August 19, 2005 A Fake Festival of Fake Films With Genuinely Dippy Titles By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN If only "Entourage" hadn't had that right-on episode set at Sundance. If only Ricky Gervais hadn't made "The Office."
If only the Sundance Channel weren't now broadcasting "Slings & Arrows," the poignant Canadian comedy about a Shakespeare theater festival. If only the "This Is Spinal Tap"/"Best in Show" school hadn't turned the tragicomic mockumentary into an art form.
Then, and only then, and then only maybe, "The Festival" - the latest offering from IFC, which begins tonight - might be considered funny, or a decent effort, or something. A fake documentary about a Telluride-like film convocation, "The Festival" has its comic heart in the right place, but the six-part series is derivative in every aspect, and it's not up to what have become the genre's exceedingly high standards.
Still, it's hard to begrudge "The Festival" much. You can readily imagine the happy night when IFC veterans of the festival circuit came up with phony indie film titles, including "Love Vigilantes," "The Meaning of Velocity" and "The Unreasonable Truth of Butterflies." You can hear them sending up, among themselves, the feeble or pompous types who turn up in knit caps at the festivals: the distributors and sponsors and actors and, of course, filmmakers. It must have been fun for them.
"My gift is to film-make," says Rufus Marquez (Nicolas Wright), an ambitious young director who in the show's conceit has a feature film at the semi-prestigious Mountain United Film Festival (M.U.F.F., naturally). Mr. Wright has a knack for the presentational, tic-driven, nervous or empty-eyed style of acting to the camera that has become the stock in trade of mockumentary comedians (see Christopher Guest, Mr. Gervais, Fred Willard). He's also nice-looking and potentially sympathetic, with his artist dreams and his life in his bipolar mother's basement (an excessively pitiful detail). Unfortunately, the series doesn't quite know whether to make him the hero or the heel.
On tonight's opening episode, he's shown being dogged by the woman making the movie about him (like Jane, the reality-show producer in "The Comeback," the pretty-girl documentarian is portrayed here as heartless). Lance (James A. Woods), the star of Rufus's "Unreasonable Truth of Butterflies," is a nitwit preener. And Rufus is further manipulated by a film-world shrew, Gigi (Sara Carlsen), whose short is called "My Vagina Scares You"; he ends up having to share a room with her.
Some even more overwritten monsters surround Rufus, including Russian mobsters and equivocal distributors, and his film seems jinxed at every turn. On the second episode, he is shown blackout drunk and falling apart. To the camera, he compares himself to Martin Sheen in "that movie, 'Apocalypse Strikes Back.' "
Hmm. Even wasted, no film person - no one at all, actually - would mistake that title. And Rufus's invocation of Mr. Sheen brings to mind "Hearts of Darkness," the documentary about "Apocalypse Now." It's a real documentary, and short on irony and parody, but no matter what your mood, it would make leagues better viewing tonight than this amateurish satire.
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