film finales

so to round out our film festival experience I saw two more movies and another short on Thursday... let me first give my eight word review of the Little Foxes at the Asolo on Wednesday night- Awful Despicable People getting exactly what they deserve. LOL enough said about that stage full of monsters...

on to the two films for Thursday - liked the first one immensely - The Hero with Sam Elliott- lovely film- didn't over reach. Excellent performance by Sam Elliott...

the short was a cute animated film about a senior with dementia heading to the ocean for some time in the sun and a nice meal of fish and white wine - but who is followed by a lunatic who keeps calling her mom- a touching way to address the issue of aging parents... who are perhaps not always with us...

 the second film I saw was one I had been scheduled to see at the Chicago Film Fest but never made it to the actual screening- this time I wish I had missed it as well... trite and heavy handed, I guess it was supposed to be funny... and to me the humor never really got off the ground- it was just a sad story about a couple after the death of their son....

so I am now down to one more film- and I hope we end with an up note-

if it lives up to the billing it should be a good way to end the festival...  alas - it was not - 90+ minutes of loser son and screaming mimi mom did not funny make- the only reason to see this film is you get to see 90 minutes of the amazingly beautiful David Coussins - a man whose smile could melt a glacier OMG... gorgeous, but the movie - a waste of time... too much yelling and seriousl co-dependence issues.  User bitch girlfriend - with nasty friends only added to the guy's loser status to me... I can only hope this was not autobigraphical... with my final count being over two dozen shorts and more than ten full length films - I have seen some great movies and an occasional clunker- that is the way it is.... but we will be back next year for more!

and even more

Tuesday we headed over the the Film Fest for two more movies and two more shorts- and for those of you keeping count that is twenty-four short films and eight feature in four days. Heading to a total of 26 short and 11 feature by the end of the festival...

this is how a day of the schedule looks when trying to figure out what you can see and want to see- some things overlap and then you have to look for another showing and sometimes you pick something because it fits between two other things you want to see-  after a few years you work out a system for deciding and also learn the hard way that you need to take a day off during the ten days of the festival so you don't end up in "overload" and just ditch the later films. Generally they play twice but unfortunately for those who can only go a day or two the showings tend to be close - like consecutive days. This means that you do need to save energy for the second half of the festival because some things don't show at all until the second half of the week and on the second weekend...

Our first film last night was 95 and 6 to Go- a lovely film and it was preceded by a really cute short on the same subject - interviewing grandparents about life and their relationships--- 

The next feature started with the wrenching story of a survivor of the Boko Haram kidnapping of 276 school girls in Nigeria and her relationship with her missing best friend Hassana. The short film was in counter point to the feature The University which was so completely first world.  The connecting point was that the "students" at the Singularity University come together to specifically address the problems of the world on all levels - food, housing, water, environment, security, health care etc...

Their projects - with the mission to "positively impact a billion people within ten years" are varied and thoughtful.

so today is our day off - and I will be working on the posts from my Uzbekistan trip before we leave for the theater (live theater tonight) to see The Little Foxes at Asolo

so even when we aren't in the movie theater we are in the theater LOL-  I have films scheduled for two more days- two on Thursday and one on Saturday but we are getting close to the finish line here... just a super busy time of year as we also prepare to head north for the summer and in between TB and I are doing our Disappearing American Road Trip (DART) for 2017 so lots of things on our plate because while I am away Phil will be in St Louis visiting family.  Stay tune much more to follow....

even more films

So third day on the film fest brought two more good films - one of them a standout!

First, I saw 44 pages- a delightful documentary about the renown HIGHLIGHTS magazine for kids.

there was a short film with the 44 pages documentary called Les Cloys

It was interesting enough but I didn't have any emotional connection to the film- it was just an intellectual (just the facts ma'am) type of response...

And then we saw the fabulous MISSION CONTROL-

by the time we left the theater we had only a few choices for a dinner - so we headed to Selva Grill and had some good ceviche and empandas and fish (sea bass for me and paella for Phil)

home late and up early and tonight the same as we do two more films and dine at Columbia for the last time this "winter"...  so stay tuned for more fun at the film fest and more posts on the Uzbekistan trip too!

more films

so today I started with a group of fabulous shorts - dark comedies - which are always favorites of mine- and then into a terrific documentary on Jane Jacobs (who faced off Robert Moses and helped lead to his downfall as the kingpin of "urban renewal" boondoggles in NYC - then it was on to more shorts (a less satisfactory group that I basically only like one of the five) and finally a short before another feature length film about a bizarre murder in a mountain town in Galicia... but here they are-

This next one was my favorite film so far - an excellent examination of the subject matter and the history of the "urban renewal" debacle we suffered from in the 60s....

In this next group I LOVED Shy Guys, Our of Frame and Stuck... liked the Made in Spain movie - was less than enthusiastic about For Free (which was missing subtitles and therefore maybe lost something in translation) and Tond was just downright creepy-

This next group was from the women's film fest (a fest within the fest) and lived down to the old joke "Sorry ma'am this is a feminist bookstore - there is no humor section..." bummers pretty much across the board - in A Beautiful Day a dad kills his daughter's abusive husband. In Wig a woman discovers her husband's adultery and bastard child. In the Disappointment Tour (one of the better of the group) three generations of women don't get along.  In Flora a transvestite is mistreated by all her family and luckily runs into a guy in the men's room who is human enough to give her encouragement to stand in her own truth. I am not sure how The Bus Trip found its way to this group as it was a political statement about the settlements in the West Bank and historical anti-semitism (must have taken a wrong turn on the way to the Jewish Film Festival of two weeks ago LOL)

The final film for me - tonight - was the strange Santoalla- a murder mystery about a remote mountain town in Galicia where two families battle it out for absolutely nothing- the place is a ruin in the middle of nowhere and one wonders what possessed the Dutch couple who settled there to stay in the face of such antipathy.... you could easily mistake this for a story about Sicily....

tomorrow an easy day with only two films - both documentaries...

Tonight we had a late dinner at Blue Marlin - our Bradenton Beach favorite - it was a stop on the farewell tour of our time here for winter--- Phil heads to Chicago in ten days ---

so as always stay tuned for more fun and games - up next back to Uzbekistan for the spring festival...Navruz...

we're off...

so yes - we are off to the races - no really it is the ten days of the Sarasota Film Festival and yesterday we saw ten short films and two full length films- and have mixed reviews....

love this years Sea and Be Seen logo series- part shown above -

first we saw the ten short films - and loved more than half of them-

we really loved - RETURN TO SENDER, ILLEGAL MOVE, GRAVEYARD SHIFT and LAST SHOT

the GRAND ILLUSION was really fun...

We both loved the sweet RETURN TO SENDER-

we really hated PIGSKIN - horrid violent movie where a woman tears out her abdomen yuck! and on the scale of up from there- but still in the bottom ranks we agreed we couldn't really see the point of either THE MOST BEAUTIFUL LINE (about a crappy 70s building that is now a graffiti covered ruin) or KLASSE (a holocaust- outsider-immigrant story told in modern dance).  We put SWEET LOVE in the positive reviews because we liked the guy and the film had a number of good laughs.

next we saw GLORY which had a despicable woman lead who thought only of herself and a lovely male lead -playing a railroad lineman - a simple honest man driven crazy by the self centered woman who stole a watch his father had given him... he kept bunnies so of course I was rooting for him the whole movie but he was up against the system and it did not end satisfactorily (clearly not a Hollywood film LOL)

the final film we saw was SARASOTA HALF IN DREAM-  a tedious and pretentious film about the grittier side of SRQ- I liked about 1/3 of it - the vintage footage of tourism films for the area were a hoot... the ten minutes of filming a single abandoned factory was just plain boring regardless of the pedantic voice over telling the "deep thoughts" of the film makers.  This would not play well enough to make the showing at any other film fest but the local one - two thumbs down on this one...

then we had dinner at the Rosemary - another good meal there- 

I am off right now for four more films and will report back later!