The Underside of a Film Festival, Where Some Dark Treasures Dwell
By MIKE HALE
Published: April 22, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/movies/23cinemania.html (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/movies/23cinemania.html)
For several weeks now friends have been asking for Tribeca Film Festival advice: What about "My Trip to Al-Qaeda"? Is "Micmacs" any good? How did they make a movie out of "Freakonomics"?
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"Ticked-Off ->-bleeped-<-s With Knives" and "Spork" belong to a peculiarly American genre, the politically correct comedy of inclusion. Israel Luna's "->-bleeped-<-s" earned some prefestival publicity when the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation said the film was misleading and exploitative and called for it to be withdrawn. It's hard to argue with "exploitative," given that the film is quite consciously a Quentin Tarantino-style, mock-exploitation exercise complete with scratchy reel changes. The banter among the transgender heroines is funny; the lurid revenge-fantasy violence, not so much.