The Festival

Reviewed by:
Larry Dobrow

With their art-meets-commerce babble and heightened sense of self-importance, the posh worlds of Sundance and Cannes are ripe targets for satire. The Festival, though, tries so hard to be the indie-flick equivalent of The Office that it veers into numbing, hectic farce (the bad kind, not the funny kind). It boasts a promising setup: IFC hires a documentarian to chronicle the Mountain United Film Festival (M.U.F.F.—get it?) experience of first-time filmmaker Rufus Marquez. But from there, the show rehashes nearly every independent film cliché: Marquez wears silly hats and lives with his mother; angry lesbian filmmaker Gigi Wallace spits and sneers at everyone in her path; mainstream-actor-gone-indie Lance Rawly preens like a Spice Girl; etc. Frankly, it's exhausting to watch. While a handful of bits elicit out-loud guffaws, most have long since found their way into any number of other ostensibly wry, ain't-Hollywood-silly skits and shows. As a result, The Festival barely warrants a single screening.