L.A. Film Fest

I’ve been living in Southern California 14 years and never got hot and bothered about the Los Angeles Film Festival. Don’t know why that is.

This year’s L.A. Film Fest jumped off yesterday. (Check out Tambay Obenson’s blog post about it.) There are a few items I’d like to see.

Embedded below are trailers for three festival films. (More are up at the L.A. Film Fest YouTube channel.)

The top trailer is for “Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story,” a documentary about the Republican strategist who taught Karl Rove the techniques of hatchet-man politics.

(Atwater created the most notorious negative ad of the 1988 presidential campaign.)

Lee Atwater was denounced by Democrats as a race-baiter... yet he loved to jam the blues with B.B. King. He ended up dying of brain cancer, but not before apologizing for his hardball tactics and bemoaning the “ruthless ambition” amok in American life.

The middle trailer is for “American Son,” a drama about a young Marine’s last 96 hours at home before deploying to Iraq. It stars young celeb Nick Cannon, whose acting in “Drumline” I liked. If Cannon can pull off this role, it’ll lift his movie career to another level.

Bottom trailer: “Made in America,” a documentary about South L.A.’s black gang culture, directed by Stacy Peralta (“Dogtown and Z-Boys”).

It doesn’t look like any kind of fresh take on the subject... but that’s irrelevant. I learned everything there is to know about the Crips and the Bloods from Peggy Seltzer. ;^)

Anyways... if you’re in SoCal, check the festival schedule for screening times.