film festival

To honor an annual tradition started before we were dating, this weekend Seth and I headed to the Tribeca Film Festival to check out one of the festival’s main attractions, Jesus Henry Christ.   This was the first movie where there was some serious star power (Julia Roberts produced the movie and showed up for the red carpet and Robert De Niro even made an appearance).   Seth and I walked the red carpet too but for some reason, no one took our picture.   I wonder why...

Despite all of the hype, however, the movie and the experience were extremely disappointing.  First, the ticket holders who didn’t know someone (i.e., us) were relegated to the sides of the theatre.  The entire middle was saved for VIPs.  So I really only saw the left side of the movie. Second, only one bathroom, with four stalls (naturally) was open for the women (picture that line of angry women).  The other bathrooms were also saved for VIPs.  This was the first time I have ever experienced feeling like a second class citizen at the film festival.  To me, one of the coolest parts of attending is that anyone can get tickets to any movie and sit in the crowd with everyone else.  That feeling was definitely lost at this premiere.

Sadly, the movie didn’t fare much better.   The acting was excellent.   Unfortunately, the actors had very little to work with as the writing was forced and the plot was aimless with gratuitous violence that was supposed to be funny (it wasn’t).   It had such great potential, but just fell flat in execution.  Halfway through the movie, I strongly considered leaving or taking out my iphone to play Words with Friends (player name: pookiemcguire, let’s play!).  We stuck it out, though, and were rewarded with a very honest Q & A with the director.   When asked about the significance of the color red in the movie (it definitely did appear a lot), he responded “my production designer thought it looked cool.”   Well, who can argue with that?