Life in Flight should prove to any aspiring screenwriter that you don't necessarily have to have an original story in order to get a screenplay made. In the film, which debuted at Tribeca on Sunday, first-time writer / director Tracey Hecht tells the tale of a man who's supposedly living the good life, but it's not the one he wants. And it takes meeting a young, vivacious woman for him to fully realize it.

Heard that story before? Sure you have, probably dozens of times. You've seen it in goofy romantic comedies from The Seven-Year Itch to Joe Versus the Volcano as well as "indie" dramas like Garden State. But good writing and acting always trumps originality of story, and Life in Flight has both, though there's still room for improvement.

Give Joshua Seftel some credit; he didn't pull any punches on War, Inc. In his first feature film, written by star/producer John Cusack, Jeremy Pisker, and Mark Leyner, Seftel attempts to make a scathing commentary on the War on Terror, the privatization of the military, the commercialization of societies all over the world, and other shenanigans. In a former life, Seftel was a former network news producer, and became known around Hollywood circles for directing documentaries like Breaking the Mold: The Kee Malesky Story.

He was nice enough to speak to me about the experience from a very blue room at the Tribeca Film Festival press office. Text and video are after the jump.

Photographers, journalists and casual television watchers alike went into frenzies late last year when the Sex and the City team reunited all across New York for the feature-length version of the hit series. Whether or not you're a fan, it's hard to deny that Sex and the City qualifies as one of those event films, if only because it puts a definitive cap on the six seasons when the show became a phenomenon. It's automatically a quintessential New York film, belonging to a separate class from any number of movies that come out each year incidentally featuring New York that could take place anywhere else.

For that reason, you'd imagine that the movie would celebrate the town of its title with a glitzy New York premiere at some big media affair, of which there is never a shortage. Oddly enough, the Los Angeles Times is reporting that Sex and the City might premiere in London, of all places. London? Really? When Spider-Man 3 opened last year, the Tribeca Film Festival dedicated an entire week to the webslinger with large scale events throughout New York's five boroughs. Considering all that Sex and the City owes to New York -- its entire legacy, really -- the idea of fleeing to Europe first sounds a little confused. Then again, I never understood the appeal of this show anyway, but that's just me. Right?

One festival closes, another opens. As we begin to ramp up coverage of this year's 60th Cannes we're also putting to bed the Tribeca fest, which wrapped up about a week and a half ago. Overall, it was a fun but somewhat odd year for the festival with awards and recognition unexpectedly going to new filmmakers like Fred Durst and some of the shorts programs like Express Stops Only getting as much ink and praise as the major features. It was a year noticeably short on star vanity projects, unless you count Rosario Dawson's Descent and two Sarah Michelle Gellar movies, and it was also a good year for documentaries, with Jerabek, Brando and The Workshop all being talked about throughout the festival. If you were asleep at the wheel for the past few weeks, here now is a recap of the Tribeca reviews, interviews and events that myself and Erik were able to bring you coverage of this year.


REVIEWS

A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory (Hot Docs)
Brando
The Cake Eaters
Charlie Bartlett
Chops
Descent
Express Stops Only
Eye of the Dolphin
Fraulein
Gardener of Eden
The Grand
Impy's Island
The Killing of John Lennon
Live!
Mood Enhancer
Napoleon and Me
The Poughkeepsie Tapes
Purple Violets
Rise: Blood Hunter
Taxidermia (Philly FF)
This is England
Watching the Detectives
West 32nd
The Workshop

Depending on your point of view, The Workshop, a documentary that played at this year's Tribeca fest, is either comedy or horror. A liberal version of Jesus Camp, the film introduces us to a radical California cult where sexual libertines, alien abductee-types and other weirdos aggregate to listen to the ludicrous preachings of a guru called Paul Lowe, who, with his British accent, toothpick limbs and long white hair, looks like the last surviving roadie for Humble Pie. His loosey-goosey seminars, conducted at a woodsy retreat somewhere off the path, are pure credit card spiritualism, with tubby boomers and glassy-eyed seekers of enlightenment all sitting enraptured while Lowe dispenses fortune cookie-deep aphorisms like "nothing ever happens in the future -- it's all now." Those who attend are also encouraged to get nude at will and offer up their partners for sex swapping, which is obviously the major draw for both them and us the viewers. In fact, you could argue that The Workshop is little more than an episode of HBO's Real Sex expanded to feature length.

The film was directed and is narrated by Jamie Morgan, whose objectivity is questionable at best, since he was actually a devotee of Lowe. Perhaps the most significant aspect of the cult -- the extent to which it is a haven not only for sexual exhibitionists but also for UFO crackpots -- is an aspect which Morgan does touch on in the film, but in a very quick, perfunctory, 'nothing to see here' kind of way that makes you wonder if alien hoodoo isn't in fact a primary feature of Lowe's teachings, and is being brushed under the rug. Most of the running time is devoted to exploring and explaining the sexual underpinnings of the cult -- how getting naked and screwing everyone you meet can make you a better person and more in touch with the universe. Those who follow Lowe's line are told throughout the film, for example, that if they get naked they will rid themselves of shame, and if they let someone else sleep with their significant other, they will rid themselves of jealousy and possessiveness and so on.

From director Andrea Staka comes Fraulein, a sometimes intriguing, sometimes tepid drama about three generations of Southern European refugees who plant a flag in Switzerland. The most recent arrival, Ana (Marija Skaricic) has no plan beyond living her life out of a bus station locker and making enough money to eat and stay afloat. A generation above her is Ruza (Mirjana Karanovic), a 40-something who runs the cafe where Ana comes looking for work. Like Ana, Ruza fled the bloody Balkans and has no intention of ever going back, but she's had years to adapt to her homeland and to gain some measure of security. She's also affected a German no-nonsense attitude that causes her to cast a cold eye on this young woman who walks in out of nowhere, expecting help. Older than both of them is Mila (Ljubica Jovic), a Croatian who schemes with her husband to save up enough money to return to Croatia in style. The German Swiss community she's belonged to for so long has never really made a dent, we're led to believe.

If there's one thing Ruza understands, it's the difference between big and small problems, and the way the latter can turn into the former if not nipped in the bud. In dealing with her employees at the cafe, she's something of a Mayor Guiliani, punishing even the smallest infractions and keeping a watchful eye on all potential goofing-off, in the hopes that this kind of vigilance will stave off any kind of serious disregard for the rules. When we first meet her, she's confronted on her way into the office by Mila, who wants to offer up a young relative for a new position. Insulted that Mila would assume she can have such influence over hiring decisions, Ruza briskly informs her: "I do the hiring here." As you might expect, Ana's introduction into the picture is something of a catalyst to soften her up and make her remember that life is not just to be endured. Ana is also not above prodding her for a little Balkan solidarity, at one point bluntly asking: "Why do you speak German to me?"

"I'm in the Marlon Brando business." -- Marlon Brando

A nearly three-hour retrospective of the mercurial actor's life, Brando proceeds chronologically from his unrequited attachment to his distant drunk of a Nebraska mother to a post-war rise through the ranks of New York theater and fortuitous pairings with Stella Adler and Elia Kazan, to unexpected movie stardom, to has-been movie stardom, to political activism, to a measured critical rebirth and finally to an increasingly sad elderly life marked by erratic jaunts onto shows like Larry King Live and an elaborate prankishness that poorly camouflages an exhausted lothario's boredom with old age. "The first two-thirds of Marlon's life was in his body and the last third was in his mind," someone tells us, the implication being that Brando felt cheated by that trade-off and spent his final years playing with the only toy he had left, his celebrity. We hear about him summoning one well-known actor to his house on the pretense of collaborating on a film, only to tell them when they arrive that he's discovered a way to power his house with electric eels.

Since much of his life is old hat to the target audience, the pleasures of Brando mostly derive from the little moments snuck in here and there -- new memories from a fellow actor or new takes on one of his films, and so on. One the most interesting sequences, for my money, is a somewhat negative reassessment of Brando's role in Apocalypse Now. Robert Duvall, in his interview, feels obliged to point out that the performance is something of a non-starter because Kurtz was obviously supposed to be a military type, whippet-slim and muscled-up, while Brando practically had to be wheelbarrowed onto the set. It's also made clear that Coppola confided to the cast that Brando showed up for the film without having done any kind of mental preparation either. Dennis Hopper gets in a good jab, noting that "Marlon didn't care about your money" and digging up the old story about Brando demanding $75K for a five-minute close-up that was needed immediately after the point that he was no longer contractually bound to be there.

At once a mainstream and experimental film, The Killing of John Lennon traps itself (and the audience) inside the warped psyche of culture-assassin Mark David Chapman, keeping the camera on him pretty much from start to credits. Only his on-the-record words are used as dialogue, as his aimless obsession with outing 'phoneys' and seeking notoriety leads him all the way from Honolulu, Hawaii to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where he will collide with history by blowing away John Lennon. Making Chapman interesting proves to be a tall order, since his murder of Lennon is generally accepted as having no political or other external motivation -- only the motivation derived from his own diseased mind. Is watching a crazy person rant and rave entertaining? Sure, it can be, but The Killing of John Lennon is only marginally entertaining, dragging on too long for its own good and continuing past the logical stopping point -- the killing -- and moving into Chapman's introduction to prison life, where his only joy will be playing pointless cat-and-mouse games with his analysts.

As played by newcomer Jonas Ball, Chapman is a highly functioning sociopath who see-saws back and forth between lucid, on-point observations and hateful, juvenile blather about feeling betrayed. Early on he says: "I don't think one should devote oneself to morbid self-attention. One should try to be a person like other people." Then, presumably with mental illness creeping in, he ignores his own advice and begins to vocalize a childish hatred of Lennon derived from a selective reading of his song lyrics. "He told us to imagine no possessions -- but he has yachts and country estates," he says, not bothering to take this internal debate any further before condemning Lennon to death. Chapman's mind eventually focuses on Salinger's infamous book The Catcher in the Rye, engaging with it almost like Jim Carrey in The Number 23 -- as if the book was written specifically with him in mind, and acting out its plot in the real world will somehow unlock some higher plane of reality. In other words, Chapman is a nut who wasn't diagnosed before he was allowed to act out.

After a Tribeca screening of The Killing of John Lennon at Pace University last week, director Andrew Piddington hung around to answer some questions from the crowd. The biggest question, which someone finally dared to ask, was how come when we see Mark David Chapman visiting New York City, it's unambiguously the New York City of 2007? We clearly see Chapman pass by Planet Hollywood, Toys R' Us and every other Times Square fixture you could possibly imagine. Piddington's answer? He needs more money to CGI that stuff away, and hasn't raised it yet. Other questions during the talk touched, of course, on Chapman's motivations, the whole conspiracy angle, the central performance of Jonas Ball, how Piddington went about casting Lennon and Ono, whether he actually met with Chapman and a number of other issues.


Crowd: Talk a little about the research and the casting process for the film.

AP: Considering research and casting, the gestation for this movie began four years ago -- it's taken four years to make. I first came across a book by Fenton Bresler called Who Killed John Lennon? This was a conspiracy book that set out to prove that Chapman was a Manchurian Candidate. There was a lot of evidence in it, but no proof. What it did have was a lot of depositions and transcripts, court information, all of which was public domain. And once I started to read the psychiatrist reports I became fascinated by the actual character. That was what drove me, and that's what started it. I then went onto the Internet and you can imagine the sort of stuff that's on the Internet. It's full of very difficult things to believe, and so therefore I then went to Ebay, and over the course of a year, I purchased nearly every single newspaper that was published during that four or five month period. That became my prime research material.

My instinct was always to cross-check three times and if the same information came through, then for me that was valid, and that's how I built up the screenplay. The screenplay took a while to write, and the film took four years to make. Jonas Ball, who I believe gives a magnificent performance in this film, the fascinating thing about Jonas Ball is that he is very young -- he hasn't done a great deal, but everything up there is very real and very solid and very mature. The great thing about any movie actor is the ability to hold the camera -- to have this relationship with the lens -- it's a cliche, but it's true -- and Jonas Ball has that. If an actor can carry a big close-up and give you the emotion that you require, that's a marvelous tool to have, and it's great for a director to use that tool. So I think he's gonna do really well. It's his first film, and he can't be here tonight because he's working, so that's good.

From German directors Reinhard Klooss and Holger Tappe, Impy's Island is the story Professor Tiberton, who runs an island menagerie of talking animals and looks eerily like UN Ambassador John Bolton, right down to the white push broom mustache. Among the animals on Professor Tiberton's island are a maternal pig who walks upright on her hooves and has a recognizably human ass, a childish penguin and his lizard companion who routinely argue over squatting rights to a giant oyster shell, and a sea lion with a mopey demeantor who has the singing voice of Louis Armstrong. There's also a mute, shirtless island boy who is constantly seen at the side of the professor, but the less said about him the better, maybe. One day, into this happy CGI environment comes a dinosaur egg, which is discovered to be stuck inside an iceberg that is floating by. Thawed, the egg hatches Impy, who the professor declares to be a missing link between dinos and mammals. Since Impy is a newborn, that's what he acts like, clinging to the mother pig and blinking giant, cartoon eyes.

I didn't quite catch where this island was located on the globe, but it's apparently within helicopter distance of a monarchy. One day a pudgy King, who looks to be modeled on Paul Giamatti only with white jowl whiskers, comes choppering in with his dark sunglasses-wearing manservant in order to hunt the Impy right back into extinction. There's some disagreement as to how to get Impy out of harm's way -- the pig actually subscribes to some kind of pagan pig religion, and thinks praying to "The Pork Fairy" will make things right. At one point we see her trying to divine information from the arrangement of the stars -- I guess that's how you determine what the Pig God wants you to do. Some of the animals want to lead Impy underground, to a watery cave dwelling where the King isn't likely to follow; eventually, the cave idea wins out, and Impy is led underground, but he's not out of harm's way yet -- there's a gigantic crab with red eyes that lives there and doesn't like having his fortress of solitude invaded.