Well, the final touches have been put on the line up for the Tribeca Film Festival. “Freakonomics,” a documentary based on the best-selling nonfiction book, written by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner will close out the festival.
It’s directed by a sort of super group of documentary filmmakers including Alex Gibney, the Academy Award winner behind, “Taxi To The Dark Side,” Morgan Spurlock, the director behind the crossover doc, “Super Size Me,” Academy Award-nominated Eugene Jarecki (“The Trials of Henry Kissinger,” “Why We Fight”), Seth Gordon (“The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters”) plus Academy Award nominee doc duo, Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing ( “Jesus Camp, “Boys of Baraka”).
It’s a pretty impeccable list of talent and the always prolific Gibney will already be giving an early sneak peek at his new doc, “My Trip to Al-Qaeda” and an unfinished preview of his documentary on former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer. All we’d need is Erroll Morris and Werner Herzog in this group and the universe might implode.
Almost all of these filmmakers’ works were listed in The Playlist’s Best Documentaries of the Decade feature which ran in December (with all due respect to my new comrades there was a lack of Frederick Wiseman in this writer’s opinion).
Also added to the Tribeca Film Festival is the world premiere of the Summit film, “Letters to Juliet,” which is a romance directed by Gary Winick, starring Amanda Seyfried (“Mamma Mia!”) and Vanessa Redgrave. It also stars Gael García Bernal, but we barely get to see him in the trailer and he’s barely mentioned in the press release we received so we assume (and sincerely hope) he has a minor role. We saw the trailer for the film recently and it essentially looks like “Dear John: The Italian Remix.”
Finally, the last edition to the festival is the world premiere of “My Own Love Song,” the follow-up to writer/director Olivier Dahan’s Edith Piaf biopic “La Vie En Rose” which made a star out of Marion Cotillard. The film stars Renee Zellweger and Forest Whitaker as a wheelchair-bound singer and her best friend who embark on a roadtrip to Memphis. The picture features new music from a guy you might know named Bob Dylan.
Tribeca 2010 runs April 21 to May 2. Hopefully they give our veteran NY writers something more than the dreaded Franklin badge.
