No Laffing Matter

LARRY FESSENDEN X 3

{mosimage}If this year’s Los Angeles Film Festival has an unofficial poster boy, it’s the New York–based writer-director Larry Fessenden, who may not be a household name (even in houses with a Fangoria subscription), but who is nevertheless the most gifted American horror auteur to emerge since the g(l)ory days of John Carpenter and George Romero. Fessenden’s specialty lies in putting a highly contemporary and sociopolitical spin on the most immortal horror-fantasy myths: In No Telling (1991), he used the architecture of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to comment on animal testing and the morality of science; in the Independent Spirit Award–winning Habit (1997), vampirism functioned as a metaphor for the alienation of modern life in the big city; and in Wendigo (2001), the eponymous creature was a werewolflike Native American spirit, but the more destructive force was the clash between civilized man and his primal, animalistic nature. Much the same holds true for Fessenden’s latest, The Last Winter, in which the employees of a U.S. oil company embark on a top-secret Alaskan drilling project that will bring “energy independence” to the American people while wreaking irreparable havoc on the delicate environment of the Arctic tundra. Until, that is, some unseen, primordial force bubbles up from the ground along with the black gold, infecting everyone and everything with which it comes into contact. Could it be the spirit of the Wendigo come back to haunt again? Perhaps. But as usual in a Fessenden film, in The Last Winter mankind is its own worst enemy. Call it the first green horror picture — punctuated by ample doses of red. In between directing his own films and acting in others (recently, he could be seen sucker-punching Bill Murray in a memorable scene from Broken Flowers), Fessenden has amassed a prolific career as an indie-film producer, including River of Grass (the 1994 debut feature of Old Joy director Kelly Reichardt) and two new works that screen alongside The Last Winter in LAFF. In the first, writer-director Ilya Chaiken’s sensitively drawn Liberty Kid, two food-service workers at New York’s Liberty Island — fast-talking hustler Tico (Kareem Savinon) and wide-eyed dreamer Derrick (Al Thompson) — find the job opportunities scarce after they’re laid off in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Recruiters of both the military and criminal-life variety soon appear, as the story ventures into that familiar territory of urban youths waylaid by ghetto realities. The strong performances and Chaiken’s vivid NYC locations, however, lend the film unexpected resonance. Old Joy reconceived as a horror movie is the simplest way to describe Trigger Man, the stunning sophomore feature by 26-year-old writer-director Ti West, whose Fessenden-produced vampire-bat epic The Roost earned a brief local release back in 2005. Working from the purportedly true story of three buddies on a Delaware hunting trip attacked by an unseen sniper, West fashions an uncommonly naturalistic terror tale in which the emphasis on landscape and the gradual passage of time have less to do with cut-and-run splatter-cinema hallmarks like Last House on the Left and I Spit on Your Grave than with the work of experimental filmmakers like Michael Snow and Chantal Akerman. Rife with intentional echoes of the 9/11 attacks and unintentional ones of the Virginia Tech shootings, Trigger Man denies its audience conventional narrative satisfactions while creating an almost unbearable atmosphere of voyeurism and random violence, right up to a final scene that teases us with resolution only to devolve into yet another enigma. Who’s gunning whom in Trigger Man? The point is that it scarcely matters in a world where everyday life is a deadly contact sport.

The Last Winter screens Fri., June 22, at 9:30 p.m. at the Majestic Crest and Sun., June 24, at 2 p.m. at the Mann Festival;Liberty Kid screens Sat., June 23, at 7:45 p.m. at the Landmark Regent and Mon., June 25, at 7:30 p.m. at the Landmark.Trigger Man screens Mon., June 25, at 10 p.m. at the Landmark Regent and Tues., June 26, at 7:30 p.m. at the Landmark.

The Last Winter (IFC Films)

Straight Time (Warner Home Video)

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More About

• Billy Wilder
• Larry Fessenden
• Paul Mazursky
• Italian Cultural Institute
• Scott Foundas

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MOVIES & MORE

{mosimage}When the trailblazing “new Hollywood cinema” of the 1970s is nostalgically evoked, two names too infrequently mentioned in the hallowed company of Altman, Cassavetes, Rafelson, et al. are those of Paul Mazursky and Ulu Grosbard. This year, the Los Angeles Film Festival sets about correcting that oversight in a sidebar program titled “Movies & More,” the “more” referring to the fact that all films in the series will be preceded or followed by onstage conversations with their makers. Chances are you’ve at least heard of Mazursky, if not for his recurring appearances on Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Sopranos, then for the fact that he weathered the grim moviemaking decade of the 1980s more successfully than most of his more lionized contemporaries, emerging with two popular hits, Moscow on the Hudson (1984) and Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986). Mazursky’s heyday, though, was the ’70s, during which he presided over a series of indelible tragicomedies (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice [actually 1969], Blume in Love, An Unmarried Woman) about modern American marriage and the pursuit of something like happiness. In 1974, Mazursky took time out for a love story of a different sort, this one between an elderly widower (Art Carney, in his Oscar-winning role) and his trusty feline companion, who, upon being evicted from their New York apartment, take to the highways, destination unknown. The movie is called Harry and Tonto, and from an era rich with road movies (Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Vanishing Point), it is one of the most lyrical and picaresque, as man and beast encounter a succession of relatives and eccentric strangers (played by the likes of Ellen Burstyn, Geraldine Fitzgerald and Chief Dan George) who form a mosaic of hopeful and bottomed-out possibilities.

Now to the more pressing question: Ulu who? A Belgian-born former diamond cutter whose Broadway credits far outnumber his film ones, Grosbard was nevertheless responsible for one of the best and least-heralded American movies of the decade: 1978’s Straight Time. In probably his greatest, least mannered performance, Dustin Hoffman stars as a recently paroled petty thief who flirts briefly with the idea of living legit, only to quickly fall back into old habits. Adapted from the novel No Beast So Fierce by real-life ex-con Edward Bunker, Straight Time sees the criminal life less as a choice than as a predisposition, and it bristles with the terse street poetry and solemn philosophizing associated with the later films of Michael Mann (who worked uncredited on the script). Also on tap, an ultrarare revival of Jospeh Sargent’s The Man (1972), which was originally produced for television but released to theaters instead and returns to the big screen at what could hardly seem a more prescient moment: It stars James Earl Jones as the first black president of these United States.

The Man screens Fri., June 22, at 9:30 p.m. at the Billy Wilder Theater;Straight Time screens Sat., June 23, at 6:30 p.m. at the Billy Wilder Theater;Harry and Tonto screens Fri., June 29, at 8:30 p.m. at the Billy Wilder Theater.