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in no special order except for #1

awesomest ever wife/best friend
kittens
the extra time we had with Theo
just being here
terrific friends
being able to move both sides of my face
being able to hand wash a heavy bowl without wincing
family stuff trending upwards
having a job at all
having a completely awesome job
being part of a great team
opportunities to make things better for people
serious challenges
a roof over my head and food on the table
our completely awesome home
really good health insurance
opportunities to worry about stuff at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy
steel frame bicycles
being able to ride 125 miles in one day
health
ridiculously awesome recording and performing experiences beyond the merit of my talent
punk fffffffn rock
the Marshall/Gibson pairing
the internets
the internets in my pocketssss
the freshly repaved stretch of Mass Ave
coffee
good coffee
MBTA, as flawed as it is
olives, oranges, bananas, and other perfect foods
high-brow lit’rature
not-so-high-brow lit’rature
a short vacation

If, like me, you somehow managed to miss the late-night-talk-show-host-wars, Rodman Flender’s film will catch you up, but here’s the gist, as I see it: O’Brien turns down what for many would be the gig of a lifetime, and walks away with a fat cash settlement, the massed goodwill of the Internets, and an injunction restricting him from TV appearances for a little while. What to do with the no-tv-time? As the title of this documentary informs you, he definitely can’t stop, so he mounts a tour in which, somewhat oddly, he mixes comedy with live classic rock & soul*; this film basically documents that tour from the germination of the idea through the last shows.

I certainly didn’t dislike this movie, but I also didn’t love it. I think what bothers me most about it is that it’s just not very surprising. It certainly creates the impression of candor (Flender corroborated this in the Q&A: he said O’Brien did not ask for unflattering material to be cut). But the putatively candid O’Brien is more-or-less as you might imagine him: he’s engaging and interesting (well, duh), he’s ambitious and driven (again, duh), he’s funny off-stage (so there are definitely some laughs in the film), he seems like he’d be a challenging co-worker (his long-suffering assistant Sona Movsesian perhaps emerges as the real hero), and he has a very ambivalent push-pull relationship with his fans (throughout the film he goes above and beyond the call of celeb duty to be nice to strangers, then expresses resentment afterward).

Of course, this observation is more about the nature of the film’s subject than the merits of the film, which I thought did a good job of presenting this not-terribly-startling picture of a big TV star. It’s paced well, and I think Flender selected enough moments from his copious footage to build an impression of character without having too many sequences that illuminated O’Brien in exactly the same way. (Arguably, the most redundant moments in terms of character-building are among the funniest, so they don’t seem problematic.) I would have put in somewhat less of the live music footage, but that’s probably just me.

And if I were a big-time fan of O’Brien I might well have totally loved it.

* It would be easy, but unduly harsh, to make a crack like “as a singer and guitarist O’Brien is a pretty good comedian”; in fact he seems sturdily competent at both. But I can’t imagine he’d have had a career that led to selling out mid-sized theatres if that had been his main gig.

I knew nothing about Ferran Adrià’s avant garde restaurant El Bulli before going into this screening, which I think was fine state to start with, but it’s immediately apparent that much of the film is about the process by which Adrià and his team craft the menu for the next season. Director Gereon Wetzel pulls the viewer deep into this process, demonstrating elaborate carefully controlled series of experiments with minor variations. Simultaneously the viewer is held at a remove: critical decisions about foodstuffs to be prominently featured, and the about the evolving theme of the menu as a whole, are made off-camera. More obviously there’s a distance intrinsic to the medium: the viewer can’t taste the elements the chefs are working with.

Adrià’s creations are intensely sculptural — there’s a sequence of the entire menu near the end, and many of the dishes look positively otherworldly. While talking about this film with friends the other day I jokingly suggested that Adrià seemed almost to be striving for a platonic ideal in which the diners don’t actually eat the food, but just visually appreciate the dishes in sequence as they appear and disappear, like an art gallery brought to your table.

This was ridiculous and wrong-headed, and I’m sorry I said it. But it has a germ of an idea that I think is much more on-target: El Bulli is creating art with food as a medium. I suspect that to Adrià a yard stick of “this tastes good” is as naive and uninteresting as “this painting is pretty,” and perhaps at El Bulli, the notion a meal provides sustenance is about as useful as expecting modern art to communicate specific concrete information.

I found Wetzel’s film very thought-provoking, and much more engaging than I expected to. One caution: if you make a drinking game of imbibing something every time Adrià tastes something and looks pensive, you will surely die of alcohol poisoning.

Writer/director/co-star Michael Tully’s dark and funny dysfunctional family tale Septien is tricky to talk about without spoilers, because some of the fun of it is in how it sets up a number of expectations and only fulfills some of them. In the Q&A session after the screening, Tully, who is also a professional film critic, talked about targeting his film for festivals. He wanted to jar audiences jaded after a day of screenings into alertness and leave an indelible impression. And he didn’t want festival bookers to be choosing between his film and some other similar film (e.g., “which of these two po-mo teen vampire satires are we going to book? we can’t screen both”).

Maybe the highest compliment/most useful thing I can say about Septien is that after seeing it, I didn’t want to go straight to another screening. I wanted to let it percolate around in my head without competition.

I didn’t think the documentary shorts program we saw was quite as impressive overall as the narrative shorts program, but I enjoyed it a lot. The unifying theme here was character studies, most of which offer a surprise (which I will not spoil).

Charles Fairbanks’ “Irma” spends a good proportion of its running length on the titular figure’s laborious journey to work (she has trouble with her legs). I thought the framing and pacing of her trip was terrific, by the time she reached her destination I was desperately curious to know what was worth all that effort, and pretty well astonished by the answer.

I really did not expect to like Matt Morris’s “Mr. Happy Man,” about Johnny Barnes, who stands at a busy intersection in Bermuda, and waves to people and tells them he loves them. I was quite unexpectedly won over — it’s neither saccharine or preachy, and thanks to its 11-minute run time, it doesn’t overstay its welcome.

Alex Mallis’ “The Dentist” was working for me as a portrait of a man with logorrhea, so a detour in his mildly unusual hobby and quite unusual venue for indulging it took me unawares.

Catherine Van Campen’s “Flying Anne” was probably the most visually striking film I saw in the entire festival - the subtlety of color in the cinematography gives it an almost other-worldly quality. Anne lives with a medical challenge, and I thought the treatment of it veered just a tiny bit toward afterschool special educational territory. But the humanity and humor of Anne’s interactions with her family and schoolmates is warm and vivid.

Sean Dunne’s “The Bowler” is another logorrheic dude — and also a professional hustler.

Lisa Mannhiemer’s “The Contract” is about an arrangement Beverly Charpentier enters into with Catherine Robbe-Grillet.* How to describe this without spoilers? It’s tricky. Mannhiemer describes the contract in terms that initially leave some details vague, in a way calculated, I think, to raise questions in the viewer’s mind. It’s simultaneously subtle and intense.
* not particularly relevant to this short, but yes, the writer Catherine Robbe Grillet, wife of writer Alain Robbe-Grillet)

J. Clay Tweel’s documentary about the competition for “Teen World Champion” at the World Magic Seminar in Las Vegas is structured similarly to the other quirky-characters-in-a-competition films (for instance The King of Kong, which Tweel also worked on). We meet and follow several of the contestants as they rehearse and evolve their acts for the competition. There are not a lot of explicit “here’s how the trick works” reveals, but because many of the illusions rely on the performer being at the right angle relative to the audience there are several moments where the performers’ misdirection doesn’t quite work for the camera angle, so the alert viewer may pick up some sleight-of-hand moves.

Tweel offers an informative look at a world I know almost nothing about. I was interested and engaged throughout, but I also felt a little manipulated — the young magicians’ stories are edited in a way that pretty clearly defines who you should be rooting for. I felt like just a little more subtlety would have strengthened the film.

So get this: Roughly forty years ago Bobby Liebling put together an almost legendary heavy rock band called Pentagram — worthy successors to Blue Cheer and Black Sabbath. For various reasons, generally self-inflicted, but not about the quality of their music, they never got a big-time record deal, despite some heart-breaking near misses. Flash forward to roughly the present: rock devotee Sean “Pellet” Pelletier stumbles across a self-released Pentagram album in a record bin; when he plays it he’s blown away. He makes it his mission to find Liebling and help him get back on stage and in the studio. Film-makers Don Argott and Demian Fenton (who among other features made “Rock School,” sort of a real-life version of “School of Rock”) are there to film it. In these broad strokes it sounds a bit like Anvil: The Story of Anvil. In some ways the comparison is useful; like “Anvil,” enjoying heavy metal is not a prerequisite to enjoying this film (there are just a handful of snippets of the band to demonstrate that they’re the real thing) ; like “Anvil,” it’s awesome. But the mood of the two films is very different. Anvil’s leader Steve Kudlow functioned in the real world outside his band. Liebling didn’t: he’s a complete wreck at the start of this Last Days Here — he literally looks like he’s at death’s door. And although Liebling’s personal odyssey offers some humor, it also has pretty harrowing moments. It’s a compelling, suspenseful story.

Overall I really liked writer-director Chris Brown’s dysfunctional family black comedy. The writing is flavorful and interestingly paced, and the performances are terrific. Collette Keen is particularly fine as the domineering, obscenity-spewing matriarch Edie, whom one of the commenters in the post-screening Q&A session described as a “great new screen villain.” It’s a hilarious, over-the-top performance, but she grounds it enough to keep the character credible; I thought things like “how could a mother say that to one of her kids?” rather than “no mother would say that to one of her kids.” Nick Frangione turns in one of the film’s most nuanced performances as pot-head prospective son-in-law Todd; the audiences sympathies evolve more with him than with other characters.
I found the ending a tiny bit problematic; it’s effective, but it’s also telegraphed well in advance, and might not be the bravest of all choices.