Tribeca 2012 Daily Recap: April 28th

I ended up skipping the festival yesterday due to feeling pretty crumby when I woke up. I slept most of the afternoon away and then caught a few films in the online press screening room at night. Feeling much better today, I made my final trip into the city for the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival.

Being a big fan of James Franco, I was looking forward to checking out FRANCOPHRENIA despite the intensely mixed reactions. It is not an easy film to judge. Very experimental and free form, I’m still not quite sure what I watched even after the Q & A with Ian Olds (co-director, co-writer) & Paul Felton (writer). It starts out as a fairly regular behind the scenes look at the making of a special episode of GENERAL HOSPITAL cut together from the mundane stuff usually left on the cutting room floor. Then it switches into something quite weird through the magic of strange editing & sometimes hilarious voice-over done by Ian Olds. I wouldn’t call it anything you must see but it is certainly a strange curiosity that I am glad to have watched once. After the surprisingly long Q & A, a final pit stop at the press lounge, another super cheap NY pizza lunch & a 30-minute walk to the other theater, I settled in for my final screening of the festival.

MANSOME is a documentary by Morgan Spurlock although he does not appear in the film as often as you would assume based on his previous work. In fact, Jason Bateman & Will Arnett appear much more often, in little comedic vignettes setting up the subject for each section of the doc. The main focus of the film is modern men’s grooming techniques and as you can imagine, it is far more entertaining than enlightening. There are some truly fascinating personalities put on display for each section and talking head pieces of people weighing in, including Paul Rudd, Judd Apatow, and Zach Galifianakis. Unfortunately no one was on hand for a post screening Q & A so after the credits rolled, I left the theater and made my way to the bus home. Of course there was massive traffic downtown, which doubled my commute time. A perfect way to cap off a great festival.

Lesson of the Day: Sometimes enjoying copious amounts of free water can come back to bite you on the ass, like when you are stuck in massive traffic on your bus home.

Jerry Cavallaro – @GetStuck – JerryCavallaro.com