While most of you were sweltering in Dallas this past weekend, I happened upon an opportunity to head up to an unseasonably sweltering Nantucket, that elbow of sand from which launched Melville’s not-so-merry band of rag-tag whale hunters, to take in the Nantucket Film Festival. In brief, the Nantucket Film Festival impresses more for its easy access to big name celebrities than its premieres and one-of-a-kind screening events. Name events included a comedy roundtable with Ben Stiller, Jim Carrey, and Chris Rock, hosted by Bill Hader; a screenwriters tribute of Nancy Meyers, hosted by Diane Keaton; and a screening of Ethel, a documentary about Ethel Kennedy by her daughter Rory Kennedy, with more Kennedys on view in Nantucket’s Dreamland theater than in a Hard Copy episode from the 1990s. For more on some of those events, check out my report on the festival over on Film Threat.
But I thought I’d share some thoughts about the festival in so far as it relates to Dallas. What the hell does Dallas have to do with Nantucket, you ask? Well, nothing, honestly. But stick with me:
— I talk about the program at length in my Film Threat piece, but I was able to catch a staged reading of Alexander Payne’s new movie, The Lost Cause, during the festival. The script is funny enough, and it contains familiar white dude lost in suburbia anxiety, but its characters felt thin and under rendered in the staged reading. That said, that was also my impression of The Descendants when I read the script for the film. And it took me two viewings of The Descendants to catch some of the more appealing subtleties of the films dramatic situation. Regardless, it was really interesting to hear the script of a sure-to-be made film by a landmark American director this early in the production cycle, and I’d love to see one of our local film festivals try to stage a similar program.
— Our local film festivals are really well organized. There’s often stuff written each year in out of town blogs about how friendly, film loving and well-managed our headlining festival, the Dallas IFF, is. And sure, by comparison, most of us have suffered the big old lines at SXSW. But even a small fest like Nantucket was saddled with a whole lot of standing in the sun, waiting around for a screening to start late. The weekend garnered new appreciation for just how well organized the Dallas fests generally are.
— It’s going to be hard for any of our film festivals to compete with the kind of celebrity fodder a little fest like Nantucket manages. Here are some ideas to net more A-Class talent in Dallas: a) move the festival out of Dallas to somewhere with beaches or mountains, and b) get some celebrities on the board. Ben Stiller’s on the board of Nantucket. (Guy’s family has lived there for decades, and, off the record, I may have shared a little boys’ room visit with ol’ Jerry Stiller. Wait, that was just on the record. Oh well.) Point being, Stiller just called up Carrey and Rock, and said, “Come hang out up on beautiful Nantucket and be funny with me,” and whala, there they were. In terms of celebrity scoreboarding, Dallas is always going to have to rely on other avenues: relationships with studios, the happenstance of stars promoting new projects, networks of lesser known stars, etc. But the lack of star power is not necessarily a bad thing; it actually helps focus more attention on the films.
— If I ever lived near the beach again (grew up on Long Island, y’all), I’m not sure if I could handle being a film critic. Because seriously, it was very, very hard to convince myself to sit in a movie theater when I had a bicycle, and pedaling for 10 minutes in any direction landed me on surf and sand. Maybe that’s just because I’m in beach withdrawal after living in Dallas for so long. But I’ve always said Dallas is a perfect kind of movie town if only because there is often, especially in the summer months, jack else to do around here save drinking ourselves to oblivion like some hot climate inversion of bored Siberians. And now that the Texas Theater has inserted their idiosyncratic programming into the mix of established art houses and megaplexes, I dare say we are a movie town. Let’s embrace that.
— Our audiences are really, really nice. Too nice, actually, if you ask me. In the screening of Ethel I attended (good movie, by the way, which will be broadcast on HBO this October), there was a post-film onstage Q&A with filmmaker Rory Kennedy and a former film curator from the Museum of Modern Art. Their conversation felt like a clenched teeth version of the shameless mugging Lee Cullum subjected us to in her appearance at the Nasher last month: the moderator interrupting, nervously filling in for Rory to compensate for weak questions. It was brutal, but I had some sympathy for the questioneer. After all, I’ve been there (I’ve interviewed Terry Allen on stage). But my sympathy was not shared by the two people sitting next to me in the theater, one of whom continued to mutter under her breath. “What the f*ck. Who the f*ck is this?” And then, not so much under her breath, “Shut up. Shut the f*ck. up” I felt for the moderator, but I wont say the grumbling audience member didn’t have a point. I will say that I love the raw, salty brutality of say-what’s-on-my-mind Yankees. The Dallas cultural scene has been criticized for being too nice, too polite. I say let’s keep importing Yankees, Dallas. Spice things up. [duck]
