Jill's Film Festival Diary for Tuesday, April 10

Films: Mojave Phone Booth, Just Sex and Nothing Else

Future Screenings: Mojave Phone Booth: Sunday, April 15, 9:30PM, National Constitution Center
Just Sex and Nothing Else: No future screenings scheduled

Who knew how exhausting sitting in a series of darkened rooms for a few hours at a time a piece could be? I don't think I've been this tired since I was trying to wrap up my senior thesis!

At least the films I saw yesterday were enjoyable. In fact, I daresay they're two of my favorites thus far! (I know, I know. There's still almost a week to go. I could change my mind...)

Mojave Phone Booth
It's human nature to want to tell the world about our problems. It's also human nature to avoid doing so. But what if there was a phone booth somewhere in the middle of the desert where you could get a call, and tell a complete stranger whom you've never met all of the problems in your life? That's the basic premise of Mojave Phone Booth, a gorgeous film about the loosely-intertwined lives of four phone booth-using strangers (and their friends and families), told in four different vignettes. Other than the occasional overlapping character, a few themes recur across the stories to keep the film cohesive, the most prominent of which being magnetic (audio and video) tape, and the destruction thereof. Director John Putch makes the leitmotifs stand out, without ever being annoyingly in-your-face or obtrusive into the four individual plot lines in the film.

With a cast that includes "that guy from that movie" and "the woman from that show," the film emphasizes performance and craft over fame and special effects—there are none at all, only gorgeous sweeping shots of Las Vegas and the surrounding desert. I was enthralled.
Festival rating: Very Good to Excellent

Just Sex and Nothing Else
This is the kind of movie that an American production company would ruin. They'd cast Renee Zellweger in the lead, and Ashton Kutcher, George Clooney, and Jason Lewis as the three men vying for her heart—and a positive paternity test. And who knows? Maybe, in Hungary, that's how they see the film anyway. But if it's making its way around the festival circuit, I doubt that.

Just Sex and Nothing Else is a charming and very funny romantic comedy about a dramaturge who has given up on her quest for the perfect man and decided, instead, to find a human sperm bank. The premise isn't anything terribly inventive, but the actors are all fantastic, the script (from what I could tell, this being subtitled and all) is clever and well-written, and, for a chick flick, it's actually a really good movie. I wouldn't be surprised to see this film in the Festival Favorites, but if it is, get there early: it was one of the most crowded screenings I've seen so far! (Oh, and be warned: the movie's not completely over when the credits start to roll. Stay seated and prepare to laugh.)
Festival rating: Very Good