April 18, 2008...4:19 pm
Opening night at NaFF
I left last afternoon for The 39th Nashville Film Festival. We arrived around 6PM and stood alongside the red carpet, waiting for William H. Macy to arrive. It was surprising how few people were waiting next to the carpet. My friend and I were able to weasel our way in and I ended up getting my Fargo DVD signed by Macy (yes, I thought ahead) and experience the excitement of meeting a movie star for the first time. It wasn’t as revelatory as I thought it would be, but it was by no means a huge disappointment. I’ll post pictures later because I forgot my card reader. The picture above is from last night, but was taken by one of the red carpet photographers.
Around 7PM we screened Macy’s new film, The Deal, about a down-and-out Hollywood producer named Charlie Burns who decides to try to breath life into his career by producing his nephew’s first screenplay: the story of former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. The catch is that he’s going to transform it into a rough-and-tumble action picture starring Bobby Mason (L.L. Cool J.) … a muscle-bound black man recently converted to Judaism. The concept is good enough and some of the jokes are really funny (the director attached to Benjamin Disraeli: Freedom Fighter decides that he wants to do the biggest action scene of the film in one take and the results and quite hilarious), but in the end it feels like something that would be destined for a straight-to-DVD release. Plus, Meg Ryan doesn’t seem to be aging well.
After that, I saw a little Norwegian film called The Art of Negative Thinking that concerned a paralyzed man named Geirr. Geirr has become extremely distanced from his wife Ingvlid … so much that Ingvlid decides to invite a positive-thinking support group over to the house for a therapy session. The group is made up of a leader who has no problems and four other people who do. Geirr is extremely hostile toward the group and some crazy things ensue. The film was billed as a comedy, but made its main mistake when it made us shamefully laugh about the characters that we were supposed to care about deeply later on in the film. Still, the film won me over with a last scene that made me want to experience the whole thing over again.
I’m off to a screening of Young@Heart.
Leave a Reply