The Los Angeles Independent Film Festival Turns 5

THE LOS ANGELES INDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVAL enters its fifth year as a resolutely exciting, untidy and formidable work in progress. Although founder Robert Faust and programming director Thomas Ethan Harris have nimbly avoided turning it into Sundance redux, they are clearly still struggling to define their festival -- not only in relation to the older, entrenched indie festival, but in relation to that other behemoth, Hollywood. To that end, while the LAIFF is increasingly a must-see (and must-to-be-seen-at) event, it's less clear whether the films themselves are. For all its good vibes and great intentions, by its fourth year the festival had yet to consistently premiere the sort of breakout talent that makes Sundance and Toronto essential.

Related Links: The Filmmakers

Caveats notwithstanding, that doesn't mean that this weekend I won't be lined up with the rest of Los Angeles to check out what has unquestionably become one of the hottest games in town. There is a lot to look forward to, including 29 features and 35 short films, retrospective screenings, a music-video showcase and more than a dozen workshops. And it's with pleasure that I point out that the closing-night feature, The Big Brass Ring, was co-written by our own F.X. Feeney, who shares writing credit with the film's director, George Hickenlooper. All festival screenings and workshops will be held at the Directors Guild, Harmony Gold Preview House, Laemmle's Sunset 5 and the Laugh Factory. For tickets call (888) ETM-TIXS, or log onto www.etm.com.

--Manohla Dargis

The Films (partial list)

BY HAZEL-DAWN DUMPERT, JOHN PATTERSON and CHUCK WILSON

BELLYFRUIT

Bellyfruit comes on like an After-School Special about the terrors of teenage pregnancy: Three girls -- white, black, Latino -- wander into pregnancy through naiveté, adolescent foolishness or exploitation at the hands of feckless males. Much tribulation ensues. It should be dire to watch, but despite the film's overschematized structure and dutifully enforced warnings and options, the three interlocking stories have a freshness and vitality that take the film into another realm entirely. This is largely thanks to gritty performances by Kelly Vint, Tamara LeSeon Bass and Tonatzin Mondragon as the luckless trio, and to director and co-writer Kerri Lee Green, whose steady hand ensures that the potentially didactic material stays honest. (Screening with Debutante; Friday, April 16, 1:30 p.m., DGA 2; Saturday, April 17, 3 p.m., Harmony Gold) (JP)

 

SOMETIME IN AUGUST

Director Caio Ribeiro poses the question "Would you go out with yourself?" and comes up with -- well, not very many interesting answers. A brokenhearted woman hires a private detective (who's in fact a drunken poet) to follow her, just to find out how others regard her. And naturally they start falling for each other, or for each other's public selves. Sometime in August is a windily whimsical tragicomedy made by people with precious little sense of either tragedy or comedy, and belongs in that self-regarding genre of independent film that should be called "Movies With Doleful Cellos on the Soundtrack." Sure enough, the cellos yowl, and the viewer's heart plummets. (Screening with Sound Sleep; Friday, April 16, 4:05 p.m., DGA 2; Sunday, April 18, 6:45 p.m., DGA 2)(JP)

 

SNAPPED

Billy (Johnny Zander), a smalltime thief, steals a bag of cash from Bob the Hitman (Seymour Cassel), who pursues Billy to his East Hampton, New York, hometown. Unaware that he's being tracked, Billy hangs out and then hangs out some more with his old girlfriend Tara (Gaby Hoffman) and his new friend Shane (David Wheir), who has a crush on Tara. Of the three, only Shane has a backstory, a family tragedy that is hinted at but never fully explored by writer-director Jesse Feigelman. Well made and nicely acted, Snapped nevertheless gets too caught up in its own East Hampton languor to really get its hooks into an audience, and consequently slides right out of the mind as soon as the lights come up. This is a promising debut from a young director who will, hopefully, aim for a fuller, richer story the next time around. (Screening with Bubblepac; Friday, April 16, 6:30 p.m., DGA 2; Monday, April 19, 4 p.m., DGA 2)(CW)

 

COMING APART

Rip Torn plays Glassman, a married psychiatrist who's moved into a studio apartment in the building where his ex-lover (Viveca Lindfors) and her new man also live. With a hidden, static camera pointed almost exclusively at a mirror mounted above the sofa (allowing for a view of the entire room), Glassman films the sex, drugs and rock & roll with which he increasingly fills his life. Influenced a little by Bertolucci, a lot by Cassavetes and blatantly, almost absurdly, by his own life, writer-director Milton Moses Ginsberg painted a portrait of the sickly comedown that was the end of the '60s. This notorious 1969 rarity is everything The Ice Stormthought it was: uninhibited, monumentally self-absorbed, and thrillingly acted by Torn and, as Glassman's unstable patient/lover, a young, beautiful, dazzlingly lunatic Sally Kirkland. (Friday, April 16, 7:30 p.m., Harmony Gold) (H-DD)

 

SWEET UNDERGROUND

Another oddly uninvolving ride on the merry-go-round of subterranean Hollywood, featuring a number of marginal characters on the run from the straight life -- a singer, a middle-class hooker and two guys who take care of elderly junkies. The production values in Dorsay Alavi's Sweet Underground are excellent, given the apparent budgetary constraints (especially the cinematography, in both color and B&W for reasons I can't divine), and the actors all do what they can with the pseudo-world-weary script, which is all fighting, shooting up and energetic cussin'. Sleazy clubs, flophouses, mean streets thronging with human detritus . . . Sweet Underground treads an awfully familiar path but leaves no discernible boot prints of its own, no matter how much stomping goes on. (Screening with Seven Days Til Sunday; Friday, April 16, 9 p.m., DGA 2; Sunday, April 18, 9:30 p.m., DGA2) (JP)