The East Lansing Film Festival - ELFF

Free tickets

This article was posted on Tue, Sep 26 2006

Deliver our tickets to Wells Hall - watch films for free…

Every weekend of the ELFS Film Series, I need people to take tickets at Wells Hall for the 7pm and 9:15pm shows. If you sign up to do this quite enjoyable task (it is great to have people come to the films), you not only get into that film for free but can get into the next ELFS film for free. That is 2 films for free. If you become a reliable regular and collect tickets 15 times, then you get a pass to the 10th annual East Lansing Film Festival, March 21 - 29, 2007.

The dates this fall for collecting tickets are the following:

September 29, 30, October 1 at 7pm & 9:15pm
October 17, 18, 19 at 7pm ONLY
October 27, 28, 29 at 7pm & 9:15pm
November 3, 4, 5 at 7pm & 9:15pm
November 17, 18, 19 at 7pm & 9:15pm.
WHAT A DEAL! Just contact me at 336-5802 or email at .

See you at the movies,

Susan

Wordplay

This article was posted on Tue, Sep 05 2006

The East Lansing Film Society begins Wednesday, September 27 with the fascinating documentary, WORDPLAY. The film will be shown at the Hannah Commmunity Center at 7:30pm only. On Friday, Saturday and Sunday, September 29, 30, and October 1, WORDPLAY will be shown at Wells Hall. The showtimes are 7:00pm and 9:15pm.

‘Wordplay’ is near letter-perfect
By Michael Sragow
Sun Movie Critic
Originally published June 30, 2006
A-

Like the crossword puzzles it celebrates, the documentary Wordplay is a small triumph of infusing personality into formula. Director Patrick Creadon and producer Christine O’Malley mold their film around a handful of puzzle-solvers anticipating the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Stamford, Conn. But even if you think you never want to see another fact-based or fictional feature that builds to an election, an academic test or a sports championship, Wordplay holds you with its craftiness, its playfulness and, best of all, the bounteous bonhomie of its puzzle-makers and crossword addicts.

The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament is part pressure cooker, part homecoming weekend. It’s a jamboree, complete with a talent show and a troubadour, a Little Rock, Ark., judge named Vic Fleming, who strums guitar and sings original songs such as “If You Don’t Come Across (I’m Gonna Be Down).” Started to promote the opening of the Marriott Hotel in Stamford in 1978, it now attracts hundreds of players who return year after year. They come from all walks of life - one top contender, Al Sanders, is a project manager at Hewlett-Packard in Colorado, another, Jon Delfin, is a New York audition-room pianist - and many mark the crossroads of their lives with the time they spend in Stamford. As crossword constructor Merl Reagle quips, “It’s a family reunion. It’s the screwed-up crossword family getting together again.”

In our pop culture, which too often associates literacy with snootiness and braininess with weirdness, it’s refreshing to see a movie that emphasizes the diversity and the shared humanity of people who delight in words. The supremely sharp and likable Jon Stewart helps set the tone when he says, of tournament director and New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz, “When you imagine ‘Crossword Guy,’ you imagine someone who’s 13 to 14 inches tall ... [but] he’s the Errol Flynn of crossword puzzling.”

Shortz, who took over the Times crossword in 1993, reads 60 to 75 submissions a week and writes or rewrites half the clues to the published ones. He made the Times crossword more eclectic and frolicsome, and he exudes the amused, flexible intelligence that holds the film together. He’s the Spirit of Crossword Puzzles Present. He may not contain multitudes, like Walt Whitman, but he connects to multitudes. He’s thrilled to collaborate with other creative people, including master crossword constructor Reagle, a burly, bearded man with a humming cranium and a wry sense of his own commitment to wordplay.

Creadon and O’Malley remind us that the success of documentaries often rests on shrewdness and cunning. They pull off a coup by arranging for Reagle to build and Shortz to run a puzzle centered on the two words, “word play.” Then they record a handful of loyal puzzle-solvers trying to crack it. These puzzlers include Stewart, former President Bill Clinton and documentary-maker Ken Burns (The Civil War). Each has a distinct attitude and point of attack toward puzzling: Stewart uses it to prime his gray matter and get his creative juices running, Clinton to clear his mind, be in the moment and have fun. Burns sees the grid as a reflection of street grids, so when he fills in the boxes he reaffirms his place in man’s urban chronicle (how perfect for a historian!).

Former Times ombudsman Daniel Okrent says he keeps a record of his puzzle-solving to chart his deteriorating brain function; New York Yankee pitcher Mike Mussina compares the drive to finish a puzzle to the drive to finish a game, and talks about pulling all his teammates into the activity.

And the pure crossword celebrities are equally compelling, if not more so. In a transcendent passage, pianist Delfin describes playing a piece of music he knows and loves ("It Might as Well Be Spring") for a singer who knows it and loves it as well as he does. Without even trying, Delfin defines how accompaniment becomes art when it heightens two people’s instincts and takes them to unexpected places.

Miraculously, playing a solitary game that pits them against each other, Delfin, Sanders and the rest of the tournament’s contestants achieve the same sort of aesthetic fellowship. Right before the final joust, the competitors ranked in a three-way tie protest that one should be ahead on points. Their bond goes beyond the joys of deductive thinking and verbal dexterity. They revive old-fashioned sportsmanship: They genuinely appreciate each other’s skill and enthusiasm, regardless of background.

Tyler Hinman, an unassuming, gung-ho college whiz from Rensselaer Polytech, reacts with genuine astonished pain to the mistake of an older family man. One-time champion Ellen Ripstein, who also twirls baton, wins the respect from her peers that she couldn’t get from a past boyfriend. Has any recent film, fact or fiction, been as refreshingly casual about a character’s gay identity as this film is about top-ranked puzzle-maker and solver Trip Payne? He appears to be, in his own jumpy way, a blessedly happy man.

Creadon and O’Malley keep their film visually alive - they split the screen, mix formal portraits with catch-as-catch-can footage, and blow up and illuminate passages of puzzles so we can feel we’re in on the solutions. The individual biographies may be too sketchy. But treating the contestants as characters in the film’s own gridlike pattern bequeaths them an idiosyncratic dignity. They become part of a practice and history of mental sport. You want them to keep on playing.

Wordplay (IFC) A documentary featuring competitors in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, Will Shortz, Jon Stewart and Bill Clinton. Directed by Patrick Creadon. Rated PG. Time 85 minutes.

Hannah Commmunity Center at 7:30pm only. On Friday, Saturday and Sunday, September 29, 30, and October 1, WORDPLAY will be shown at Wells Hall

ELFF is looking for a computer donation

This article was posted on Tue, Sep 05 2006

Dear Film Society:

The East Lansing Film Festival has retired a very tired computer from the last century. We are in desperate need of a new one. Does anyone have a computer that is somewhat recent and in good working order that you would like to contribute to a very worthy cause? Your contribution is tax-deductible.

We need a PC not a MAC, a monitor and keyboard.

Please contact me by email at or by telephone at 517-336-5802.