A Snapshot of the 63rd New York Film Festival Plus a Detour to Take in a Broadway Show

Part 1: A Brief History of the 

NYFF and Me 

Left: full house at the Sept 29 screening of House of Dynamite

The last time I attended the New York Film Festival was in 2003, so I think it's fair to say it's been awhile. 

This year, the 63-year-old festival began on Sept 26 and runs through Oct 13, but I was only able to catch four-days worth of films. I was mostly in town to see a play, Waiting for Godot with Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, and took advantage of the timing to add the festival to my itinerary. Still, I caught more features (eight) and fewer shorts (none) than in the past. The NYFF doesn't bundle shorts with features anymore; instead they programmed seven shorts packages, five associated with the more adventurous Currents section. 

In 2003, I caught five features and four shorts: Denys Arcand's Academy Award-winning comedy-drama The Barbarian Invasions with Dominique Monféry's 58-years-in-the-making Destino, a Disney animated short co-written by Salvador Dalí; Johnnie To's PTU, a rousing policier, with Pascal Lahmani's mismatched WWII-era short From Head to Toe; Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Distant, a heartbreaking character study, with Charles Officer and Ingrid Veninger's experimental short Urda/Bone; and George Hickenlooper's Mayor of the Sunset Strip, a downbeat if engaging portrait of KROQ DJ and alt-rock tastemaker Rodney Bingenheimer, with Streetwise filmmaker Martin Bell's Twins, a documentary short made with his wife, photographer Mary Ellen Mark (both Hickenlooper and Mark have since passed away). 

Right: Mehmet Emin Toprak (1974-2002) in Distant

I missed 2003's opening night film, Clint Eastwood's Boston thriller Mystic River, which I caught later that year, but I made it to the closing night film, Alejandro González Iñárritu's 21 Grams, which screened at Avery Fisher Hall (since renamed David Geffen Hall). The filmmaker was there, along with stars Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, and Benicio Del Toro–two of whom are now starring in P.T. Anderson's One Battle After Another. This was in the pre-smartphone / pre-digital camera days–for me, at any rate–so I have no photographic proof of any of this. 

As for Iñárritu's jigsaw-shaped film, a popular screenplay structure at the time, I wasn't crazy about it–the last film of his I truly enjoyed was Amores Perros, his 2000 directorial debut–but I was impressed by the performances, Penn's especially, and spotting Lou Reed in the audience was a nice bonus. 

Sean Penn would go on to win an Oscar for Mystic River, which also received a nomination for Best Picture. This year's opener was Luca Guadagnino's After the Hunt with Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, and Andrew Garfield. It sounded too much like something I had seen before, so I wasn't too sad to miss it, not least since every Guadagnino film interests me less than the one before, despite the fact that I loved 2015's A Bigger Splash, his idiosyncratic update of Jacques Deray's La Piscine, which actually betters the original in some respects, especially the character of Penelope (Dakota Johnson taking over from Jane Birkin), who becomes a more fully-rounded human being.

Left: I was there! Del Toro, Watts, Penn, and Melissa Leo at the 41st NYFF opening night

This year's closer is Bradley Cooper's Is This Thing On? with Will Arnett and Laura Dern, which looks like a less ambitious, if possibly more enjoyable film than Maestro, his misbegotten Leonard Bernstein biopic, though I quite liked his American take on A Star Is Born, more for Lady Gaga's warmhearted performance than anything else.

This year, I purchased tickets for four films in advance, a fairly arduous process, as it turns out, though I have no memory of the 2003 ticketing process. It took nearly two hours this time around to complete my order, in part because I lost my place in the queue and had to start all over again. By the time I got in, every other film I wanted to see was sold out online.

Members of Film Society at Lincoln Center surely have better luck online through pre-sales, but I don't live in New York, and nor can I afford to visit as often as I would like, so a membership wouldn't do me much good. 

Right: ticketholder line for the second screening of the Bruce Springsteen biopic--the Boss didn't show up for this one

Fortunately, NYFF holds tickets at the door for each screening, and I got to each one super-early, which meant a lot of standing around, but also a lot of fun people-watching–it's New York, after all–and the opportunity to chat with fellow filmgoers. The sellouts turned out to be a blessing in disguise. I left Seattle ridiculously early Sunday morning in order to get into NYC well before the 6:15pm screening of Kelly Reichardt's The Mastermind, but the plane was late, JFK was a mess, and my shuttle made a lot of stops on the way from Queens to Manhattan–yet no stops on the way back. 

By the time I checked into my Lower East Side Airbnb, the film had already begun. I'm glad I didn't waste money on a ticket I wouldn't have been able to use, not least since they start at $30 for new films and $20 for archival releases. Considering that Reichardt had to cancel her Seattle appearance with First Cow, due to Covid-19, I fear I'm forever fated to miss her.

Next up: Part II: Eight Films in Four Days

More information about the 63rd NYFF at this link. Images from me (House of Dynamite screening and the line for Bruce Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere at Alice Tully Hall), Film Society at Lincoln Center (Distant and 21 Grams photocall), and Posterati (NYFF 41 poster signed by Junichi Taki).