plastic?" and "Pressure Cooker," the latter of which won a special jury award for its depiction of three inner city high school students in Philadelphia trying to earn scholarships to culinary academies. The former, however, was equally deserving and a bit more unexpected in its presentation of a contest between the best grocery baggers in the country, from Jacob Richardson, an awkward teen in Virginia, to Jon Sandell, a curmudgeonly 49-year-old in Minnesota, who emerge as geniuses at stuffing six-packs and eggs with military-like efficiency and speed. The other doc that took home a prize from the festival was "Loot," a love-it-or-hate-it proposition that won the $50,000 Target Documentary Award, but felt to me like a gorgeously shot excursion in search of a story. From the moment director Darius Marder drops the audience into the Philippines to watch Lance Larson tell the audience that he's plunged $100,000 into a hole in the ground in search of treasure, one gets the impression early and often that this would-be treasure hunter is no expert, though soon he sniffs out a potential goldmine of stolen valuables from the Holocaust based on a tip from a World War II veteran who swears he hid the goods in a house in Austria. (Once there, Larson attempts to speak like the locals by asking for "agua fria" in a restaurant.) The trouble is that "Loot"'s moments of levity undercut the film's subjects and the utter seriousness of what seems to be Marder's intent, particularly when the film culminates in an Ingmar Bergman-approved shot of an old man crying in a field. Marder manages to capture some provocative ideas about what should be treasured, as Lance attempts to bond with his son in the midst of his hunt for the Holocaust booty, but "Loot"'s lack of focus outside of its stunning camera work gives the film less cache than it should have.

The real find of the festival was also the film that had the most roots locally — "Largo," a facsimile of an evening at the Los Angeles restaurant/music club that plays host to such acts as Aimee Mann, Jon Brion, Patton Oswalt, Fiona Apple and Flight of the Conchords, all of whom are lovingly shot in black and white by Andrew van Baal and Mark Flanagan, who made the production easier, given that he owns the club. Since Largo recently changed its address in the city, the film acts as a bit of a time capsule for its more intimate and slightly dingier days when Zach Galifinakis could adjourn into the street after a joke combining the plight of children in Darfur and celebrity gift baskets falls on deaf ears or John C. Reilly felt comfortable sharing a "Boogie Nights" production story involving Burt Reynolds' insistence on an Irish accent for the porn director he played since his "lady friend" at the time suggested it. Yet beyond capturing a piece of history, the brilliance of "Largo" comes from how the film is framed with each musician and comedian getting just enough time to play a song or do a bit and leaving a little extra for the eccentricities of the club and its regulars to emerge naturally for what feels like the most exclusive one night only shows around. Dave "Gruber" Allen, best known to the larger world for his portrayal of the hippie guidance counselor on "Freaks and Geeks," parlayed his role as MC for Largo into warming up the audience for the film's premiere at the festival, where he leapt around the stage of the Majestic Crest Theater, going over the rules for the evening with such specifics as abandoning "the Trader Joe's zeitgeist and hackysacking in the aisles" to "class it up." No doubt it amused the many in the crowd filled with hip Angelenos, but it wasn't a necessary warning for what proved to be one of the classiest events of the whole festival.