Oh.. and totally forgot...nearly. So went to the Denver Jewish Film Festival, saw a couple of movies. For the most part it was actually enjoyable. There were some hiccups of course, crowded parking lots and timing of let outs and let ins, and the long speech before each presentation that was the same thing pretty much each time which lagged things up each showing. But I think honestly there is still a lot of growing pains associated with the group running the show. I don't want to talk too badly because they are providing a great service but there are festivals in this town that are run so well with great programing that they could definitely learn from.
The website is so poorly done I can't even link to it because the effort to even find the film listings doesn't show anymore, which is ridiculous considering many people like to refer back to what they have seen.
The first movie that I saw was an interesting little movie about a little boy coming into his own. Can't remember the name, and cant link back to it... maddening.
The second movie I saw was: Making Trouble. I learned about (not from the documentary mind you) our family connection to Sophie Tucker. It was actually a pretty great movie. It took almost a half minute for them to sync up the sound which was annoying but it finally caught up. I learned alot about three comedians that didn't know anything about (Molly Pican, Sophie Tucker and seriously... Fanny Brice) which was amazing. When they presented the segment on Gilda Radner I knew what was coming and lost it when they showed Alan Zwibel's piece. This is what I saw him present on the Bunny Bunny tour and its always in my heart because I remember that night at the Tattered Cover like it was yesterday. Joan Rivers was actually pretty funny. And the piece with Wendy Wasserstein was very interesting, I didn't quite understand why they didn't focus on Madeline Kahn because that is what it looked like it was going towards and didn't, but the film maker explained that was in fact what she was going for then Wendy Wasserstein passed away and they changed the focus of that segment. I think seriously they should just do both. But that would make a long piece. Maybe on the dvd they can do it.
And last night I saw: Strange Fruit. I didn't realize that I had seen it before. Oops. It was still good.
I have to say after looking at some of the festivals around the country, our fair city, Denver's was absolutely way low grade. I am not saying the quality of the exhibition was not good, but it wasn't great. They showed 8 episodes of In Treatment, but the problem being that it was on a Thursday night. Why not show on a Sunday afternoon? Include a lunch and make an afternoon of it. I am not quite sure about the quality of the programming at all. There wasn't anything for a younger crowd like in the past. They have showed The Hebrew Hammer in the past for the BBYO crowd, which I thought was a great move. Nothing like that this year. Perhaps next year it will be programmed a little more progressively, the timing of the showings will be better so there isn't such a logjam in the parking lot (that was horrible) and they will leave the program information up so that people can go back and look up what they saw. In many cases they can look up the movie, find it on dvd and help the film makers by purchasing the movies. Just sayin'.
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