Film festival clearly off the critical list

Film festival clearly off the critical list

By CHRISTOPHER POTTER
NEWS ARTS WRITER

Let’s join hands and dance in a circle, movie buffs - the patient is definitely off the critical list.

And though a brief regimen of physical therapy may still be in order, the 26th annual edition of the Ann Arbor Film Festival turned out to be a decidedly fun event. Buoyed by an invigorating upturn in attendance and a spicy, if not too exotic, menu of celluloid goodies, this year’s festival (which concluded Sunday night) seemed at last to have made the cavernous confines of the Michigan Theater feel like home.

Perhaps it was the slightly reduced schedule format (no more 11 p.m. shows), or a perceptible turn toward a no-nonsense screening approach (i.e., more adherence to starting times, no mid-show intermission break). By the ironic act of consolidation rather than overextension, the festival seems to have adapted to the Michigan’s vast expanses for the first time since the event’s mixed-blessing move from its vastly smaller U-M campus confines nine years ago. For the first time in memory it was actually fun to camp out in the Michigan balcony (the only place for true believers to watch festivities), bolstered by upbeat attendance into more an act of of tribal fellowship than of lonely exhibitionism.

Still, one wishes the expanded crowd of loyalists had been more vociferous (as in days of yore) in voicing approval or disapproval of a given film. Heaven knows this year's winner's list seemed almost premeditatedly geared toward cheer/jeer controversy both in its citations and omissions. The evening's big winner, for example, Sabrina Schmid’s “Elephant Theatre” (the Tom Berman Award), seemed to score more on sentiment (who could resist several score elephants dancing and cavorting in hammy ecstasy?) than on its only fair-to-middling animation.

Other winners favored a mode of what one might call abstract realism, epitomized in Franco Marinai’s “Mock Gravity” - about a cerebral love affair between a painter and an actress - and Rafael Wang and David Allison’s "Geometry of Love,” an intriguing adaptation of John Cheever’s short story about a disintegrating marriage. While both films richly deserved their awards, one can only gape in amazement at the inclusion of fractured excursions like Tina Bastajian’s “Yellow Aria,” a tedious parody of Italian nihilist romance; Matthew Buckingham’s “At Once,” a nonentity about a boy and his pet aquarium fish; and Yuri Kageyama’s “A Back Alley Asian-American Love Story,” a quirky woman’s-angle tale of a one-night stand, its pithy commentary nearly obliterated by a raucous background score that seemed half yowling alley cat and half chainsaw.

Far better were Winner’s Night turns at overt surrealism and/or comedy, like Robert Withers’ “Turtle Dreams,” a post-apocalypse tale featuring giant tortoises wandering across a devastated Earth, and Tony Mortillaro’s sublime “Legends of Doo-Wop,” which imparted the deep dark secret that much of the best of Elvis, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly et al. was actually the product of a pair of unheralded stand-ins.

As with any winner-and-losers competition, one writhes over the absence Sunday night of certain unheralded gems, notably Pascal Aubier’s “L’Apparition,” a hilarious mock-visitation “miracle” with echoes of Di Sica’s “Miracle in Milan”; David Gulik’s “Airborn” (which did win a minor prize), a wholly endearing portrait of a pair of road-wandering derelicts; Marcy Page’s forbiddingly lush “Paradisia,” which mated a medieval castle, a nude heroine, an evil dragon, St. George and countless other mythical icons together in a miraculous burst of metamorphosing animation; and George Kuchar’s “Musical (Break Through),” a funny, purply perverse blend of German homoerotic punk with the blandness of American musicals.