BEFORE: Last night was my second full day working at the Tribeca Film Festival - I'm not counting the load-in day, which was really just baby-sitting the theater for five hours. No, I've had two full shifts there, and yesterday's was a full 12 hours, because it was a weekend day. I've got two more scheduled, one tomorrow and one on Father's Day, I don't mind because I'm not within driving distance from my father, and perhaps my co-workers are, so by all means, go and enjoy the day, I'll be at the theater working.
Yesterday's screenings included "The Knife", with Melissa Leo and indie-super producer Mark Duplass on the Q&A panel, "America's Burning", a documentary about the political schism in America, narrated by Michael Douglas, "It Was All a Dream", a documentary about the early days of hip-hop, and "Lake George", a crime drama with Carrie Coon, who also showed up for the Q&A panel after. Nothing I really wanted to see, but that's fine because I was too busy to sit and watch them anyway, I was busy managing the theater, counting heads and directing traffic.
There are a few films in the festival that I would be interested in seeing in the future, like "Brats", a doc about the 1980's Brat Pack movie stars, and "Casa Bonita, Mi Amor!" which is about the creators of "South Park" buying a Mexican restaurant in Colorado and restoring it to the legendary theme park status it had in an episode of their show. But those films aren't playing at the venue where I work, so I'll have to catch up with them down the road. They may not fit into my chain, anyway, unless I pick up some more doc ideas from the DocNYC festival in October.
Stephen Root carries over again from "Paint".
THE PLOT: After a journalist discovers his identity, a former Weather Underground activist goes on the run.
AFTER: Well, I feel really ripped off by this one, because it's a crime movie where the crime took place decades ago, and we never get to see it, not even in flashbacks, and it's an action movie where there's very little action - so it's more like an "inaction" movie.
There are two main characters, the reporter who exposes the identity of this 1970's activist who's been hiding in plain sight, but under a false name, in upstate New York for decades. Here the movie encounters the same problem faced by classic films like "All the President's Men" and "Spotlight", which is that the job of reporting is just not very cinematic. It involves interviewing people, making phone calls and looking through newspapers on microfiche at the library which is all so very... excuse me, I just dozed off for a bit just thinking about all that. It's just not visual, it's not exciting, and that leads to not being interesting. There were two many characters in this film to begin with, but when Albany reporter Ben Shepard finds an old photo in a newspaper of the young Osbornes and Sloans winning a fishing contest, I was thinking, "Who's Osborne? Who's Sloan? Who cares?"
The other lead character is Jim Grant - but that's not his real name, he's a lawyer, widower and single father but he USED to be an activist for the Weather Underground, a group that was so opposed to the Vietnam War and other U.S. policies that they carried out acts of terrorism in the U.S. by means of protest, and during a bank robbery of theirs a guard was killed, and it turns out there's no statute of limitations on murder, so the police and feds have at this point in been looking for the Weather Underground people since that event in 1980, so 31 years in hiding.
So when W.U. activist Sharon Solarz gets arrested in upstate New York, presumably after driving in from Canada to get cheap gas, Jim Grant leaves his daughter with a trusted friend and drives off before anyone can figure out that Sharon didn't call him to be her lawyer, she was calling him to warn him. This up-and-coming Albany reporter wonders why Jim Grant didn't take her case, and eventually puts the pieces together, revealing to the world that Jim Grant, lawyer, is really Nick Sloan, former activist/terrorist. Meanwhile, the police want to know why the reporter printed the story in the newspaper BEFORE cluing them in, which gave Sloan a heads-up. Rookie mistake, because if Shepard had called the police first, he could have had TWO headlines, one being "Weather Underground Activist Found" and "Weather Underground Activist Arrested". You could have sold twice as many newspapers, you dope.
At this point you'd think the movie would kick into higher gear, but it never really does, it just becomes "Robert Redford Drives Across America", which I probably would watch if it were a documentary of an actor on a scenic quest across the country, showing us his favorite haunts in each city. But it's not that at all, he's trying to visit and warn the other members of the activist group, who are also hiding from the law - but the big problem is that the feds are tracking Sloan, so really, all he's doing is telling the government where all the W.U. former members are hiding. That's pretty stupid if you think about it.
Nick leaves his daughter in New York City, with his brother, I think. Yes, he cares so much for his daughter that he leaves her behind, which doesn't make much sense, either, why not bring her along? She could learn a lot from driving across the country with her father, plus they just look like any normal father-daughter pair, and it's a little less suspicious than a guy checking into motels by himself, just saying. But from there it's on to Milwaukee, where an associate runs a lumber yard, then to a college where another former associate is now a history professor. He's looking for someone named Mimi, and the professor points him in the direction of Big Sur, California, where she "imports" marijuana by boat - wouldn't it be easier just to grow it in California?
Meanwhile, the reporter goes to Michigan to investigate the original bank robbery, and also speak with the detective who investigated it back in 1980, this is also very boring and just talky-talky, except he manages to flirt with that cop's daughter when the cop doesn't seem to want to help. The reporter somehow learns that Mimi is the person who can exonerate Nick Sloan, by proving he wasn't present at the bank robbery, they had just borrowed his car as a getaway vehicle or something. But he learns about a cabin on an Upper Peninsula island that's pretty close to Canada, and decides to check it out.
Also meanwhile, Nick Sloan doesn't find Mimi in Big Sur, but then figures out where she's going, and then heads BACK across the country to that same place in Michigan, where all the secrets are revealed. The "big reveal" is just another nothing-burger, and the reporter and the FBI and the guy who runs the grocery store all turn up in the same place, and Sloan is arrested, but it's all for show because again, he wasn't really there in the first place. But couldn't somebody have just pointed that out at the start, and made all these cross-country trips unnecessary? I mean, come on, we all have cell phones now, why couldn't everybody just CALL each other and work this out? I guess that would have been even less cinematic, though, but at least it would have been shorter. Because, you know, the FBI and the NSA are listening to all of our phone calls, so why aren't they solving more of the crimes that people are talking about on their phones?
Well, at least we all learned that the 1970's were a very different time, and that yesterday's activists were so much cooler than today's, all that people today know how to do is camp out in tents and form drum circles, and that's just not getting it done. And they're protesting what? The Israel-Gaza War? Jeez, at least protest for civil rights or gay rights or freedom to read any book you want or love who you want or have an abortion if you want. Something that will impact the lives of Americans right now, here at home, or else you might as well just go back to class.
Also starring Robert Redford (last seen in "Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind"), Shia LaBeouf (last seen in "Disturbia"), Julie Christie (last seen in "The Bookshop"), Susan Sarandon (last seen in "Jeff, Who Lives at Home"), Nick Nolte (last seen in "Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time"), Chris Cooper (last seen in "Irresistible"), Terrence Howard (last seen in "Term Life"), Stanley Tucci (last seen in "The Daytrippers"), Richard Jenkins (last seen in "Nightmare Alley"), Anna Kendrick (last seen in "Stowaway"), Brendan Gleeson (last seen in "Calvary"), Brit Marling (last seen in "Arbitrage"), Sam Elliott (last seen in "The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot"), Jackie Evancho, Matthew Kimbrough (last seen in "Biloxi Blues"), Lochlyn Munro (last seen in "A Guy Thing"), Hiro Kanagawa (last seen in "Needle in a Timestack"), Andrew Airlie (last seen in "Fear"), Lane Edwards (last seen in "The Shack"), Kenneth Miller (last seen in "Seal Team Six: The Raid on Osama bin Laden"), Susan Hogan (last seen in "Narrow Margin"), Gabrielle Rose (last seen in "Catch and Release"), David Milchard, Erin Simms, David James Lewis, Jon Johnson, Bethany Brown (last seen in "The Mountain Between Us"), Kelly-Ruth Mercier, Keegan Connor Tracy (last seen in "Smokin' Aces 2: Assassins' Ball"), Fred Henderson (ditto), Isaiah Adam, Gabriela Reynoso, Marsha Regis, John Shaw, John Sopher, Bernie Yao, Bruce Dawson (last seen in "Fifty Shades of Grey"), Andrea Brooks, Jackson Warris (last seen in "Two for the Money"), Dale Wolfe (last seen in "Big Eyes"), Clay St. Thomas (last seen in "Welcome to Marwen"), Barry Bowman, Dan Gerrity (last seen in "The Spirit"), Donna Lysell (last seen in "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus"), Jason Blue, G. Michael Gray, Ed Huber, Jennifer Bradley, Lexie Huber, Jessica Williams (last seen in "People Places Things")
RATING: 4 out of 10 gas station clerks
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