Photos courtesy Tribeca Film Festival
Clockwise from top left: Images from "Elite Squad," "Savage Grace," "Charly," "War, Inc.," "Redbelt" and "SqueezeBox!"
I never know quite what to say about the Tribeca Film Festival, which launched its 2008 edition on Wednesday night with the premiere of the Tina Fey-Amy Poehler comedy "Baby Mama." Maybe that's because the festival's reason for existing has never seemed entirely clear. How do "Baby Mama" and the Wachowski siblings' "Speed Racer," this year's Hollywoodized red-carpet premieres, fit into a festival that encompasses sports movies, experimental New York documentaries, unknown art films from Eastern Europe and the Arab world, and a collection of would-be art-house hits vacuumed up from other festivals?
Maybe it's a dumb question. Those things stick together because they're all part of a large, diverse and incoherent film festival that clogs up Manhattan during the very nicest spring weather and fleetingly captures the industry's attention before all the film-biz bigwigs jet off to Cannes. I've opined before that Tribeca got so big so fast because its very scale has given its founders and organizers a sense of purpose and self-justification. In New York, bigness begets bigness, which equates to importance. Call it the Steinbrenner principle, which drives the New York Yankees to spend -- and make -- more money than any other sports franchise, albeit without notable success in recent years.