declaration of independence Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Sure, you could travel to Sundance in the dead of winter and suffer frostbite for your trouble, or visit any one of dozens of conveniently-located festivals in the US screening independent films. But doesn't it sound more exciting and exotic to hop on a cross-Atlantic overnight flight so you can arrive in Swinging London just as the brand-new Declaration of Independence Film Festival gets underway? (Gotta love the cheekiness of the name, though the logo is a bit abstract for my taste.) Friday, June 1 marks the first day of screenings for the inaugural edition of the fest, which promises "the very best in new independent cinema from the USA and Canada." Many of the films are receiving their International Premiere (i.e., screening for the first time outside their native country) and a number are still awaiting distribution deals in the US, so this looks like a great opportunity for Londoners and stray cinema tourists to catch up.

For a first-time fest, the programmers assembled a very decent line-up. Of the features, Paul Fox's Everything's Gone Green and Jeff Lipsky's Flannel Pajamas have both been released in the US; other titles that I've seen and can recommend include Reg Harkema's Monkey Warfare (an entertaining comedy/drama about aging Canadian bohemians), Daniel Casey's The Death of Michael Smith (intriguing, stylish, sometimes confusing mystery/crime drama), and Matthew Nourse's The Pacific and Eddy (which I haven't seen, but it's "filmmaking haiku" according to Variety). Among the documentaries, Kim enjoyed Darius Goes West: The Roll of His Life when it played at AFI Dallas; the others are less familiar to me, but the subject matter (including musicians, comedians, lottery winners, a civil rights attorney, and real-life Mexican superheroes) is nicely varied. Check out the festival's web site for more details.

Few people today remember what Nathan Hale is famous for. Even in my home state of Connecticut, where he's officially recognized as our State Hero, he is probably often thought of as just another one of the many Revolutionary War patriots we learned about in high school. Perhaps you have a good enough memory to link him with his most famous quote, "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country" (which may have been actually ripped off from a contemporary play)? Well, don't worry if you haven't held on to your history book knowledge; that is what we have Hollywood for. Warner Bros. will be producing a biopic about Hale, based on M. William Phelps' upcoming book "For the Sake of Liberty: America's First Spy."

I'll watch just about any movie set during the American Revolution -- heck, I even enjoy The Patriot -- so I'll be looking forward to this. Even though it's being produced by one of the men responsible for Wild Wild West (Barry Josephson), as long as it features Rebels versus Red Coats, I'm down. I'm actually curious to see how the film depicts Hale's first and only espionage mission, an undercover operation that ended tragically with his hanging. The only versions of the story I've read, which are short, textbook writings, make him seem, in my opinion, to have been an awful spy. After all, his cover was blown and he was found out rather quickly. Phelps' new biography may shed some new light on what actually went down, but regardless, Hale was something of a failure, though a very heroic failure nonetheless. The studio may want to cast an actor who doesn't have a reputation for being a chameleon.