NYTimes about the Tribeca Film Festival. Which I am unhappily not going to, again. Next year! Since it is going to rain in Boston this entire weekend (after being beautiful and sunny all work week) I am going to try to do Boston's Independent Film Festival which was fun last year but ehh.. I was hoping for Tribeca.
"Everybody's in movies." And that means everyone from the snootiest cinephile to the squarest suburban family.
 |
That grass roots attitude may not be easy for everyone to accept in New York City, where institutions like the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art promote the notion that art films rule. The sudden appearance of the TriBeCa Film Festival in Manhattan in 2002, arriving on waves of hype, has been a classic case of a staid old neighborhood jolted by an influx of new money and brash new energy.
Naysayers still view the festival as the equivalent of a sprawling modern McMansion too large for its allotted space, an alien weed running wild in a meticulously cultivated garden.
The flashy newcomers, the old guard grumbles, give raucous celebrity parties in their own exclusive, gated enclave; because almost all of the screenings take place south of Canal Street, with many at the 11-screen Regal Cinemas Battery Park Stadium complex, Midtown moviegoers unaccustomed to venturing south of Houston Street must go out of their way to attend. Besides, they whisper, isn't the TriBeCa Film Festival really a business opportunity masquerading as civic boosterism? And doesn't its avowed goal of helping revive the economy of Lower Manhattan after 9/11 smack a little of entrepreneurial piggybacking on a catastrophe?
But as it mounts its fourth annual onslaught on Lower Manhattan (through May 1), the TriBeCa Film Festival is flexing more artistic muscle than ever before. Casual moviegoers may notice only the icing on the cake: the festival's figurehead and prime mover, Robert De Niro, popping up everywhere to promote it, and the heavy-duty glamour of its opening film, "The Interpreter."
But below the slick, star-crusted glaze is a rich, serious cake. The festival's size alone is intimidating: 250 films, including 158 features from 45 countries; divided into 11 categories that include 4 competitions.
Comments