Previous: Thursday at the festival

Friday, May 10, 2002
2:29pm
Running late, as I usually am when I have too much to do in too little time, I rush into the UA multiplex just in time for Shorts IV, a batch of films on the short-film track. The theater is absolutely packed -- it's almost unbelievable how popular the festival has been, and it's not even the weekend yet. Saturday is sure to be insane.

Even more amazing than the popularity of the festival is how extremely well run it has been. Everywhere you look, there are eager young people with badges and headsets, busily hurrying around to keep everything running on schedule, and succeeding. Most incredible of all, this world-class film festival -- with 62 films in competition, culled from more than 1300 submissions, plus numerous additional non-competing films on the slate -- was pulled together in only 120 days. I guess it was an easier thing to manage than it might have been for someone besides Robert DeNiro: A big name means big money and big clout for getting things done, and big friends to call on for help, too.

Like for a hilarious series of promo trailers for the festival, playing before most of the films I've seen (I seem to recall them running as TV ads, too). Ordinary New Yorkers-in-the-street describe their favorite movie -- the two I've seen are love letters to Gladiator and Jerry Maguire -- and then out steps a famous New York movie type to enact a famous scene from said movie. Ben Stiller as Russell Crowe. Danny DeVito as Tom Cruise. Funny stuff.

Shorts IV consists of five films about children. Perhaps this is a coincidence, a quirk of scheduling -- perhaps it's that, as director Dan Blank points out in the Q&A afterward, young filmmakers, as these five are, turn to what they know, and most of the experience of their lives thus far is childhood. Perhaps it's the universality of childhood that makes each of these films so affecting in their own ways, despite the fact that filmmakers themselves are from all around the world, from New York to Spain to Poland and beyond.

Luis Prieto's "Bamboleho" (www.factotum.es prodco) is a chase movie and a love story among the street kids of Barcelona. The film flies over the rooftops of the city -- where, Prieto tells us during the Q&A, the real Barcelona kids have begun to take refuge -- giving flight to the dreams and the memories of one boy. Prieto captures the surreal, exquisite junkyard beauty of the streets and imbues a genuine humanity into his characters.

Marcin Wrona's "Magnet Man" is a true story about the filmmaker's father -- a mesmerist, exorcist, and healer who can help everyone but himself -- told from the point of view of his young son (the filmmaker as a boy), who both adores and abhors his father. Wrona uses a visually energetic collage technique to create what he calls "tragicomic kitsch," one with a fantastical sense of Monty Python about it, like a missing Terry Gilliam project.

If I were pressed to make a choice, I'd pick Dan Blank's stunning "Shadowplay" (danmation.com) as the single best film I would see at the festival. Animated in clay and shot with a digital still camera, this is a child's-eye denial of the horrific: Shadows flashed onto the walls of Hiroshima as their owners burned away become the world of one boy reduced to seared shadow himself, and he flits from wall to wall, trying to find his way home. It's a heartrending sucker punch of a film, made all the more moving by its quietly soothing ending.

Teddy Sharkova's "Rocks and Chocolate" (www.rocksandchocolate.com) is a bittersweet tale of love amidst desperation. A father scrapes the bottom of his wallet to buy four eggs to feed himself and his young daughter, unaware of what she's been doing in order to buy a treat. The film's 10-year-old star gives an assured performance worthy of an actress three times her age.

Liat Dahan's "Climbing Miss Sophie" has a lovely timeless quality about it: Set in an ancient New York tenement apartment building, this story of the lost dreams of abandoned people could take place at practically any time in the last 60 years. A homeless, parentless boy earns a place under fat Miss Sophie's roof by pushing her up the five flights of stairs to her apartment every day, only coming to understand all that this symbiotic relationship truly offers both of them when it is suddenly threatened. A poignant film of hope among the hopeless.

4:34pm
I stroll back up Greenwich Street toward the Tribeca Film Center. At first, I think this warning tape has something to do with the setting up that's going on for the Tribeca Family Festival tomorrow -- workmen are erecting tents and stages, laying electrical wires, and so on. And I then look closer and realize that it's a clever promotion for the new crime thriller Insomnia -- starring Al Pacino, Hilary Swank, and Robin Williams -- which is getting a special prerelease screening at the festival. [my review]

4:47pm
I stop by the Media Lab with the intent of checking my email. Alas, the checking of email is all that occurs.

5:09pm
Snack time at the Hospitality Suite. I feel like a little kid, getting my afternoon milk and cookies. The cookies are very cool -- the one on the right is the festival's logo, depicted in icing.

I wish I could take a nap after my snack. All this running around and not sleeping enough has me exhausted.

6:22pm
As I walk down to Battery Park, at the tippy southern tip of Manhattan, for the festival's Rock and Comedy Concert, cosponsored by MTV, I pass right by Ground Zero. The dust that's still getting kicked up from the site has a weird quality to it -- I want to call it a choking dust, but that conjures images of opaque clouds of powder, and that's not the case at all. It does choke, but it feels like only a single grain has embedded itself in my throat, and it takes a lot of gagging and half a bottle of water to dislodge it. It's been a blustery day, and this crap has been blowing around. What kind of environmental and health nightmare are we going to be in for in 20 years?

A sanitation truck passes by, running up Trinity Place, and now I realize why the streets around the site are soaking wet: The city is washing them down every day. Still, nine months later.

7:13pm
I wander around the masses in Battery Park. Guys in business suits and girls in shorts and sandals and kids in strollers and dogs on leashes are all bopping around to the Counting Crows, who sound terrific. I can't get too near the stage, and the best views are to be found on the giant video monitors set up around the park. This won't do at all.

7:42pm
Now this is more like it. I discover the VIP area to one side of the stage. I'm not entirely sure that press is supposed to be allowed in here, but the kid guarding the entrance waves me through. Heh heh.

8:01pm
Heh heh indeed. If I were really intent on being a pain in the ass, I'd be leaping at the chance to talk to Kevin Spacey or Phillip Seymour Hoffman -- with whom I literally brushed elbows -- or the lead singer from Counting Crows. But the fact that I don't see any other press passes in here stops me: I don't want to get booted, and these people are only here to have a good time, not to get hassled by me. I have nothing incisive to say, anyway -- somehow, I doubt "Ohmigod, you're so cool!" would do.

8:15pm
I never thought I'd ever say this, but Jimmy Fallon made me laugh*. He did a routine involving celebs endorsing a troll doll that was an absolute riot.

*One-time-only offer. May not be repeated ever in the history of the universe.

8:27pm
Wyclef Jean gets the crowd riled up as the sun goes down with an NYC anthem-type song. Good thing all those fresh-faced lads and lasses in the American Express golf shirts handed out all those promotional AmEx/Tribeca Film Festival flashlights.

Oh, and everybody also liked that "Jump Around" song.

9:07pm
DeNiro comes out to introduce Robin Williams. Before he does that, though, he announces how stunned he is at the turnout for the concert and thanks everyone profusely for coming. Once again he seems genuinely overwhelmed at what he has wrought -- he's practically giddy, which is not an emotion readily ascribed to DeNiro's screen persona, and it might be difficult to imagine for anyone who's only ever seen him onscreen. This guy is either the biggest mush in the world or the greatest actor in the world. Oh, wait...

But seriously, folks: I've been a fan of DeNiro's since forever, but my respect and admiration for him now goes way beyond his work. I guess because I feel a kind of simpatico with him now, at least on this one issue. I think I felt so compelled to be in Tribeca this weekend and to absorb as much of the festival as possible for the same reason he obviously felt compelled to create it: It's this fixation on September 11 that so many New Yorkers feel, and I'm not sure that anyone outside New York can understand it. So even though "giddy" and "DeNiro" seem to mix as well as oil and water, I get him: The city is coming back. It never really went away -- it was just in retreat for a while.

9:34pm
If I was going to make my 10:15 screening, I had to leave the concert before David Bowie turned up. Bummer.

I walk up Broadway and stop at a McDonald's, looking to maximize the havoc I can wreak to my diet this weekend. I'm just plain hungry, and while this may be the city that never sleeps, parts of it do: This is just about the only eating establishment open in extreme Lower Manhattan at 9:30 in the evening.

The girl behind the counter sees the MTV press pass stuck to the back of the festival press pass hanging around my neck, and she gets all excited, thinking I work for the network. No, I explain, it's a press pass for the concert. What concert? she wants to know. And then: What festival? It absolutely floors me, even though this isn't a new phenomenon: This city is so huge that something as big as the Tribeca Film Festival -- the prefestival attendance estimates were about 50,000 for the weekend -- and a noisy rock concert a mile away could be swallowed whole by it. It is actually possible to not be an idiot and still have no idea what's going on in this town.

10:02pm
The sign in a store window across from City Hall Park announces that "In celebration of the Tribeca Film Festival," the store will be open on Saturday, which would not be the case on any old ordinary Saturday. The bizarre thing is, this is a hardware store. If there's a connection between socket wrenches and movies, I'm not seeing it. But this is a nice indication of how much the festival means to the area, and how excited about it people are.

10:13pm
The last time I saw Kieran Culkin on film, he must have been about 8 or so. So when I see this Culkinesque teenager arrive for the screening -- no red-carpet bull, he just walked in -- I take him for yet another Culkin spawn that we've yet to be introduced to. But I was wrong: It was Kieran, and he ain't a little kid anymore. In fact he turns in an amazing and mature performance in Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, a terrific film about the powerlessness and imagination of teenagers -- teenage boys in particular -- and the very serious shit their restlessness can get them into. [my review]

1:10am
I collapse into bed, and my last thought before I fall into unconsciousness is that I'm very glad I decided to drive down to Manhattan today. Cuz it's the gettin' home that's the worst: If I'd had to take the subway home, I'd still be somewhere underground instead of snug in my bed.

Next: Saturday at the festival

--MaryAnn Johanson

all photos by yours truly