Jill's Film Festival Diary for Saturday, April 7

Films: 638 Ways to Kill Castro, The Disney Cartoon: Nine Decades of Magic, The Boss of It All, Roy Disney Salute, Suffering Man's Charity

Future Screenings: 638 Ways to Kill Castro: Monday, April 9, 2:30PM, The Bridge
The Disney Cartoon: Nine Decades of Magic: No future screenings scheduled
The Boss of It All: Sunday, April 8, 7:15PM, The Ritz Five
Roy Disney Salute: No future screenings scheduled
Suffering Man's Charity: Monday, April 9, 5:15PM, The Bridge

Apparently, when I do a festival, I really do a festival. I built naptimes into my schedule yesterday, but instead of going home to nap, I just kept adding screenings to my schedule. I couldn't help it. I want to use my press pass to the fullest, goddammit!

638 Ways to Kill Castro
Okay, so the movie doesn't necessarily detail all 638 assassination attempts on the Cuban dictator. But that's fine by me: I don't think I could have sat through a twelve-hour documentary yesterday. Instead, the film came in at a very manageable and entertaining seventy-five minutes. Kudos to the editors who had to spend what was probably way, way too much time with, not only archival documentary footage, but also a few dozen old gangster movies with tangentially pertinent scenes. It was clever, perhaps at times too clever, but served as an interesting way of reaffirming that truth is, indeed, stranger than fiction. I couldn't believe some of the things that our government came up with to try and assassinate or humiliate Castro: everything from some sort of powder that would make him lose his beard to exploding cigars to poisoned scuba suits, to more conventional methods (Bay of Pigs anyone?). It's an interesting slice of history, with some pretty embarrassing interview excerpts (listen for the line about "the Arabs"...) and enough conspiracy theories to make Dan Brown jealous. It could get a little jumpy at times, but in all, the film is a cohesive history of America's involvement with Cuba since 1959.
Festival rating: Good to Very Good.

The Disney Cartoon: Nine Decades of Magic
I planned my whole day around attending this screening, and I'm glad I did. (Really wish I didn't miss that screening of Fantasia on Friday, though!) Leonard Maltin and Roy Disney actually introduced the collection of Disney shorts spanning from the pre-Disney studios years to today, featuring old favorites like "The Brave Little Tailor," a "Winnie the Pooh" cartoon, a Roger Rabbit cartoon, and culminating in the only recently-finished collaboration between Salvador Dali and Walt Disney called "Destino," a truly gorgeous walk-through of some of Dali's most recognizable paintings. There are no further screenings of the cartoon collection scheduled, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it featured in the Festival Favorites at the end of the festival. If nothing else, it's worth re-discovering some of these old Disney shorts for yourselves.
Festival rating: Excellent.

The Boss of It All
Chances are, if you know who Lars von Trier is, then you'd be very surprised by The Boss of It All. Why? Well, because it's funny. It's very funny. And von Trier's films are usually anything but. The basic premise of the film isn't anything too original: an out-of-work actor is hired to play someone he's not, namely, a company president, a.k.a. the "Boss of It All." Where the originality occurs is in who does the hiring: the real "Boss of It All," who has created several different realities of what the fake boss is really like, all of which converge in the funniest, most inconvenient ways possible. It's a play about the ego of actors, so clearly, I loved it. And it was just over-the-top enough to keep the audience in stitches throughout its 100-minute runtime.
Festival rating: Very Good.

Roy Disney Salute
There's not a lot to say here, because this was an interview session, not a screening. It was fantastic and, especially after watching the collection of Disney shorts earlier in the afternoon, it made me really want to re-explore some of my old Disney favorites. Roy Disney is charming and a great storyteller, and Leonard Maltin did a fantastic job of getting details from the honored guest. I will say that the tribute film at the beginning of the session was a little strange: it was thorough, but the clips were in a weird order (it started with a montage, rather than ending with one), and the film ended rather abruptly. Whatever, I still got to hum "A Whole New World" to myself in my seat.
Festival rating: Excellent.

Suffering Man's Charity
This was definitely the strangest film I've seen in recent memory and not in any way what I was expecting when I saw a film featuring Alan Cumming, David Boreanaz, and Anne Heche. I was expecting comedy, through and through, and got, well, comedy, but not of the conventional type. Not at all. Hours and a stiff drink after seeing the film, I'm still not entirely sure what I thought of it. Was it clever? Quite. Well written? Very. Good acting? Indeed (although with all the big names in the script, everyone but Cumming and Boreanaz felt a bit under-utilized). From a purely objective, critical point of view, it's quite a good film. But so incredibly weird that I can't even say for sure whether I enjoyed it or not.
Festival rating: Good.