S’Mac and Tribeca Film Fest
One nice thing about New York that helps offset the cramped living space, high prices, miserable weather, cold people, rats and roaches is the selection of restaurants. A while back, I heard from my roommate’s sister, a New York resident of two years, about a restaurant that serves nothing but macaroni and cheese called S’Mac. There are few things in this world that I enjoy more than cheese and starch which is unfortunate because it’s pretty much about the worst stuff you can put into your body. My girlfriend and I had tickets to a Tribeca Film Fest screening this evening so we decided to check out S’Mac which was just a block away from the theater.
She went big and ordered the sample platter.
Knowing I would be downwind of her leftovers, I decided to go with a small dish of the Cajun mac’n'cheese.
The Cajun mac was awesome; there was nothing in her sample platter that I liked more, although the La Mancha was close. Who knew fennel could taste so good in mac’n'cheese?
After dinner, we killed some time sitting in tiny, cramped, over-crowded bars while waiting for our 8:45 showing of Dog Pound.
I had never been to a film festival before so I didn’t really know what to expect. For the most part, it was just like going to a regular movie except there was a little more buzz in the hallways and before the film started the French director, Kim Chapiron, and one of the featured actors, Adam Butcher, who was fantastic, were introduced. They thanked the audience for coming and said they would be available for a short Q&A session following the film’s conclusion.
Dog Pound is about a fictional juvenile correction facility in Montana. I had hoped it was going to be a documentary. Since it wasn’t, I was hoping it would at least be true-to-life and provide some type of a thought-provoking message regarding the juvenile correction system. It didn’t do that either.
Instead, the film was basically a low-budget prison movie that served viewers a king’s portion of violence and sensationalism. To that extent, it was actually pretty good. I think anyone who showed up hoping for a Tarantino-style blood bath probably left the theater pretty happy. The film held my attention most of the way but was nothing special overall. My girlfriend spent the cab ride home explaining how utterly unrealistic it was (she works in the juvenile corrections field) and how it seems unlikely that Chapiron did his homework before shooting. It made me sort of wish we had hung around for the Q&A. I would have liked to have seen how seriously he took himself. If he tried to act like the film made some social statement in regards to juvenile corrections, it would have been pretty laughable. But maybe his intent was just to make a gory prison movie and if that was the case, he should give himself a pat on the back.
At any rate, it was kind of neat watching a film that only a handful of people have ever seen while the director was in the room.
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