Screener

Tales of Downtown decline at Tribeca: The end of CBGB, the collapse of Wall Street

One of the strengths of the Tribeca Film Festival has always been its selection of documentaries, which play a prominent role in its programming. The Festival's quest for a New York connection in its films is also on display in two revealing documentaries that deal with very different aspects of the Downtown Manhattan scene: Burning Down the House, the story of the rise and fall of the legendary Bowery rock club CBGB, and American Casino, an incisive look at the short-sighted thinking and exploitation of minority communities that led to the subprime mortgage fiasco and the collapse of Wall Street.

Burning Down the House is directed by Mandy Stein, the daughter of Sire Records founder Seymour Stein and Linda Stein, the onetime manager of seminal punk band The Ramones, who was found murdered in her penthouse in October 2007. Both of her parents are interviewed in the film. On the scene at CBGB from the age of three, Mandy Stein began this project four years ago when she first learned the club was in danger of closing due to its back-rent dispute with its landlord, the Bowery Residence Committee, a homeless-outreach organization.

Opened in 1973, CBGB was the launching pad for some of rock's most influential artists of the 1970s and 80s, including The Ramones, The Police, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, Blondie and Television. Many of those colorful musicians appear in the movie, paying tribute to the club's iconoclastic founder, Hilly Kristal. There's plenty of nostalgic footage of performances and the club's dessicated decor, including its notoriously gross bathrooms (which give the men's room in Trainspotting some pungent competition).

Despite an aggressive campaign to save the club from eviction and have this "filthy hole" declared a city landmark, the fate of CBGB apparently came down to bad blood between Kristal and Muzzy Rosenblatt, the director of the Bowery Residence Committee. The club closed in October 2006 (after a final concert including Patti Smith and Blondie documented here), and now its awning and part of its zany interior are poignantly on display at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Annex in New York's Soho. Kristal died of lung cancer in August 2007. In true punk spirit, Talking Heads bassist Tina Weymouth is filmed on closing night shouting, "Whoever takes over this space is cursed!"

A curse of a different kind was cast on the many poor suckers who fell for the lure of subprime mortagages during the home-ownership frenzy that fueled the collapse of our financial system. Leslie Cockburn's aptly titled American Casino chronicles the unconscionable scam of speculation that played with and profited from the lives of naive first-time home buyers. Pointing out the illusory nature of the mortgage boom, Bloomberg reporter Mark Pittman notes, "I don't think most people really understood that they were in a casino. When you're in the Street's casino, you've got to play by their rules."

Cockburn's film contrasts the young Turks of Wall Street with a group of victims of the subprime shell game in an African-American neighborhood in Baltimore. According to the film, African-Americans were 3.8 times more likely to be given subprime loans in 2006, even though more than 60% of these same people actually qualified for less risky prime loans. One of the most affecting of the victims is Patricia McNair, an elegant clinical therapist at Johns Hopkins, whom Cockburn follows throughout her failed attempt to hold onto her home.

By contrast, an anonymous Bear Stearns analyst points out that agents along the real-estate value chain were always paid upfront and had "no skin in the game." In fact, some speculators profited handsomely from betting against people's ability to pay off their loans.

The film at times gets too caught up in the minutiae of financial schemes for anyone without an MBA degree, but it's an often devastating history of the greed, cynicism and short-term myopia that got us all into this current mess. "The Party's Over" plays sardonically on the soundtrack; let's hope American Casino adds to the sobriety.

Tribeca preview: 'In the Loop' and 'Still Walking'

The eighth annual Tribeca Film Festival, founded by Robert De Niro and his producing partner Jane Rosenthal to help reinvigorate Lower Manhattan after the Sept. 11, 2001 attack, opens tomorrow night with the world premiere of Woody Allen's Whatever Works. Allen's return to his native city after a movie retreat to London and Barcelona is an appropriate kickoff for this very New York-oriented event, even if L.A. transplant Larry David is the ultra-curmudgeonly mouthpiece for Allen this time out. The comedy, which has the bald, aging David marrying 21-year-old Evan Rachel Wood, may offer some queasy parallels to Allen's personal life, but its general attitude is that when it comes to romantic relationships...hey, whatever works.

The Tribeca Festival itself has been taking a hard look at what works (and doesn't) and has slimmed down considerably from its past excess of screening choices. The Fest has been criticized for not being selective enough (especially in its programming of low-budget indies), and for being rather too eager to host Hollywood fluff (the Olsen Twins' New York Minute in 2004 being an especially regrettable choice). The jury's still out on whether something like Nia Vardalos' My Life in Ruins, this year's closing night attraction, is festival-worthy, but this edition's trimmer schedule of 85 features (including 45 world premieres) and 46 shorts, seems to have a healthy ratio of strong and intriguing contenders.

I've already seen two exceptional Tribeca selections, both from IFC Films and both slated for release this summer: In the Loop and Still Walking.

The BBC production In the Loop is one of the most consistently funny films I've seen in years. The feature debut of director and co-writer Armando Iannucci, this droll political satire is an offshoot of an award-winning BBC TV series, "The Thick of It," which centered on a British government minister and his team of wily spin doctors. For the big-screen incarnation, the scope widens to explore the relationship between Britain and the U.S. in the leadup to an unnamed war (think Iraq).

In a radio interview, the incompetent Minister for International Development, Simon Foster (Tom Hollander), declares that war is "unforeseeble," then muddies the waters to a murky shade when he tries to revise his comment in a subsequent encounter with the press, proclaiming that Britain "must be ready to climb the mountain of conflict." Before long, Simon becomes a pawn in the campaign of State Department honcho Linton Barwick (David Rasche) to fire up support for an invasion in the Middle East.

The film is a true transatlantic ensemble effort, with great comic opportunities for its entire Brit and U.S. cast. Peter Capaldi (Local Hero) is hilarious as the volatile, profane Director of Communications for the Prime Minister, who takes the seething insult to a new level of artistry. Mimi Kennedy, best known from TV's "Dharma and Greg," shines as a high-powered, liberal-leaning diplomat with major dental problems, and James Gandolfini, Tony Soprano himself, gets to show his comic side as a general skeptical of the push toward war. (Well-read, he calls himself "the Gore Vidal of the Pentagon" until someone notes that Vidal is gay.)

Iannucci's film is partly improvised, which is hard to fathom since the witticisms here seem to flow endlessly. The performances straddle that fine line between the absurd and the utterly credible, giving the impression that this outrageous satire isn't really that far from the awful truth. In the Loop debuts at Tribeca on April 27 and opens in theatres on July 24.

IFC was also smart to acquire Still Walking, the latest film from accomplished Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-Eda (Nobody Knows, After Life). This subtle, poignant and charming drama all takes place in one day, as a 40-year-old art restorer returns for a visit to his elderly parents' home with his new wife, a widow, and her ten-year-old son. The occasion is the 15-year anniversary of the accidental drowning death of his older brother.

Nothing much happens plotwise apart from the tensions revealed within this family of complex and often ornery individuals. Over the course of the film they bicker, make tentative connections, and ultimately reveal the sad distance that will be regretted once the elders are gone forever. Kore-Eda wrote the film in response to the death of his own parents, and there's a refreshing, clear-eyed lack of sentimentality to this portrait that is yet a moving reflection on mortality."We're not normal," one character observes of the family's dysfunction. "These days we're not abnormal," another replies.

Still Walking debuts at Tribeca on April 28 and opens in theatres on August 21.