My last day at the festival began with Waiter, a dark comedy starring, directed by and written by Alex van Warmerdam.  Like Love and Other Disasters, Waiter tries a little too hard to be clever.  But unlike Love and Other Disasters, it succeeds more than not.

I did not see Stranger Than Fiction at the festival, but these two movies seem similar.  Waiter is about Edgar, the waiter of the title, who is living a rather frustratingly bland life.  As his situation gets worse, he confronts Herman, a screenwriter who is creating Edgar’s life.  Actually, Love and Other Disasters also has this kind of meta-narrative about a relationship between the events of the film and the screenwriter who creates it.

Edgar negotiates with Herman and his wife Suzie for a better fate, but things, of course, get out of hand as a power struggle evolves between Edgar and Herman.  Because the film gets too wrapped up in plot twists, I did not find the
film to be particularly engaging, but it is interesting and occassionally funny with a somewhat surprising ending.

Monday evening:

As I mentioned before, I’ve been a Hal Hartley fan since his first full length feature, The Unbelievable Truth, so being at the Premiere of Fay Grim where Harley and stars Parker Posey, Jeff Goldblum, Saffron Burrows, Liam Aiken, and Chuck Montgomery were present was quite a thrill.

Fay Grim is a sequel to 1997′s Henry Fool.  The new film focuses on Simon Grim’s sister who married Henry Fool at the end of the first film.  As is often the case with sequels, I was concerned that the new film would be a rehash of the first one.  But Hartley’s films are always surprising and Fay Grim is no exception.  Fay Grim is a quite different film than Henry Fool.  Unlike most of Hartley’s films which take place in New York and its suburbs, Fay Grim isinternational in scope.  Fay Grim is also, by far, Hartley’s most political film.

What is the same about Fay Grim is the interesting characters, the snappy dialog, and the adventurous cinematography.  Like Henry Fool, Fay Grim has an open-ending which we can only hope means a third part.  In the Q&A, Hartley was a bitevasive about whether there would be another film with these characters.

Monday morning:

OK, Love and Other Disasters is not a particularly good movie. But most of the films I had seen up to this point had been rather heavy and/or depressions depressing, so a light British romantic comedy early Monday morning felt about right.

The basic premise is that Emily Jackson (Brittany Murphy) thinks that Paolo (Santiago Cabrera) is gay and fixes him up with her gay roomate Peter (Matthew Rhys). Of course, Paolo is straight and supposed hilarity ensues. Love and Other Disasters tries too hard to be clever. In a few spots, this cleverness works, in some spots, not so much. There are
a few good laughs along the way.

So, not a great movie, but it’s harmlessly entertaining, especially after seeing movies about crippling poverty, conspiratorial governments, and meditations regarding the meaning of life.