New York LOVES Film 2008 Award Winner

Director Daniela Zanzotto has a history of using film to document intimate and personal struggles of every day people, so it's no surprise she is at the helm of of the award winning Tribeca film "Zoned In" about a boy who, at 16 and with two brothers already headed for the penal system, is about to embark on a long journey into an Ivy League university.

From the early film sequences, it's clear Daniel is one of the brightest 16 year olds anyone is ever going to meet, and his natural eloquence on camera makes it even more clear why he was chosen among half a dozen students for a completed documentary, if such a thing can truly exist.

Zanzotto keeps a focussed lens on Daniel, letting him tell his own story in a sequence of scenes where he grows from fresh and confident teen to a struggling stranger in a strange land, surrounded by shiny BMWs. He sees through these token status objects, which have been bestowed by old wealth family money only to be squandered by the students he must compete against in the university setting. He only shakes his head at what is given freely instead of earned.

His comments on the overabundance he sees around him ring true from lonely honesty and a piercing perspective all his own concerning the fallacy of the Ivy League American university as a genuine proving ground for the able. He hasn't the money to even attend the social gatherings that his posh classmates expect as an entry point to their social circles outside the classroom.

During class time he finds his real-life experience shunned and feared by a political and social agenda that is at odds with any sympathy toward his background. He reacts angrily by refusing to vote and receding into an inner sanctuary of family photographs and fear at letting down his young son. He is given every coercion to leave, yet he resolves to stay, no matter the cost to his confidence and the added viciousness of marginalization while being surrounded by such overabundant privilege.

Instead of giving in Daniel stays on campus and navigates the dual challenges of acclimating to his new life surrounded by wealth and its unsaid expectation of uniformity, while trying to maintain a connection to his roots, which he comes to realize have failed to prepare him as a scholar for the rigors of competitive university studies.

Like many students beginning college on their own merits, he finds the systems difficult to navigate and the assistance offered less than cursory, a growing problem in the American university system as a whole, but magnified here for a young man who could use the mentorship and real one-on-one camaraderie he found initially through a High School mentor. Where the struggle of every displaced student ends and the additional burden of being poor in a wealthy school system begins is difficult to place, but this ads all the more universality to Daniel's struggle to comprehend the planet on which he has landed, and the strange people with whom he must now interact for his grades and social acceptance.

His on-camera conversations with his older brother show two sophisticated and eloquent young men caught in a circumstance where one has an out with a scholarship to a prestigious university, while the other can see no solution except for activities that inevitably place him back in prison. The pride from his family magnifies Daniel's fears about being the prodigal son, and deepen his resolve to see himself through to become an educated dad to his own bright young son.

Daniel's story becomes much more than a tale of a poor child in a rich school, but is a bright and warm insider view of the modern son's search for community identity, while learning to question what is genuinely a part of one's culture versus what is supplanted and ultimately false. Coming from a community in Brooklyn which is saturated with re-enforcing, self-damaging behaviors that masquerade as culture and identity, Daniel struggles against and must eventually redefine how he views what is genuine community culture from what is superficial wealth and dangerously-sought pomp and status. He sees how hollow the same materialism rings when it is worn by his wealthy schoolmates as expected uniform, given no significance aside from identifying the haves from the have nots, giving him a different spin on life.

Nerves were still raw by the end of the film from watching an angry and disillusioned Daniel on the day of his graduation, finally breaking down to cry after so many difficult years struggling in virtual isolation amidst the privileged students who were nestled too deeply in their cocoons and echo chambers to really offer him the chance to interact within the system.

During the Q and A afterward, a heckler in the crowd grilled director Zanzotto, catching her off guard with his leading questions that put her on the stand as the representational specter to atone for the emotional punishment Daniel received at the hands of a predominantly white university institution. The follow-up question from the same man was even more telling. "Were you able to empathize?" became a well-annunciated suggestion that, as a white British woman, Zanzotto would be as incapable of empathizing with Daniel's plight as every white person who had not reached out to him during the documentary. The audience grew quiet, the moderator round-eyed, and it wasn't until a woman at the front of the auditorium rephrased the question in her own milder form that the moderator cut the question entirely, recognizing it as a repackaging of the first. Sadly, the second question was beautiful, but the initial heckler had not left room for any continued discussion on the topic.

Such are the adventures of a Tribeca talks moderator, but as a community discussion of downtown New Yorkers that otherwise would never have occurred, the film did much to incite a realization not just of the thick glass ceiling placed on the poor of this country, but also became a sounding board for the deep anger that still clogs the unity process, one that needs to be addressed in order to close the widening gap between rich and poor.

For his part, Daniel works hard to be true to himself, claiming to the end that he will never hate where he comes from, and maintaining his composure even in times of extreme isolation from his schoolmates. His early life experiences had already matured him in many ways beyond the level of mindless partying that his youthful peers exercised. Yet his spirit is not broken by the experience of swimming in their pond, and he grows to become a successful mentor to his own community, becoming a school teacher in inner-city Brooklyn where he himself began. Much like the sharp-witted Daniel of his initial taping at 16, the new Daniel that emerges by the end of the film is warm and confident, showing a sensitivity and insight to his students as a stand-in father figure to many that perhaps no other teacher could provide, all while taking care of his newborn daughter and growing young son at home.

Daniel is still searching to connect his family and his heritage by the end of the film, but unlike the timid boy in college, now he leads the attempt, knowing exactly what his students will face, pushing them through to excel and complete the new cycle of college graduates. If there's a better film to win the New York LOVES Film award, I challenge anyone to produce it.

Isabella Rossellini Does Tribeca in Tights

Just try and imagine it. The dainty, ageless Isabella Rossellini. The life-size, construction paper "partners" she seduces dressed as various insects and bugs. She demonstrates a fly spitting on its food before eating. A snail's unfortunate propensity for coiling inside a shell. Suddenly, her jump-suited hands fly to her crotch in full-on insectoid horror. "My penis would break off!" she shouts, post-coitis, not breaking character a micron as the entire theater gasps for air.

In her latest collaboration, entitled "Green Porno," death by laughter is near-eminent. Luckily this series of shorts is just brief enough to have people mumbling "Are you hooking?!" for the third season in a row in the back of the theater. True, you really had to be there, but in the vein of the super-famous reinventing themselves via the wide-open tracks of completely random film making, this one ranks right up there with Neil Patrick Harris's cameo in Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle. Collaborator Jody Shapiro did a fabulous job making this possibly the best comedy of the year out of the festival. Talent used well on both sides.

Tribeca Premieres: Nobel Son

Elated at being told he has won the Nobel Prize, self-absorbed researcher Eli Michaelson soon finds his classroom philandering and his past quickly surface in the forefront of his life. The kidnapping of his son and the emotional breakdown of a manipulative student lover are just the beginning of what fame delivers to an absolutely unapologetic university professor.

Modern mechanics and high tech wizardry blaze through lightning quick scenes while house music sizzles on the soundtrack courtesy of famed DJ producer Paul Okenfold. All of this combines to make the film slicker and hipper than many of its independent counterparts at this year's Tribeca festival. A top cast helps to brighten an already intricate plot, and academics will appreciate the deadpan quips. Later the cloak and dagger antics of the well-planned heist more than make up for the price of admission and show that even an independent can play on a level playing field thanks to digital editing tools like Final Cut Pro running in a simple mac studio.

The story ostensibly begins as a family drama between a successful father and his disappointment towards his struggling son, but the plot soon spirals into black comedy, paying homage to the likes of John Huston and Guy Ritchie in copious doses. At the core this is a classic heist, and like any good noir the lines of cause and effect blur throughout. The script seems intent on satirizing the cliches that jaded movie viewers have come to guess instantly. This irreverence forms the basis of much of the humor and creates a strange series of events that is surprising and fresh without leaving too much believability behind.

Played in trademark comedic style by Alan Rickman, director Randall Miller admits the character of Michaelson is loosely based on his late father, a well-known chemistry professor at Berkley who disapproved of Miller's own career path in his youth. Add the lightning-quick mental dexterity of Michaelson's forensic psychiatrist wife (well-played by a thoughtful Mary Steenburgen) and soon years of closeted secrets are unraveling. Members of this estranged family learn about Eli's even more shocking acts as they are pulled into the consequences. All of this slowly smolders behind the course of a seemingly straightforward kidnapping and extortion scheme that Steenburgen and her often-available detective coworker (Bill Pullman) work to solve in desperation to help her son.

Michaelson is less effected by what his offspring suffers and seems comically oblivious to his looming fate of discovery thanks to his recent notoriety. He beams with self affection at a celebratory dinner, relishing his cutting remarks at faculty and the concerned department director, warmly played by Ted Danson in a cameo role. Danson warns his fame will put bad behavior under close inspection just when Michaelson's angry young lover appears behind him for a flamboyant scene. The young student lover more than winks at Rickman's other well-known professor performances, turning past performances in a more overt direction.

Dawn Balkin has a fun turn as a flight attendant who must serve a smugly tipsy Michaelson during a scathing outburst on whether the captain has homo-erotic fantasies about him. Steenburgen expertly and clinically puts the situation in perspective. "I'm sorry," she tells Balkin, "but it appears the genius part of his brain has swallowed up the civilized part, causing this monstrous antisocial behavior."

Even without drinks it is clear Michaelson keeps a running interest in anyone who may be interested in him. Between kinky introductions where a flavor of the week comically barters for better grades even while he does the deed to her atop piles of better-graded reports, Rickman plays the flamboyant chemistry teacher once again to a fully R-rated capacity. The night is still young after his flighty young lover threatens to go public and Eli's son Barkley runs off smarting from public humiliation due to Michalson's venomous mood at the faculty dinner. Still riding a bicycle and scrounging change, the strangeness of the twenty-something grad school experience plays out for young Barkley in Ann Sexton epitaphs, sultry bohemian hook-ups, and snide bookstore coffee house baristas out to turn a deaf ear against the pleading pauperism of writer's blocked grad students. Instead of going back to his lonely research, Barkley is off in the night to stalk his current crush at a local poetry reading, which is where the two plots of the movie finally collide.

He eyes the smoldering City Hall, who voices edgy prose amid achingly funny poetry monologues by the certifiable. Excellent casting include scenes carried by Matt Winston (think alligators and area rugs from the Tribeca skits) and an over the top Kevin West. These scenes are so much fun because they are clearly meant to be. Lucky for writers Savin and Miller the supporting cast is just as strong as the main event making their witty writing hit the mark many more times than it misses through the flurry of high speed chases and quick camera cuts. There are some misses, but they are few in a script that works double time to fit multiple genres while never quite deciding which to follow at a given moment.

The central cast is rounded out with strong performances from Bill Pullman and Danny Devito, as well as a host of good lines that sometimes hit perfectly and often land out of nowhere and with flawless poise from Eli's brilliant wife (Steenburgen). Pullman is an awkward and sometimes inaudibly mumbling suitor who has waited in the wings for Steenburgen to come to her senses for years. Danny Devito plays a quirky variation as a mentally challenged neighbor. He is pitch perfect while Pullman comes across by reading between the lines of scenes that aren't there, but probably were at one point during the sophisticated background outlines of this complicated and weighty script.

If there is such a thing as mental motion sickness a film like this might need a warning label for some audiences, especially those expecting more soft focus lighting and retirement home scoring. Nobel Son does not suffer more than what it gains for the trade-off in becoming a caper more than a family drama. In a series of high tech scenes, much of what Miller is visually capable of directing meshes perfectly with the high style of Savin's perceptive writing and the energetic soundtrack overlays the nimble cinematography beautifully. The result is a perfectly paced young and fresh take on how to properly handle the nymphomaniacal, the certifiable, an indoor Mini Cooper, and a Seven Eleven big gulp. In that order.

For anyone looking for a fresh take on how to break out of the standard crime drama cliche, this one might be worth catching since it was quickly picked up for distribution and has a flash fan following since the premiere who are now lining the gates to see in theaters. I admit, I had to see it twice before I was done with it.

Tribeca Interviews: Case Studies on Five Successful Independent Short Films

"Mood Enhancer" is one of the three or four collections of shorts presented at Tribeca each year, and they're easily my favorite part of the festival.

This year didn't disappoint, but the post film interviews were a real eye opener to just how people have begun to start up in the business of filmmaking.

Some of the presented films cost under $5,000, which is unheard of for most entry-winning projects. "Lawrence" is the story of a bashful pastry factory worker (played by a frosty-blonded Tokio Paris) who talks into a tape recorder instead of to other people, living out his fantasy life and then listening to how he sounds.


How to Play to Your Strengths and Experiences with Early-Career Projects: A study of "Lawrence"

Gregory Mitnick, a DP by day, shot "Lawrence" entirely at night over a 5-day period for less than his budget of $5000. He admits that he created over ten drafts of the script, and added the novelty of his film was in using the audio voice-overs of the recorded tape memoirs as a means to splice the footage and sometimes all new audio together in post after the initial filming wrapped. Being a director of photography, this enabled him to shine in his element, while leaving the flexibility he needed to get the additional aspects of the film right in a micro-budget success of a short film study that made it all the way to Tribeca.


Getting The Money: "Heart of Whistler" Recognizes Canadian Money is Good Anywhere

Director/writer Ken Hegan is a master at getting financed. The hated aspect of filmmaking is a useful and realistic part of getting to the head of the line for handouts if you know how to design your pitch. As part of writing Whistler, Ken purposefully put as many references to the Olympics into the screenplay as possible to play to Canadian fundraiser's competition for the Olympic Winter Games. The film cleverly ( and cleverly as in integrally) meshes sports parodies throughout the film to bolster the plot and the financing to produce a film just crazy enough to work both for audiences and financers who backed him.

A self-confessed "branding whore," Hegan even went so far as to sponsor his wedding in order to get an aerial shot for a film using the sponsor's helicopter. Apparently his wife knew exactly what kind of relationship she was getting into --a successful, filmmaking one.


Textbook Study of How Smart Shorts Work Best: "The Water and the Milk"

This is a well-made gem of what can go right in the sharply-defined focus of a short film. With great cinematography courtesy of Emiliano Villanueva, and great Art Direction by Carlos Salom (the shot of Tara in the window from outside is old-school film magic). Tara Parra is the outstanding actress in this film (all of 3 actors are ever involved, plus a cow) with director Celso García able to keep the wide range of comedy and irony without seeming flighty.


Surrealists: Producing Fantasy-Tinged Stories that Work

"Onion Underwater" is an achingly sleek example of modern surrealism that tries hard not to present philosophical themes in a hokey context. The result is a super-slick $60,000 budget film that took a year to complete, with 2 months in post, and another 2 in special effects and audio. Shot on film, the end result is an intriguing sci-fi exploration that comes out something like "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" at some moments, and part "Amélie" at others.


Effective Pitching Lessons from "I Am Bob"

This short began as a cross between an old Elton John SNL skit involving a moose (I just couldn't bring myself to ask) and the writer/director's real life friend becoming stranded from his limo one night when he stepped out for a momentary mother nature solute.

Combined with the surreal world of celebrity look-alikes, the self-parody leaves plenty of room for irony. When the real Bob is mistaken himself as just another look-alike in the competition, "the" Bob Geldof is then coerced into singing onstage as a means of getting cab fair away from a remote northern town.

You might think it's great luck that Donald Rice was able to get Geldof, but you'd be missing the point about working long and hard on custom versions of the script for both Mick Jagger and Elton John that were written and pitched as well, proving that most luck is in fact smart selling.

Cheers to Geldof for being a good enough sport to play the parody of himself, with the real point of luck being Geldof's willingness to stay an extra three days to finish the shoot after wishful thinking made Rice think he could shoot a seven-day production schedule in four.

To see these shockingly good shoestring films for yourself, "Mood Enhancer" plays for the rest of the festival at these venues:

Sun, Apr 29, 6:30pm
AMC Village VII Theater 1

Thu, May 3, 11:30pm
Tribeca Cinemas Theater 1

Fri, May 4, 11:30pm
AMC Kips Bay Theater 13