Laugh till you turn green
Global warming comedy to play at Woods Hole fest
Someday, some smart marketer is going to come up with a better way to pitch "environmentally-themed films" than simply calling them "environmentally-themed films." It's a sincere but not exactly sexy - or even vaguely provocative - come-on.
Which is a pity, because Randy Olson's "Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy," which opens the, yes, environmentally-themed Woods Hole Film Festival on Saturday, has the potential to be good, bawdy fun. Olson got a doctorate in biology from Harvard University and began making movies in 1994 as a career change. His feature "Flock of Dodos" was a lively look at the US culture wars, investigating the "intelligent design" movement in his home state of Kansas and then back on his academic stamping grounds in Cambridge.
His new "Sizzle" is mockumentary as much as documentary, complete with a cameraman who interrupts interviews to say that he thinks global warming is a scam, an endless quest for a celebrity host, and - more centrally - experts who don't agree on much of anything.
Olson will be at the 9 p.m. show along with Naomi Oreskes, a professor of science history at the University of California at San Diego and one of the film's main subjects.
The one-week festival is screening 36 features and 74 short films, and hosting four filmmakers-in-residence - director Brad Anderson ("Transsiberian"), screenwriters Jim Uhls ("Jumper," "Fight Club") and Julie Talen ("Harriet the Spy"), and producer Gill Holland - as well as the directors of most of the films being shown.
Other highlights include "Secrecy," Robb Moss and Peter Gallison's look at the risks to democracy posed by the increase in information the government deems classified, and the New England premiere of "Rooters: The Birth Of Red Sox Nation," about a group of Boston baseball fans a century and more ago known as the Royal Rooters. Interviewees include Red Sox legend Johnny Pesky, former Sox pitcher Bronson Arroyo, and journalist Peter Gammons. The movie won the award for "baseball excellence" at the second annual Baseball Film Festival (bet you didn't know that even existed) held last November at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
Executive director Judy Laster notes that the festival is an important part of the artistic community on Cape Cod, and that nearly one-quarter of the filmmakers whose work will be shown have presented at the festival before.
Ticket and schedule information is online at woodsholefilmfestival.org, or call 508-495-3456.
COOLIDGE EXEC DIRECTOR STEPPING DOWN: Joe Zina, who as executive director of the Coolidge Corner Theatre Foundation for 10 years oversaw a $2.5 million capital campaign, restoration of the theater's Art Deco details and marquee, installation of new Dolby digital surround sound systems and renovated stages, and expansion from two screens to four, will be leaving the Coolidge to consult with community cultural centers on dance and film.
Just how much the theater has blossomed under Zina can't be overstated. The addition of the two new digital screening rooms, in particular, has really cemented the theater's role as a community player; both are "designed to host premiere screenings of smaller independent films and act as 'hold-over' screens for films that continue to draw large audiences beyond original expectations," as the Coolidge puts it in a press release. The theater "has also become one of the highest grossing independently-run art cinemas in the nation," it adds - no small feat in these
An official search for a new executive director will be announced in coming weeks. The Coolidge, which opened in 1933, will be celebrating its 75th anniversary later this year.
CONGRATULATIONS: Some recent winners in the neighborhood. . . . For her screenplay "Me and Christian," Jessica DiGiacinto has won the grand prize of the Sixth Annual Screenwriting Competition held by Women in Film & Video/New England and cosponsored by the Lesley University Writing for Stage & Screen program.
DiGiacinto hails from Hollis, N.H., and got her bachelor's degree from Wheaton College before heading to New York University's Graduate Musical Theater Writing Program, which she graduated from this past spring. "Alice's Adventures Underground," her adaptation of "Alice in Wonderland," is playing through next Saturday at the children's theater Andy's Summer Playhouse, in Wilton, N.H.
DiGiacinto will be honored along with runner-up Sarah Schulman and third-place finisher Caitlin McCarthy at a free ceremony/networking event on July 31 at 7 p.m. at Lesley University's Hall Theatre. Visit wifvne.org for more information.
Meanwhile, Reading native William Lautzenheiser, a lecturer in screenwriting at Boston University, has been awarded the Golden Eagle in the student division by the CINE group for his short "Just Like It Was" (his master's thesis film). Lautzenheiser is in good company: other filmmakers who got Golden Eagle awards in their early years include Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, and Ken Burns. The movie was filmed in Massachusetts and Connecticut and is based on an incident in the Bret Lott novel "The Man Who Owned Vermont."
SCREENINGS OF NOTE: The catalog of Spanish director Pedro Almodovar will be featured at the Brattle Theatre on Thursdays starting this week. Among the films being shown are "Volver" and "Talk to Her" (this Thursday, afternoon and evening showings for both movies), "All About My Mother" (Aug. 7), and "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" (Aug. 14). The program runs through the end of August (617-876-6837 and brattlefilm.org).
And the Boston French Film Festival continues this week. You might want to pencil in Abdellatif Kechiche's "The Secret of the Grain," which Globe reviewer Wesley Morris says is the festival's high point: " 'Grain' is a big family drama centered on a blue-collar Franco-Arab clan and its couscous," he writes. "The apartments are small, the emotions big, and the story like something out of a many-chaptered literary saga." The film, he adds, "is built from the tempests that arise when the characters - most exhilaratingly, the women - assert themselves." It plays next Sunday at 12:40 p.m.
Leslie Brokaw can be reached at lbrokaw@globe.com.
