SexAddict Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Winner of the Snakes on a Plane Award for most forthright title, Caveh Zahedi's fictionalized documentary I Am a Sex Addict has come to the big screen after fifteen years of production, setbacks, disasters and difficulties. The passage of time hasn't changed the tense of the title -- Zahedi may be recovered for years, but he's still got impossibly conflicted feelings and desires about sex -- and in many ways the slow crawl to the finish line enabled I Am a Sex Addict to have a sweep and scope that a lot of modern navel-gazing self-made films lack. 

As a subject (or leading man – the film straddles the line between the real and the re-created), Zahedi's a pretty unlikely figure: Bold but bashful, larger-than-life but small of stature, smart enough to be incredibly aware of how stupid many of his actions are. Those dichotomies run throughout the film, making I Am a Sex Addict repellent-yet-riveting: You don't want to watch Zahedi open up the aperture of the camera and spill his guts onto the frame , but he's so open -- and fascinating, and frank about his self-destruction and majestically pathetic -- that you can't help but watch. Of course, the fact that Zahedi's got a slow-fuse, deadpan delivery that makes him look like a neurotic Buster Keaton doesn't hurt his watchability. …

Stopped by the General Motors/Women in Film "cocktail reception" tonight after a day full of screenings. Worried that I was late, I arrived to find I had gotten there just in time ... to miss a series of reportedly tedious speeches, courtesy of Tribeca Film Institute execs, and a representative of the corporate sponsor. Oh well!

Once again, the biggest conversational ice breaker seemed to be, "So - is this festival disorganized enough for ya?" Emily Morse (above), who appears in Caveh Zahedi's I Am a Sex Addict, told me that she's been given the runaround about getting into a screening of that film. Morse, a noted filmmaker herself (she directed the San Francisco-mayoral-race documentary See How They Run), did point out that the Tribeca lineup seems stronger than ever - but why do they have to make actually seeing the films so darn difficult?



Also at the party: Oscar winning film editor Thelma Schoonmaker (who evaded my camera), and Beverly Hills, 90210 alum Tiffani Thiessen (seen here with her unidentified friend) who is at Tribeca with her directorial debut, a short called Just Pray.