Some of those who spent their Mother's Day weekend at the 11th annual Maryland Film Festival capped off the festivities at a Sunday evening party across the street from the Charles Theatre. We asked a few to choose the festival's highlight:

Mark R. Smith, freelance writer: I loved the Animated Shorts program. I really liked the one that used the lyrics to the Rolling Stones song (Dandelion Will Make You Wise). The Bill Plympton short, done with the line drawings -- those were terrific. The one based on a music video, by a group called Parson Brown, from the Netherlands someplace, that was really cool, too. I made it here for all four nights for the first time this year. That was pretty cool, too.

Joe Swanberg, director, Alexander the Last: We went to the (Orioles) baseball game with two British filmmakers whom we just met today. Those are always my best moments. I made new friends and had cool experiences with two people from another country. That's why I am so excited to come to festivals after so many of them, and so many movies. I've had so many experiences like that. This festival, every year I meet people who I end-up collaborating with and working with.

Kris Swanberg, director, It was great, but I was ready to come home: I'm just so impressed with how accomodating this festival is, and how great the staff has been. They flew us out and put us up. We get to see great movies and hang out, they have all these wonderful parties. It's just been really, really a nice, small, friendly festival.

Photo: Husband-and-wife filmmakers Kris and Joe Swanberg raise a toast to MFF 2009. Photo by Chris Kaltenbach

Continue reading "MFF 2009: Parting shots" »

Posted by Chris Kaltenbach at 6:29 AM in Goings On | Permalink | Comments (0)
                       

As a guest host at the MFF, Dischord Records' co-owner and operator Ian MacKaye, the veteran of bands including Minor Threat and Fugazi who is currently making music in the Evens, was going to choose a brutal brutal Soviet antiwar film. Then he thought, "How predictable? The punk guy chooses a film with people shooting and cutting each other in half!" Figuring the festival audience, like him, had had enough of war, he tried to find something that would celebrate "humanity, creativity, life!"

So he took a chance on a piece he hadn't seen but desperately wanted to -- a short 1992 French TV documentary called "Nina Simone: La Legende."

Punker MacKaye and jazz-R&B-pop-gospel "Priestess of Soul" Simone? Where does that connection come from? Well, fifteen years ago MacKaye heard a recording of Simone singing "The King of Love is Dead" and considered it "one of the single most heavy pieces of music I'd ever heard." Both in his opening remarks and in his comments afterward, MacKaye made clear he connected to her intensity, purity, and most of all her singularity as an artist.

How you reacted to the film itself depended on whether you were steeped enough in Simone's story, mythology and music to fill in the blanks of a defiantly arty 54-minute piece that concentrated on her black-activist politics, her volatility and her thwarted ambition to be a classical pianist. Even MacKaye said he was "still putting together in my head" a final section labeled "The Dream": Simone at the piano playing Tchaikovsky with a chamber group.

But there were enough sublime performance clips, including Simone imbuing "Little Liza Jane" with a whole new rhythm, to enlist first-time Simone fans in the quest to make her best art available. And MacKaye's own humor, unpredictability, originality and passion helped make the Saturday screening at the Charles an event to savor.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 7:44 AM in Goings On | Permalink | Comments (0)
                       

John Waters will always be king of the annual Maryland Film Festival: His Friday-night pick, a tradition since MFF1 in 1999, always brings in the crowds, frequently for a movie no one's ever heard of. This year's Love Songs was no exception.

But this year found Waters happily sharing the spotlight with Bobcat Goldthwait, whose World's Greatest Dad, starring Robin Williams as a put-upon father who exploits his son's infamy in some unusual ways, had the crowd roaring with laughter (some of it uncomfortable laughter, but that's OK) Saturday night.

The movie, which is expected to go into wide release later this year (probably in the fall), was subversive in the proud Waters tradition, wringing laughs out of some pretty non-traditional sources (like suicide and Internet porn).

Atfer the screening, Waters rose to his feet to tell Goldthwait, "This is your best movie, and you're going to have a very big hit."

Goldthwait, who could be seen in the audience at several movies during his three-day festival stay, seemed genuinely touched by both Waters' approval and the audience's warm reception. He told the Charles audience that he broke into tears at their reaction, and he wasn't kidding.

"I love it when people enjoy this movie," he said afterward, "especially when they laugh in places where I want them to laugh."

Photo of John Waters and Bobcat Goldthwait by Chris Kaltenbach

Posted by Chris Kaltenbach at 6:09 AM in Goings On | Permalink | Comments (0)
                       

Nothing like confidence in your product: This year's award for the most optimistic filmmakers goes to the people responsible for Lightning Salad Moving Picture, who put a sign in the Charles Theatre lobby Friday urging people not to start pitching tents, to be sure they'd get into the movie's 6:30 p.m. screening Saturday, before midnight.

Sadly, not a single tent seems to have been pitched.

But festival Membership Manager Lucia Treasure, who's seen the movie, said it's awesome. Which is all the praise any filmmaker should need.

Posted by Chris Kaltenbach at 3:20 PM in Goings On | Permalink | Comments (2)
                       

Rock slides, rattlesnakes, burning embers...this year's 3D classic, Roy Ward Baker's Inferno, had everything necessary to thrill an extra-dimensional audience's heart.

Most of the 1953 movie consists of Robert Ryan trying to crawl his way out of the desert with a broken leg. See, he's been left behind by his two-timing wife (Rhonda Fleming) and her scheming boy toy (William Lundigan).

The desert landscapes proved surprisingly receptive to 3D filmmaking, what with all the solitary cactus and rocks to provide perspective. And even though the traditional 3D trick of throwing things at the audience didn't show up until the climactic fight scene, the experience was all good.

Kudos to festival major domo Jed Dietz, who pulled every available string to get 20th Century Fox to lend the festival its only extant print, and to Charles projectionist John Standiford for making sure the movie shone in all its Technicolor glory. In fact, the only complaint (and make no mistake, the print was gorgeous) is that Fleming's red hair didn't jump off the screen the way I thought it would. Still, that's a small complaint: she spent plenty of the movie smoldering in her classic 1950's way.

Now, the search begins for next year's 3D prize.

Any thoughts on what movie you'd like to see in that extra dimension at MFF 2010?

Posted by Chris Kaltenbach at 3:02 PM in Goings On, Instant Analysis | Permalink | Comments (0)
                       

Print may be dying, but not at John Waters’ house. He says he gets six newspapers every day — The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Post, The New York Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today.

“And I’d get The New York Daily News if they every figured out how to deliver it. I hate reading on-line, especially after I’ve been writing at my computer. And since I live alone I’m reading at all times. I’m always reading when I eat.”

He still savors the tabloid charge of a New York Post headline such as the one that appeared after the demise of Ike Turner: “Ike Beat Tina to Death.” And he loves reading the editorials of people “I don’t agree with.” He enjoys the crime reporting in The Sun and feels the destiny of most newspapers is to become ferociously local. (“It’s really harder for Time or Newsweek: What do they have to become, The New Republic?”)

But he says you can’t resist the new digital age. “It’s like the coming of talkies. You have to re-invent yourself.”

Posted by Michael Sragow at 10:00 AM in Goings On | Permalink | Comments (0)
                       

John Waters lacks the funding to film his most recent script Fruitcake, a Christmas family comedy about meat thieves — those people who rap on your door or accost you at a bar and yell, “You want some meat?” and deliver, say, some blatantly stolen ground beef. He says the market has dried up for mid-range independent movies, even one that could be brought in for $7 million, and he refuses to lower the price tag by recreating Baltimore in another state that, unlike Maryland, boasts substantial moviemaking-incentive programs.

But he has kept busy.

He’s done a story draft for Hairspray 2, and though he’s sworn to secrecy, he will say that it takes place “when the Sixties really hit.”

He’s recently given five lectures in eight days in three countries (Sweden, Denmark and America), presented an art show called Rear Projection in New York and Los Angeles (where it’s still up at the Larry Gogosian Gallery), and completed a book called Role Models for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It is, he says, “My memoirs told through the people who inspired me.” The list includes Johnny Mathis, Tennessee Williams, Charles Manson family member Leslie Van Houten (Waters has long championed her parole), and the daughter of Zorro, the lesbian stripper.

Waters may be best known as a filmmaker and movie-TV personality, but he really has become a man of letters and a man of the arts, high, low and middle. He even says that by far the most money he ever made came not from any of his own movies but from the Broadway musical of Hairspray.

Posted by Michael Sragow at 8:52 AM in Goings On | Permalink | Comments (0)
                       

No one – not even Bobcat Goldthwait – does film-festival intros better than John Waters (left, preparing his remarks). Each year, when he hosts a film of his own choosing for the Maryland Film Festival, he gets viewers on his side with his wit: he makes them want to see film as he does. That worked even for this year’s wan, polysexual musical dramedy Love Songs, done in French cinema’s favorite flavor: pastiche-io.

Earlier he’d asked me, “How many other bisexual musicals do you know? Especially ones in which people sing about a brain tumor, saliva, and a human sandwich? ” He did a variation on that for the SRO crowd at the Charles, then framed Love Songs for the audience as an ode to everything he adores about French movies and French culture — and not just because “The mother of a girl asks what happens in a threesome.”

He also savors every minute of it because “everyone reads in bed. And everyone gets cold drafts – I’ve never gotten a cold draft.” Also, everybody smokes so hard that American authorities would have wanted to rate it “Triple XXX.” Waters likes the film’s pastiche quality, especially the way people abruptly break into song in the manner of a lesser Jacques Demy film (it’s more Young Girls of Rochefort than Umbrellas of Cherbourg). Whenever anyone sings in this movie, he said, “I’m shocked and then I’m happy.”

And though gay groups are always fighting the charge that gay filmmakers make “gay recruiting films,” with a smile Waters called Love Songs “a great gay recruiting film.”

He confessed he hates romantic comedies except for Billy Wilder’s Kiss Me, Stupid. Waters feels “kiss me, stupid” as a command is one of the best romantic closers in movie history. But right up there for Waters is Love Songs’ “Love me less, but love me for a long time.” He needn’t worry about the affections of his Baltimore fans: he had them at “human sandwich” or even “brain tumor.”

Photo by Chris Kaltenbach

Posted by Michael Sragow at 1:46 AM in Goings On | Permalink | Comments (0)
                       

Here's one measure of success: Used to be that opening morning of the festival was something of a desolate time; I remember once, when the festival used to start at 10, I was one of only about six people at the opening show.

I don't know whether it's because the opening has been moved back 90 minutes (to 11:30 a.m.), or because of the offering (an animated shorts program), but by 11:20, there were already more than 100 people in line, both inside and outside the Charles.

All of which suggests what veteran festivalgoers already know: the Charles Theatre and its environs are the place to be this weekend.

Me, I'll be checking out D.C. native Zach Clark's Modern Love Is Automatic, in which the director says he "wanted to take the exact same moral stance on being a dominatrix as it would on making a sandwich." Hmmm...

The fun starts at noon. More later ...

Photo: Movie lovers line-up for the first movies at the Maryland Film Festival's opening day. Photo by Chris Kaltenbach 

Posted by Chris Kaltenbach at 11:33 AM in Goings On | Permalink | Comments (3)
                       

With Bobcat Goldthwait serving as a puckish master of ceremonies, the 2009 Maryland Film Festival got off to an inventive, crowd-pleasing start at MICA's Brown Center auditorium Thursday night. The eight short films he introduced, made by filmmakers all trying to stretch some filmic boundary or another, got the audience laughing (even the serious ones contained moments of obvious whimsy) and me, at least, thinking.

Who knew there would be so much to learn, even for an old festival warhorse like myself?

1) Goldthwait is multi-dimensional. "Besides making movies with tasteful amounts of beastiality," he said from the stage, referring to his own MFF 2007 entry, the subversively endearing Sleeping Dogs Lie, "I make shorts." His 17-minute Goldthwait Home Movies was hilarious.

Continue reading "5 things I learned at the Opening Night Shorts Program" »

Posted by Chris Kaltenbach at 7:35 AM in Goings On | Permalink | Comments (2)
                       

The Maryland Film Festival hits Station North Arts District this weekend, and the Baltimore Sun will be covering it from first image to last. Whether it's suggesting each day's surest bets, talking with some of the dozens of filmmakers who will be coming to Baltimore from all over the world, noting the unexpected surprises (and letting you know if it will be showing a second time) or simply reporting on what's going on where, The Sun's movie team of critic Michael Sragow and reporter Chris Kaltenbach will be blogging throughout the festival.

Check back early and often, so as not to miss a single seen scene from Baltimore's annual celebration of all things cinematic.

Posted by baltimoresun.com at 9:34 AM in Goings On | Permalink | Comments (0)