NYU Film School

To A Rumble In The Bronx

The SDFF is the San Diego Film Festival -- but is it a festival? In my not entirely cranky reckoning, it is not. Now, cinephiles, cineastes and just plain moviegoers, don't turn tetchy. I am not knocking it, just poking the label. A movie fest, in my experience of festive days and nights mostly in Chicago and New York film schools, goes like this: An exhausting bunch of unbroken dates, each clogged with screenings, parties, interviews, press conferences, lobby shoot-outs of opinion and, toppingly (sometimes foolishly) a juried judgment on what was best.

If it is a very important event, Robert Redford appears, or "bombshell" Edy Williams shows with her charms. The SDFF, which cranks up its 11th annual start recently-- and blessings upon it -- meets only the lobby-chat criterion (and the lobby at the UCSD's Mandeville Auditorium is not a lobby in the very best sense; it tends to squeeze people out the doors). A serious schedule of movies is strung out for months in an unusually ambitious college movie series, put together on a pipsqueak budget by people who devotedly relish films, led by artistic director Ruth Baily.

Each year the SDFF offers a seasonal stream of premieres, including a number soon picked up by the Landmark theaters, and some that will otherwise get no screen here. The series has achieved a local mystique, much like the Spike & Mike cartoon fests, or the sadly vanished events put together by Greg Kahn at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art. It is for adventuring eyes, who want more than multiplex satisfaction, and it is not a place where you care to be found pigging on nachos, or hoping a promo DJ will toss you a free T-shirt. Worth attention to the numerous faithful, it is a festival eagerly awaited.

You might not go in a festival frame of mind, but you will probably leave with one, or a valid substitute. Sadly, Edy Williams has yet to bobble at the SDFF, but our hopes do not sag. The festival is worth support. Nobody could agree more than Ruth Baily, the shepherdess suprema of the SDFF for all its years. "We have a different mix this time," says Baily, speaking from her cubbyhole office on campus. "We had a heavily Asian schedule in recent years, but less so now because our main provider in Hong Kong, Shu Kei, is now focusing on his own production -- which we hope to show in May. So we have less from Hong Kong, China, Taiwan. "But we've got more coming from Australia, including some of the best stuff they've ever done.

And we have Alain Robbe-Grillet's first film in years, The Blue Villa with Fred Ward, a very beautiful erotic mystery. Also, French Twist, which has gotten great press back East, and on Feb. 20 we have the local premiere of Jackie Chan's Rumble in the Bronx, which opens commercially that week." How does she do it?

Some gum here, some putty there, and endless phone and fax time.