Thursday, June 26, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Film: Good, bad and really ugly

The CineVegas gang unleashes a fearsome fusillade of awful flicks

By Anthony Allison

WANTED! Alive or Memorexed! Trevor Groth, a.k.a. "the Sundance kid," and members of his notorious CineVegas gang--for daylight robbery. Groth--whose outlaw band includes faithful sidekick Mikey "Hopalong" Plante, secretive mistress of disguise Andie "the Chameleon" Weinberger and wealthy land baron Danny "Hair-Trigger" Greenspun and his lovely spouse "Robbin'" Robin--was last seen riding west into the sunset, after unleashing a fearsome fusillade of lethal celluloid during a weeklong showdown at the Not-OK-Cinema Corral.

But seriously, filmpokes, the fifth CineVegas International Film Festival, which wound up Saturday at the Brenden Palms with the world premiere of a documentary about Hunter S. Thompson, was a decidedly mixed movie bag. From an inauspicious opening night offering (Octane) to an anticlimactic closing night appearance by the godfather of gonzo journalism himself, intrepid film buffs explored a program seemingly tailor-made to induce fear and loathing in Las Vegas festivalgoers.

To be fair, that's normal for film fest attendees, who are obliged to choose from bewildering lists of unfamiliar film titles, usually on the basis of brief, less-than-candid capsule descriptions. (Fest programmers are in the ticket-selling, not the frankness, business.)

But you also get the chance to rub shoulders with stars, view films that aren't available elsewhere and talk to filmmakers about their work. Thanks largely to the ongoing support of the Greenspuns, this year's CineVegas offered all that to its relatively small but appreciative audiences (the fest's biggest theater at the Brenden was a 325-seater, compared with 1,200 at its former home, the Paris).

In his second year as director of programming, longtime Sundance staffer Groth shrewdly included a number of surefire crowd-pleasers (The Magdalene Sisters, Whale Rider, which opens Friday) and new work by renowned masters (Chen Kaige's Together, Ken Loach's Sweet Sixteen). But the real festival meat, the new flicks yet to win distribution or critical plaudits, were more of a mixed bunch.

Easily the most anticipated film was Breakfast with Hunter, Wayne Ewing's profile of the author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Though one-sided, this hagiographic portrait of Thompson, the self-styled "elderly dope fiend living out in the wilderness," offers an intriguing glimpse into the gonzo god's "heavily fortified" compound near Aspen, Colo., and revealing comments by cartoonist Ralph Steadman, who illustrated Thompson's original November 1971 Rolling Stone articles, and historian David Brinkley, who explains how Thompson coined the phrase "fear and loathing" in response to JFK's assassination. There's also a fascinating glimpse of the creative disputes surrounding the film adaptation of the book, involving director Alex Cox, who was later replaced by Terry Gilliam, but not before he horrified the author with the suggestion that animation would be a good way to depict his revered description of mid-'60s San Francisco idealism: "We were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave... So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark--that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

That sacred passage from the Gospel According to St. Hunter, recited in the film by a gum-chewing Johnny Depp, was also lovingly quoted, chapter and verse, by Grace Slick during a pre-screening roundtable. The funny, forthright Jefferson Airplane alumna ("I don't want anybody to see my 63-year-old body--there's nothing about being old that's good") joined Dennis Hopper and essayist/UNLV art professor Dave Hickey in a stimulating discussion about "Artists, Icons and Legends."

To nobody's surprise, the day's biggest icon was a no-show, and filmmaker Ewing gamely stood in for Thompson while New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell vainly tried to keep his panelists on topic. "I thought an ikon was a Russian painting," quipped Hopper, who'd just received the fest's lifetime achievement award. Inevitably the session descended into a rambling nostalgia-fest by the quartet of aging boomers.

"It begs the question of where did our generation fail?" said Ewing. "We thought we'd won the battle. We thought we'd stopped the world."

That rhetorical question was echoed later at the screening. Thompson, 65, who staggered into the theater using two showgirls as crutches, received a spontaneous standing ovation from a capacity crowd. But when a 25-year-old disciple asked the gonzo guru, "What separates your generation from mine?" the answer was an incoherent babble about, "a large-scale abandonment of this dream that we can do this thing--we can win," punctuated by ear-splitting screams and heavy breathing into the microphone.

It was a fittingly depressing, fear-inducing end to a generally lackluster festival program that, having started badly with Octane, a schlocky piece of Luxembourg-shot Eurotrash, soon descended to its nadir--Scott Caan's directorial debut Dallas 362, a derivative, Tarantinoesque drama about L.A. lowlifes (Caan and Shawn Hatosy) plotting to rob a drug dealer. "I hope you like it, because I'd like to do this again," Caan told the audience, revealing the telltale insecurity of a man used to being perennially surrounded by sycophants. If this farrago ever gets released, Jeff Goldblum, who plays Caan's therapist with a glazed rictus of embarrassment, will be a shoo-in for the worst actor Razzie award.

Continuing a strange CineVegas tradition the film went on to win the critics' awards, (apparently RES magazine's Holly Willis and Mike Goodridge, from the trade journal Screen International, are certifiably insane). Audience members, meanwhile, bestowed their awards on This Girl's Life and Simeon Soffer's documentary about a Louisiana prison football program, 4th and Life.

One possible explanation for the inclusion of Caan's flick (nepotism, anyone?) emerged later with "Las Vegas," an NBC pilot starring daddy James Caan as the head of surveillance in a large resort (played incognito by Mandalay Bay). CineVegas' sneak preview wasn't an official premiere and network honchos will apparently go postal if details are published. But astute Mercury readers might reasonably surmise that a TV show set in Sin City and penned by the screenwriter of The Fast and the Furious would probably pack into 42 fast, furious minutes the whole glitzy gamut--from casino staff chasing cheats to clichéd urban myths about "whales" (a term for "high-roller" that no one in Vegas actually uses), neatly packaged with sex, glitz and neon.

The antithesis of this unreal view of Vegas was Queen of Diamonds, Nina Menkes' uncompromising take on alienation, partly shot at Bob Stupak's Vegas World in 1989, a film almost totally bereft of narrative and dialogue. Nearly half the 40-strong audience walked out and the crestfallen director reported that one disgruntled patron left the theater muttering that whoever was responsible "should be shot." He had a point: Why pay 10 bucks to watch a bored blackjack dealer (the director's sister Tinka Menkes) when the real thing was available outside for free? But magnifying the drudgery on the big screen crystallizes it. And like the similarly challenging work of Belgian avant-gardiste Chantal Akerman, Menkes' haunting images will doubtless linger in (the few remaining) viewers' minds years after more mundane movies have faded away.

Other noteworthy offerings included Break a Leg, writer-actor John Cassini's heartfelt Tinseltown parody; Daddy Cool, Pittsburgh filmmaker Brady Lewis' quirky parody of mad scientist/werewolf movies; The Fittest, Jeff and Josh Crook's witty take on office politics and the sexual battlefield; Klepto, Thomas Trail's engaging romance about a kleptomaniac and a besotted security guard; Private Property, Elizabeth Dimon's mystery set in a Cape Cod lighthouse, that's vaguely reminiscent of Roman Polanski's surreal 1966 black comedy Cul-de-Sac; Shade, real-life "card mechanic" Damian Nieman's drama, starring Sylvester Stallone as an aging card shark, that's worth seeing for the opening credit sequence alone (you'll never play poker again); Stuey, Tony Vidmer's sad biopic of Stu "The Kid" Ungar, with sensitive work by Michael Imperioli as the doomed gin-rummy prodigy who became the youngest winner of Binion's World Series of Poker; and This Girl's Life, video director Ash's odd mix of porn (with newcomer Juliette Marquis), Parkinson's disease (James Woods, as her father) and gratuitous nudity (female and, for once, male too). Best of all was Sam and Joe, Jason Ruscio's well-written spousal-abuse drama with a great cast (Petra Wright, Michael T. Ringer, Jeffrey Donovan and youngster Eugene Blakely), but that was rendered unwatchable by jerky, handheld camerawork and distracting pans (rather than cutting) between characters.

But then came two documentary film highlights (see sidebar) that screened to regrettably small crowds (between 40 and 50 dogged fans). They both epitomized why festivals like this are so important, and spotlighted CineVegas' woeful lack of effective local marketing.

Fest organizers might usefully learn from co-founder Josh Abbey, whose simple but effective technique with the Las Vegas Celebration of Jewish Film is to get a community group to market one movie to its membership. Got a docudrama about geriatrics (Assisted Living)? Bombard every seniors groups with fliers. Got a teen-oriented extreme sports doc (Keep Your Eyes Open)? Organize ticket giveaways at skateparks and BMX bike stores. They also might consider reducing the price of passes. $50 for a student pass is reasonable, but $500 for an all-access pass is daylight robbery. (Even armed with his press pass, graciously provided free, the Mercury's crazed film hound managed to attend only 22 screenings, or $220 worth of flicks at the regular price of $10 each).

Yet with some inventive marketing and radical thinking, CineVegas easily could become the summer Sundance that one cockeyed optimist predicted--a film feast that will truly involve, and excite, the entire community.