Life in Flight should prove to any aspiring screenwriter that you don't necessarily have to have an original story in order to get a screenplay made. In the film, which debuted at Tribeca on Sunday, first-time writer / director Tracey Hecht tells the tale of a man who's supposedly living the good life, but it's not the one he wants. And it takes meeting a young, vivacious woman for him to fully realize it.

Heard that story before? Sure you have, probably dozens of times. You've seen it in goofy romantic comedies from The Seven-Year Itch to Joe Versus the Volcano as well as "indie" dramas like Garden State. But good writing and acting always trumps originality of story, and Life in Flight has both, though there's still room for improvement.

Give Joshua Seftel some credit; he didn't pull any punches on War, Inc. In his first feature film, written by star/producer John Cusack, Jeremy Pisker, and Mark Leyner, Seftel attempts to make a scathing commentary on the War on Terror, the privatization of the military, the commercialization of societies all over the world, and other shenanigans. In a former life, Seftel was a former network news producer, and became known around Hollywood circles for directing documentaries like Breaking the Mold: The Kee Malesky Story.

He was nice enough to speak to me about the experience from a very blue room at the Tribeca Film Festival press office. Text and video are after the jump.

Photographers, journalists and casual television watchers alike went into frenzies late last year when the Sex and the City team reunited all across New York for the feature-length version of the hit series. Whether or not you're a fan, it's hard to deny that Sex and the City qualifies as one of those event films, if only because it puts a definitive cap on the six seasons when the show became a phenomenon. It's automatically a quintessential New York film, belonging to a separate class from any number of movies that come out each year incidentally featuring New York that could take place anywhere else.

For that reason, you'd imagine that the movie would celebrate the town of its title with a glitzy New York premiere at some big media affair, of which there is never a shortage. Oddly enough, the Los Angeles Times is reporting that Sex and the City might premiere in London, of all places. London? Really? When Spider-Man 3 opened last year, the Tribeca Film Festival dedicated an entire week to the webslinger with large scale events throughout New York's five boroughs. Considering all that Sex and the City owes to New York -- its entire legacy, really -- the idea of fleeing to Europe first sounds a little confused. Then again, I never understood the appeal of this show anyway, but that's just me. Right?

One festival closes, another opens. As we begin to ramp up coverage of this year's 60th Cannes we're also putting to bed the Tribeca fest, which wrapped up about a week and a half ago. Overall, it was a fun but somewhat odd year for the festival with awards and recognition unexpectedly going to new filmmakers like Fred Durst and some of the shorts programs like Express Stops Only getting as much ink and praise as the major features. It was a year noticeably short on star vanity projects, unless you count Rosario Dawson's Descent and two Sarah Michelle Gellar movies, and it was also a good year for documentaries, with Jerabek, Brando and The Workshop all being talked about throughout the festival. If you were asleep at the wheel for the past few weeks, here now is a recap of the Tribeca reviews, interviews and events that myself and Erik were able to bring you coverage of this year.


REVIEWS

A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory (Hot Docs)
Brando
The Cake Eaters
Charlie Bartlett
Chops
Descent
Express Stops Only
Eye of the Dolphin
Fraulein
Gardener of Eden
The Grand
Impy's Island
The Killing of John Lennon
Live!
Mood Enhancer
Napoleon and Me
The Poughkeepsie Tapes
Purple Violets
Rise: Blood Hunter
Taxidermia (Philly FF)
This is England
Watching the Detectives
West 32nd
The Workshop

Depending on your point of view, The Workshop, a documentary that played at this year's Tribeca fest, is either comedy or horror. A liberal version of Jesus Camp, the film introduces us to a radical California cult where sexual libertines, alien abductee-types and other weirdos aggregate to listen to the ludicrous preachings of a guru called Paul Lowe, who, with his British accent, toothpick limbs and long white hair, looks like the last surviving roadie for Humble Pie. His loosey-goosey seminars, conducted at a woodsy retreat somewhere off the path, are pure credit card spiritualism, with tubby boomers and glassy-eyed seekers of enlightenment all sitting enraptured while Lowe dispenses fortune cookie-deep aphorisms like "nothing ever happens in the future -- it's all now." Those who attend are also encouraged to get nude at will and offer up their partners for sex swapping, which is obviously the major draw for both them and us the viewers. In fact, you could argue that The Workshop is little more than an episode of HBO's Real Sex expanded to feature length.

The film was directed and is narrated by Jamie Morgan, whose objectivity is questionable at best, since he was actually a devotee of Lowe. Perhaps the most significant aspect of the cult -- the extent to which it is a haven not only for sexual exhibitionists but also for UFO crackpots -- is an aspect which Morgan does touch on in the film, but in a very quick, perfunctory, 'nothing to see here' kind of way that makes you wonder if alien hoodoo isn't in fact a primary feature of Lowe's teachings, and is being brushed under the rug. Most of the running time is devoted to exploring and explaining the sexual underpinnings of the cult -- how getting naked and screwing everyone you meet can make you a better person and more in touch with the universe. Those who follow Lowe's line are told throughout the film, for example, that if they get naked they will rid themselves of shame, and if they let someone else sleep with their significant other, they will rid themselves of jealousy and possessiveness and so on.