IFFB cont.

Sunday I yet again had to wake up relatively early and head to the Somerville Theater to volunteer. Today they decided that they had far too much food in the filmmakers lounge so they let us schlubs go down there and steal some bagels and BBQ on our breaks. It felt less exclusive and enchanting than I’d hoped. Sadly, though Hal Holbrook had come in an hour before (and his movie was still screening) he was off in an undisclosed location. Anyhow, they had me outside answering random questions, handing out schedules and free chips and doing crowd control most of the day. This was more enjoyable than tearing tickets and it meant I could walk around more and sort of do whatever.

When my shift was done I hit up The Lost Son of Havana, a doc about former Cuban-born Red Sox great Luis Tiant, who was playing in the US when the Bay of Pigs occurred and could never go back. The doc follows him on his first trip back in 2007, reuniting with old friends and family and focuses quite a bit on his relationship with his late father who was a Negro League player in the 30s and 40s. The film was quite good – I didn’t know much about Tiant going in but it was pretty impressive to see him pitch. He pitched from many different arm angles which anyone who knows anything about pitching mechanics will tell you is very hard to do.

When I got outside it had cooled down considerably from the mid-80s highs of the afternoon. Nonetheless I stuck around to see The Escapist, an Irish prison-break film starring Brian Cox and Joseph Fiennes. It was a well executed genre exercise with many of the regular prison film stock characters. However, the twist at the end and the bathos that it caused were less pleasing. Brian Cox was then on hand for Q and A wherein he predictably lamented the lack of distribution for independent film and talked about how there were 40 movie theaters in his small city in Scotland when he grew up. The crowd loved it. Also, Brian Cox doesn’t sound Scottish at all!

This evening I plan to see Art and Copy, a doc about advertising. I’m afraid I’ll be missing the film that closes out the festival on Tuesday starring Robin Williams (yuck) and written and directed by the man who made the Citizen Kane of alcoholic clown movies Bobcat Goldthwait.

Explore posts in the same categories: Uncategorized