“Be Your Own Critic.”
That’s the cheeky theme of the 28th Starz Denver International Film Festival, which opens Thursday night at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House with Roger Donaldson’s “The World’s Fastest Indian.”
Anthony Hopkins stars as Kiwi codger Burt Munro, who in 1967 rode his crotch rocket Indian Scout motorcycle into the record books on Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats.
The festival graphic – a big blue hand floating in space, thumb arched in approval – reminds the star-bestowing, grade-giving, opposable-thumb-hoisting among us that “everyone is a critic.”
So fine, go ahead, take my gig. (But please, only from Nov. 10-20.)
Still, with nearly 200 films flickering over 11 days, “Be Your Own Festival Programmer” is more like it.
Veteran festivalgoers will tell you, there’s just no way to grab a film festival tiger by its tail when the beast is as beckoning and enormous as this event.
That’s not a complaint. That’s an opportunity.
Unlike the New York Film Festival, which screens a very creamy 20-plus movies, Starz goes for the gusto of variety.
Sure, you can judge the festival’s success by its more obvious ambitions – its red-carpet specials, its tributes, it prize contenders, its international sidebar. (This year focuses on Japan.)
In addition to “The World’s Fastest Indian,” the festival’s Big Night film features Heath Ledger as “Casanova.” Ledger makes a second, very different appearance on closing night in Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain.” Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal (“Jarhead”) play cowboys involved in a clandestine, wracked and startlingly moving lifelong relationship.
Yes, you can take the easy way out and commit yourself to only the big events, but then you risk missing the festival’s buried pleasures.
“Festing” is a talent, a practice.
A film biz friend explained her festival choices this way. She doesn’t see movies that will open within the next year. (Chances are if they have a distributor, they’ll be making their way to Denver soon enough.)
She loves shorts programs. Until recently, festivals were one of the few ways to see these morsels. She also makes a point of seeing what the hometown talent has crafted.
Festivals feed and tend an animal called the “festival film.” This species isn’t a dog, at least not always. It is a recognition that film festivals provide a space (and more important, a temporal atmosphere) in which to view movies that challenge the rhythms of most films we see. And not just those at the multiplex but even those that make it to art-house screens.
Not many art-house exhibitors have the bottom-line resources to show an 11-hour film. Indeed, how many of us have the stamina for one?
Yet, in its curatorial function, a film festival can and should rise to the challenge.
Dutch artist Erik van Loon’s installation, “A Victim’s Perspective” (about the Auschwitz Death March), will run continuously in the Daily Grind coffee house on the Auraria Campus (Nov. 12-13, and Nov. 19-20).
Massive festivals require festival-within-festival ingenuity.
We each have a chance to program an opening- and closing-night movie. These aren’t necessarily the bookends touted in the festival program. Instead it’s the first movie that rewards your faith and the last one that lodges itself like a splinter to be worried over for days.
Here are some festival-within-festival suggestions. They don’t take into account some of the more intriguing sidebar programming the event is doing this year like the One on One talks with David Schwimmer of “Duane Hopwood,” Petra Wright from “Laura Smiles,” distribution honcho Bob Berney, Robert Knott (“Swimmers”); the must-attend seminar “Why We Fight: From WWII to Iraq”; or the Hunter S. Thompson event for a journalist gonzo but definitely not forgotten.
But try festival-tamer approaches on for size:
THE PRIZE WATCH FEST (where second-guessing the juries could keep you busy for the entire festival).
There are three juried prizes given out at the festival. In the running for the emerging filmmaker award are Alexandra Brodsky’s “Bittersweet Place,” Nic Bettauer’s “Duck,” Georgiana Garcia Riedel’s “How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer Vacation,” Christopher Jaymes’ “In Memory of My Father,” Jason Ruscio’s “Laura Smiles,” Andrew Bujalski’s “Mutual Appreciation,” and Doug Sadler’s “Swimmers.”
Vying for the Maysles Brothers Award for best documentary are: Heather Lyn MacDonald’s “Been Rich All My Life,” Renaud Delourme’s “Earth From Above: The Film,” Canaan Brumley’s “Ears Open. Eyeballs, Click,” Roberta Grossman’s “Homeland: Four Portraits of Native Action,” Monika Borgmann’s “Massacre,” Peter Forgacs’ “El Perro Negro: Stories From the Spanish Civil War,” David Zeiger’s “Sir! No Sir!” There’s also the Krzysztof Kieslowski Award for best feature film.
THE TRANS TREND FESTIVAL (featuring plucky transvestites and a gutsy transsexual).
You can select from Neil Jordan’s “Breakfast on Pluto,” starring Cillian Murphy (“Red Eye”), as beautiful a lass as he is a lad, and Liam Neeson; Duncan Tucker’s “Transamerica,” starring “Desperate Housewife” Felicity Huffman as determined transsexual Bree; and “The World’s Fastest Indian,” in which the most interesting female character, isn’t – female that is.
THE SUPPORT LOCALLY GROWN PRODUCT FESTIVAL
Colorado Showcase I and II with short narratives and docs by Colorado-connected filmmakers include donnie l. betts’ “Music Is My Life, Politics My Mistress: The Story of Oscar Brown Jr.”; Chris Marino’s amusing “Combover: The Movie”; and Patty Butler Spiers and Richard Randall’s documentary on African-American religious music, “Soul of the Delta”
THE RANDY AND LOVING IT FESTIVAL.
You can make your own lusty judgment of “Casanova,” with Heath Ledger as the famed lover and Sienna Miller as his tamer; “Mrs. Henderson Presents,” starring Dame Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins; and “The Matador,” with Pierce Brosnan in a Bond-breaking performance as a hired assassin.
Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-820-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com.
