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...

our final SFF day

so off we went to OUR final day for the Sarasota Film Festival-

here was what we saw on this day four (for us) -  we started with Crossing Bhutan because we loved Bhutan (Phil's #1 most loved destination) and the scenery was bound to be spectacular- but it turned out the film wasn't all that spectacular about Bhutan because it was mostly about the trekking thing - or rather the majority was - so we were kind of disappointed about that because there was so much they could have taught the world about Bhutan... but here is what it did do- it made Phil and I tear up about how lucky we are to have been there (now nine years ago) together and how incredible it is to look back on our time together and all we have seen and done since we met each other - coming up on twenty years ago! And also to look forward to the upcoming trips (more on that after we get settled back into a Chicago routine)

Then we went on to The Art of the Prank- along with its own short -

 read these closely- they are not real - they just look like they could be LOL-

The Prank Movie was unbelievably funny and worth seeking out - it has an important message (actually a number of them) buried in a coat of comedy and performance art that is of utmost importance in today's media overloaded world... seek this one out!  Added bonus Joe Skaggs was there with us in the theater and seemed truly thrilled by his reception.

then we went on to our final film together- along with a short-

We had been to the circus just this spring and LOVED pretty much all of it but were completely awed by Dolly Jacobs, so we found the Circus film really lovely - a loving portrait of those who have made lives and multiple generations of family a part of our country's circus heritage... The film is well done and the short was touching as well.  So that was our film festival experience this year - cut short by our trip north tomorrow- but still packed with a number of spectacularly well done films- and only one complete bomb...

now days later - my favorite film of the documentary group was "Nothing Left Unsaid" followed by "Breakfast at Ina's" and in the narrative category feature length - "Stevie D" and short a tie with the two "Rated" and "Piece of Cake" both being worthy with thought provoking humor in Rated and laugh out loud funny in Cake-

so that's a wrap! and you probably won't hear much from me over the next two weeks or so as we head north - pack and move our household into a storage facility and close on its sale... so check the blog later in the month for new posts!

off to more movies!

So day two for us at the film festival- I had two films scheduled and while both were good, they weren't exactly what I was expecting-

The Miss Sharon Jones movie I misinterpreted the above blurb as her whole journey- but really this was more her journey through the cancer treatment.  She surely is an inspirational woman but I kind of would have liked more about her personal history to be included in the film.  She is one powerful woman!

This film was an excellent review of Norman Lear's professional and creative life with a bit of family info interspersed- wow what an influence he was and is on the genre of sitcom... it made me want to go out and buy his book... Even This I Get to Experience... really interesting life - and now at 93 you see a man at peace with the way things have come out and who relishes the loving family nuclear and extended (as he put it) he has to support him.

so overall as a film I liked the Lear film better but both subjects were inspirational and interesting - tomorrow a ig day with four films - actually waaaaay more than four films because I have three feature films and one group of shorts and a couple of the films have shorts before them - so here is what it looks like- seven plus three plus two more shorts with Breakfast at Ina's for a total of 12 films of varying lengths in total...

so stay tuned for more fun and games tomorrow-