The Press's unofficial guide to the Anchorage International Film Festival

As you’ve probably noticed, it’s pretty dark this time of year. We all saw 30 Days of Night and we all know what can happen; do you really want to be wandering around outside when the vampires show up? Of course you don’t. So take advantage of the indoor safety afforded by the Anchorage International Film Festival, unspooling December 5-14 at the Bear Tooth TheatrePub, the Regal Fireweed, and the Anchorage Museum.

Besides the workshops and other special events, the 2008 installment of AIFF boasts a colorful array of narratives and documentaries, long, short, and animated, all for about $7 per screening. Highlights this year include the soon-to-be cult classic Repo: The Genetic Opera and How To Be, featuring Twilight It-Boy Robert Pattinson, as well as Billy Elliot’s superbly talented Jamie Bell starring in Hallam Foe.

Call 786-4980 for further information, or get even more details, as well as a full schedule of this year’s selections, at www.anchoragefilmfestival.org.

Meanwhile, here’s five of ‘em...

Chronic Town (2008)

(Saturday 12/6, 7:55 p.m., and Friday 12/12, 5:30 p.m., Bear Tooth TheatrePub)

The first rule of screenwriting is don’t talk about screenwriting. The second—no; wait. That’s Fight Club. The first rule of screenwriting is to write what you know. And not to cast any aspersions on first-time scripter Michael Kamsky, but his lived-in screenplay for the defiantly indie drama Chronic Town is chockablock with troubled lowlifes who positively crackle with the depths of their vice as well as their virtue. Either Kamsky knows a lot of lowlifes, or he’s a convincing fake. Rookie helmer Tom Hines handles the directorial aspects of things and employs a gifted ensemble of relative unknowns to bring Kamsky’s words to brutal, graceful life.

Canadian character actor J.R. Bourne offers up a ferocious performance as our anti-hero Truman, a Fairbanks cab driver with more demons than Hell itself. As Chronic Town opens Truman is beginning his day with a regimen that includes smoking, drinking a beer, puking, and eating pizza, and we’re left with the definite impression that this is nothing out of the ordinary. Truman’s time at work consists of bickering over the radio with a supervisor that he’s nicknamed Blow Job while shuttling about a few of Fairbanks’ more vivid citizens, and by the time he picks up his girlfriend it’s no surprise to us when she dumps him. Truman’s drug-fueled descent into self-pity sets the plot into motion, but everyone knows it’s not the actual plummet that hurts; it’s the sudden stop.

Despite the best efforts of Truman’s woolly enabler Faraday (Jeffrey Scott Jensen), an unplanned vacation in the mental ward gives way to necessary care as well as a seemingly healthy friendship with an elderly nursing-home patient (Alice Drummond) who has a decent weed connection. Possible redemption arrives in the form of the wary Eleanor (Emily Wagner), an exotic dancer that Truman had failed to charm previously (“Aren’t you packin’ a bit to be a stripper?”), but then bonds with in one of his contentious group therapy meetings. Truman isn’t shy about his bare need for companionship, so Truman and Eleanor embark on a warm, tentative romance, complete with impromptu rounds of “Rock, Paper, Scissors.” But an icy haze of drugs, booze, and lies hangs over them, and you can’t help but wait for the other shoe to drop.

Kamsky fills his keenly observed—and often darkly funny—script with sharp commentary about the messy realities of relationships and the sad fiction of addiction, including one particularly poignant exchange between two bruised souls on the loneliness of sex (“All that effort for very little,” muses Truman). Director of photography Yiannis Samaras allows the wintry isolation of Fairbanks to act as a metaphor for the semi-voluntary solitude of nearly all of Chronic Town’s characters, including Paul Dooley (1979’s classic Breaking Away) in a memorable turn as Eleanor’s wise dad and an unbelievably gutsy Dan Butler (Frasier) as the piteous Blow Job.

Though Wagner—recognizable from 14 years in the background on ER—is heartbreaking as Eleanor, this is unequivocally Bourne’s film. Scruffily handsome, with baby-blue eyes and a self-harm streak as wide as the sky, Truman is an unapologetic wreck, too consumed with his own desires to notice their possibly detrimental effect on others. It’s stunning work—one of the best performances you’ll see in or out of a festival setting—because Bourne plays Truman without any judgment, so we the jury are unable to truly indict him either.

Ballou (2008)

(Thursday 12/11, 7:45 p.m., and Saturday 12/13, 2:30 p.m., Anchorage Museum)

As documentary filmmaking goes, the subject has become kind of cliché, yet it never, ever fails to inspire: Disadvantaged young people cope with an outside environment that is anything but kid-friendly yet encounter direction and acceptance through an outlet that is anything but ordinary. The past few years have seen films that allow us to watch in oddly invested excitement as kids master things like spelling bees and ballroom dancing, and 2008 brings us Ballou, a rousing piece of filmmaking about the unifying power of music and especially the difference a few impassioned people can make when they take it upon themselves to give back.

Ballou High School is located in the southeast part of Washington, DC, an impoverished urban area just a few miles from the U.S. Capitol Building. Only 5 percent of Ballou’s graduates actually go on to finish college, thanks to the usual drug-and-crime problems sustained by the low economic stature of the neighborhood. But under the tutelage of a determined individual named Darrell Watson, a gaggle of Ballou’s students have found a sort of raison d’etre in marching band. Yup, weird helmets, whirling flags, and instruments large enough to topple a kid; not the first things that spring to mind when thinking of inner-city youth, but the dedicated young people of Ballou High seem to live for it.

Director Michael Patrei trains his lens on Watson and his generous cadre of volunteers, many of them—like Watson—former Ballou students. “I was in the band, enjoyed it, and came back to give back,” says the dance instructor, while another unpaid staff member puts it more succinctly: “Band is my life.” She’s not kidding either; the marching band practices every day after school and on Saturdays, and some of Patrei’s most affecting shots find the band honing their skills on neighborhood streets, the boarded-up buildings in stark contrast to the open, unbridled enthusiasm of the band members.

“This band is like basically anger management for me,” one musician admits after noting her newfound ability to turn the other cheek. We get to know some of the marching band’s more prominent members, like sousaphonist Lewis, a young man of great faith who runs for band president; as well as the magnetic Kenney, a percussion-playing jokester who nonetheless takes his role in the band very seriously. Patrei’s camera follows the Ballou band as it labors tirelessly in preparation for contests and charity events, and the snippets of choreography and bits of music that we get to see all come together in Ballou’s climax, which takes place at the High-Stepping Marching Band Competition.

Not to take anything away from these hard-working kids, but the stirring story here just might be Darrell Watson. “I was determined to come back to Ballou to be a teacher and to do what I’m doing,” the ’88 Ballou graduate says. Watson will call for push-ups if discipline is needed, and he makes damn sure his band is giving him everything he knows they’re capable of. He believes in them unconditionally, and they, in turn, believe in themselves. “Y’all know we here,” Watson comforts his band, still reeling from the loss of a fellow musician to leukemia. They know. Now we know. And no one is going to forget that easily.

Bart Got A Room (2008)

(Saturday 12/6, 5:45 p.m., and Thursday 12/11, 7:30 p.m., Bear Tooth TheatrePub)

“Bart got a room?” people keep asking. We haven’t yet met Bart, but we immediately sense from everyone’s similarly skeptical inflection that whoever Bart is, he’s undoubtedly the king of the losers and someone you do not want to best you. This shocked clarification pops up from time to time throughout writer-director Brian Hecker’s charmingly imperfect debut film, a funny coming-of-age tale set amidst the strip malls and plastic-covered furniture of Florida. It’s right around prom time, and a hotel suite following the soirée is any teen’s ultimate goal. But it’s not the only hurdle that Danny Stein will have to clear.

Steven Kaplan stars as Danny, a high-school senior stressing out about all the details of that storied rite-of-passage: the girl, the limo, the tux, and, yes, the room. (Hell, even Bart got one.) A cute sophomore seems to be making eyes at Danny, and with the wildly unqualified encouragement of his father Ernie (the always-welcome William H. Macy in a later-period Mike Brady wig) Danny makes his move. Danny will actually make a bunch of moves, most of them really, uncomfortably wrong. But anyone who’s ever seen a movie before—especially one like Some Kind of Wonderful—knows how this is going to shake out the minute that we meet Danny’s longtime best friend Camille (adorable Alia Shawkat from Arrested Development), no matter what Danny does to screw it up.

Hecker nabbed a pretty cool cast for his first foray into filmmaking, including Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Cheryl Hines as Danny’s mom Beth, recently divorced from Danny’s dad and jonesing for financial security. (Recognizable character actor Jon Polito plays Beth’s oily suitor.) Imagine a hybrid of American Pie’s Jason Biggs and Juno’s Michael Cera, and you’ve got Kaplan, nebbishly attractive and offering up priceless reactions to Macy’s endearing, embarrassing attempts at fatherhood. Some of Hecker’s contrivances fall extremely flat (the hooker idea immediately comes to mind), while others—like the hilarious, squirm-inducing scene in which Danny and Ernie test the thickness of the walls in Ernie’s sad bachelor pad—we hope for Hecker’s sake just put the “semi” in “semi-autobiographical.”

Junk Dreams (2008)

(Saturday 12/6, 12:30 p.m., Anchorage Museum)

It must have been quite the sight: A majestic, 29-foot Chinese junk crawling along the Inside Passage. Not part of a retro Communist invasion, the boat actually belonged to a Washington septuagenarian named Ernie Borgman, and the barebones crew consisted of his daughter Skye and his brother Charlie. A retiree from the National Parks Service, Ernie embarked on the 1,600-mile trip from Port Hadlock, Washington to Valdez with his brother once Charlie’s health stabilized, and filmmaker Skye (wo)manned the camera. What she captured in Junk Dreams is part travelogue, part meditation on mortality, and total celebration of family.

“Ingenuity and resourcefulness are a way of life for these men,” Skye reports in a ubiquitous voiceover that alternates between helpful and hyperbolic. Ernie and Charlie will find that they’ll be relying heavily on both of those qualities thanks to a wonky two-cylinder diesel engine kept humming by skill and wishes. It’s not even a given that they’ll be able to set sail—you get the impression the brothers’ wives wouldn’t mind at all if they stayed—and the journey is fraught with mechanical glitches and inclement weather that throw them way off schedule. These setbacks are more than compensated for by moments of transcendent Northwest beauty, eagles and firs and whales, all memorialized by Skye’s consummate cinematographer’s eye.

What stands out in Junk Dreams, though, is the heart-tugging bond between Ernie and Charlie, who ride out the unavoidable vagaries of travel with the good humor of men who have their priorities firmly in place. “Charlie, we have had the best life that anybody could have had,” Ernie sighs, both he and his brother surprisingly at ease with their human impermanence as they acknowledge and enjoy the respective winters of their lives. The junk’s temporary beaching on a sand bar towards the end is a fitting metaphor for the bumps in the road of life: Just have patience, and the tide will eventually take you home.

Skid Marks (2008)

(Wednesday 12/10, 9:40 p.m., Regal Fireweed)

Are you sitting down? You really don’t need to be, because it shouldn’t shock anyone that a comedy called Skid Marks is pretty freaking dumb. Scratch that; it’s very freaking dumb. Skid Marks follows in the time-honored tradition of the Police Academy movies, a genre which usually finds a handsome smart-ass and his Rainbow Coalition of underachievers (the fat guy, the midget guy, the black guy, the Asian chick) setting out to prove that they don’t completely suck at their jobs (here it’s Emergency Medical Technician). Or at least suck a little less than the jerks who are trying to take their jobs. Skid Marks features more unfunny dick jokes than you would have thought could fit into one film. Then again, though, a few of them are kind of funny.

The almost unfairly charismatic Tyler Poelle stars as Rich, a happy-go-lucky EMT with Bayside Ambulatory Life Services (that’s BALS). He’s got his ragtag crew, and they spend their working hours trying to gank patients from the dastardly bastards at Downtown Intensive Care. Yup, it’s the classic struggle pitting BALS against DIC, though DIC’s Neil (a fearless actor named David Schultz) vows that “DIC will always be above BALS!” Skid Marks then concerns itself with the hijinks that ensue in the race to become the town’s sole provider of emergency medical services. Of course there’s a pretty damsel offering absolution to our hero, and of course she’ll hate him for like ten minutes because of some misunderstanding.

Skid Marks is just simple, brainless fun, as subtle as a kick to the nethers and as realistic as a silicone implant. The cast—especially Schultz, who goes, um, balls-out—appear as though they’re having a blast. I’m sure director Karl Kozak didn’t set out to make Citizen Kane II: Rosebud’s Revenge, and he totally didn’t.