Tribeca Cinemas
54 Varick St. at Laight St.
October 13-16, $45-$105, All-Access Pass: $299
www.thefoodfilmfestival.com
www.tribecacinemas.com
They’re truly two great tastes that go great together: food and film. Dinner and a movie has been a classic date since the beginning of the cinema, and the two are combined in the fifth annual Food Film Festival. Running October 13-16, this year’s delicious delights include John Craig Ross’s Amor Pulpo and Dinner for Two: An Edible Valentine in Three Acts, Bao Nguyen’s Banh and Mi, Jonathan Jacob’s The Burgerlution, Ximena Sanchez’s Changua, Liza de Guia’s Danny Macaroons: No Such Thing as Boring Macaroons Anymore, Ovenly: Reinventing Crappy Bar Snacks, and Robicelli’s Cupcakes, festival founder George Motz’s Fun with Pig at Saxon+Parole, Michael Fox’s The Good Beer Seal, Hilah Cooking’s Hangover Tacos, Matt Duckor’s Scenes from Staff Meal: Café Boulud’s Fry Burger, and Joel Herm’s Pastry Paris. Food porn aficionados don’t only get to salivate at the gastronomic wonders on-screen but will actually get to sample much of the food they see.
Makoto Shinkai, who took the anime world by storm with his 2003 hit Voices of a Distant Star, a short film made completely on his home computer, followed that up with his first feature-length work, the magical and mystical The Place Promised in Our Early Days. Set in an alternate futuristic post-WWII world, The Place Promised centers on three friends, Hiroki, Takuya, and Sayuri, who make a vow to fly Hiroke and Takuya’s plane, Bela C’ielo, into the Tower, a monolithic structure rising into the sky that symbolizes the postwar division into the Union and U.S.-Japanese forces. With war imminent, an older Takuya and Hiroki find themselves on opposing sides, with Sayuri lost in a coma dreamworld. Although the plot — especially the science aspects — gets rather complex and confusing, The Place Promised is a beautiful-looking film, both tenderly sweet and harshly depressing, presenting a rather bleak forecast of the future. But stunning visual moments such as a setting sun with an illuminated halo that forms a shining star twinkling into an abandoned factory make it all worth it. Shinkai’s film was deservedly named Best Animated Film at the Mainichi Film Awards, where it topped the much more heralded Steamboy (Katsuhiro Otomo, 2004) and Howl’s Moving Castle (Hayao Miyazaki, 2004). The career of the thirty-eight-year-old anime auteur is being celebrated at this year’s New York Comic Con / New York Anime Festival, which will include screenings of Voices of a Distant Star (October 14, Room 1A18, 12:30), The Place Promised in Our Early Days (October 14, Room 1A18, 1:15), the three-part 5 Centimeters Per Second (October 14, Room 1A18, 3:00), and his latest, Children Who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Below (October 16, IGN Theater, 11:00 am), with Shinkai on hand to introduce this New York premiere.
Azazel Jacobs follows up the widely praised Momma’s Man, in which he cast his real-life parents (experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs and painter Flo Jacobs) in a story about a married adult and new father (Matt Boren) who keeps extending a visi t to his ancestral home, with another idiosyncratic tale about growing up. Terri, adapted by Patrick deWitt from a series of his interrelated short stories, follows the trials and tribulations of the title teen, played with great subtlety by newcomer Jacob Wysocki. Terri is a grossly overweight kid who shows up late to school every morning wearing pajamas; lives with and takes care of his uncle (The Office’s Creed Bratton), who is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s; becomes obsessed with catching mice; and has a secret crush on high school cutie Heather (Olivia Crocicchia). When the vice principal, Mr. Fitzgerald (a wonderfully offbeat John C. Reilly), takes a personal interest in him, Terri is at first confused, but then seems okay with it, until he finds out that he is part of a group of deeply troubled teens that Mr. Fitzgerald meets with regularly, including such loser outcasts as Chad Markson (Bridger Zadina), who likes to pull out his own hair and say very inappropriate things at inopportune moments. They are soon joined by Heather, who was nearly expelled for allowing a boy to touch her during class and is now shunned by the cool clique. The unlikely threesome, along with Mr. Fitzgerald, who appears to mean well but can’t stop putting his foot in his mouth, exemplify the difficult teenage years as they come together, and break apart, over the course of this charming, eclectic film. As with Momma’s Man, Jacobs has faith in his narrative, eschewing grand statements and teen clichés in favor of a poignant and intelligent examination of adolescence that anyone can relate to, whether they were the teased or the teaser back in those tumultuous and torturous high school days. Terri is screening on October 13 at 7:00 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s “After Hours (Fall/Winter 2011)” series, which continues October 27 with Joe Maggio’s The Last Rites of Joe May, followed by a Pinewood Dialogue with star Dennis Farina, and November 3 with Larry Cohen’s 1977 film The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, with Cohen in person.
