Beyond the Multiplex

Do men who have sex with horses deserve our sympathy? A podcast interview with the director of a movie about animal love -- "Zoo."

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Sex, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Beyond the Multiplex, Tribeca Film Festival, Salon Conversations

Photo: THINKFilm

A scene from "Zoo."

April 26, 2007 | As everyone who writes about the Tribeca Film Festival has observed for the past six years, it isn't easy to describe or define New York's spring movie extravaganza -- which has now spread, bloblike, all over Manhattan and bears only a nominal relationship to the downtown neighborhood of its birth -- except to say that it's big and getting bigger. This year the growth is more a question of ambition (and ticket price) than absolute size; Tribeca will screen 157 feature films, an egregious number but slightly below last year's total.

Tribeca sometimes seems like the film-fest equivalent of the endlessly protean product in that old "Saturday Night Live" commercial, the one that was a floor wax and a dessert topping. This year's Tribeca event is a significant post-Sundance indie marketplace and a massive hype event for the release of "Spider-Man 3" -- and a rapid-fire showcase for numerous off-the-radar documentaries and foreign films as well. I suggested last year that Tribeca honchos Jane Rosenthal and Robert De Niro hoped to displace Lincoln Center's New York Film Festival, both as Gotham's dominant movie showcase and as a social-cultural event. (That goal has been half-accomplished.) Now I realize I was underestimating them.

"We should become, if not the dominant festival, then one of the great festivals of all time," Tribeca co-founder Craig Hatkoff (Rosenthal's husband) recently told Gregg Goldstein of the Hollywood Reporter. In the same article, Rosenthal makes it clear that she sees Tribeca's competition as Sundance, Berlin, Cannes and Toronto, the four biggest events in world cinema. That's some chutzpah for a festival that was founded in 2002 on a shoestring budget, has no permanent home base and has reportedly run in the red every year (Goldstein pegs annual losses at about $1 million). But, hell, you don't get ahead in New York by being polite and restrained. Part of the NYFF's problem -- at least in terms of image -- is that it's attached to an über-civilized high-culture universe that seems a little less relevant every year.

Maybe a thoroughly obnoxious scale of ambition is the only one that makes sense for Tribeca. Why shouldn't New York, the world capital of obnoxious ambition, have the biggest, starfuckingest, most artistically ambitious and most expensive film festival in the world? (Most of this year's Tribeca tickets cost $18, up 50 percent from last year.) If that's the goal, I have three words of advice for Rosenthal, De Niro, festival director Peter Scarlet, et al.: Show better movies.

Tribeca has become a first-rate showcase for documentaries -- last year, "Jesus Camp," "The Bridge" and "Jonestown" all premiered there -- but its record with narrative features is mixed, if not worse than that. No festival this large, especially when it lacks (so far) the cachet of the big four, can avoid shoveling some crap onto the screen. But this one has shoveled more than its share of unfinished, half-baked and never-shoulda-been-made titles, and like other people in the business I've grown cynical about the value of a Tribeca premiere. More than 100 films will receive a world or North American premiere at this year's festival, each one attended by a microsecond of hype, and then most of them will disappear back into the deep underbrush of Undistributed Film Limbo, never to surface again.

Of course the programmers aren't going to take my advice, since the business plan for Tribeca evidently calls for being big-ass at all costs. I have to admit that it may be working: The lineup has gotten a little stronger every year, and this year's package of films seems full of intriguing possibilities. I'll break it down more in dispatches from the festival over the next several days. But first, let's turn to the most controversial film to premiere at Sundance this year (now being hurried into theaters), along with the latest enigmatic study of violence and its aftermath from the terrific Australian director Ray Lawrence.

Next page: Horse love -- yea or neigh?