While the administration of Tribeca needs to rethink their ticket buying system for next year, the six films and two shorts programs I saw were well worth the time spent.
Herblock - Oh how I wish our local paper carried his editorial cartoons when I was growing up. This portrait of a voice for the common man in the last century is a MUST see. I hope it ends up in theaters and on PBS ! I know I need to read more about him.
I Got Somethin' to Tell You - see above. While we had many comedy records at home, I missed out on Moms Mabley although I did see her on Ed Sullivan. She was the First female comedian. Fun film. She was a different kind of social commentator and very much revered by the comedians of our day.
Dancing in Jaffa - Getting Israeli Jews, Palestineans, and Christian kids to dance with each other(?) was the dream of ballroom champion Pierre Dulaine. Great premise and after he spent a great deal of time hitting his head against a wall so to speak, it worked. Hopefully this will show up at the Jewish Film Festival and the Lincoln Center Dance on film festival. This is a must for my ballroom dance friends.
Out of Print - a well made documentary on subjects near and dear to my heart: Publishing -self and traditional, libraries, shelf life of information, books and the Internet. I recently took a tour of the Brooklyn Business Library and remembered how comforting it is to search through well curated stored information. On the other hand, when I think of the amount of great and horrible information I can access from my cell phone, the mind boggles. I hope this film will make it to PBS so it can be seen by a larger audience.
Michael H: I saw this documentary because I had seen Amour by accident and I thought it was incredibly well done. I thought this documentary was interesting - especially the shots of shooting his older films. He is brilliant but honestly, there is too much gratuitous violence for me. Great documentary but I will never knowingly go to another film of his.
Stand Clear: Really interesting. At some level this is a modern day version of The Little Fugitive. Instead of a young child running away to Coney Island in the 50's, an autistic young teen runs away and lives in the subway for several days. This story was (at first) very loosely based on a real story.
Life got a little complicated for the film maker when Hurricane Sandy showed up 3/4 through the filming. This is not unlike the literary challenge that author Pete Hamill had when his New York story Forever was finally ready to go to the publisher on Sept 10, 2001.
Like many NYC works of film fiction, those of us who live here know that some of the locations make no sense but the film still works. The last place the teen is seen before Sandy is in a subway near the Cloisters which is about
as far away from his home in Far Rockaway as one can get by subway. I won't give away the end.