USA,
1996, 108 min
Shown in 1996
CREDITS
- dir
-
Tiffanie DeBartolo
- prod
-
Christopher Lloyd, Rita Rokisky, John Hackett
- scr
-
Tiffanie DeBartolo
- cam
-
Guillermo Navarro
- editor
-
Tom Fries
- cast
-
Ione Skye, Jennifer Aniston, Mackenzie Astin, Miachel Landes, Seymour Cassel
- source
-
Tritone Productions
- premiere
-
World Premiere
-
COMMENTS
One of four Opening Night films. Screening attended by many SF 49ers luminaries like Joe Montana and Bill Walsh, because director Tiffanie DeBartolo is 49er owner Eddie DeBartolo's daughter. Ione Skye, Mackenzie Astin, Seymour Cassel, Christopher Lloyd in person.
OTHER
Aspiring actress Frankie (Ione Skye) lives in a black-and-white world, bouncing between bright romantic idealism and gloomy, defeatist slumps. Tortured by sleep deficiency, she’s on a conveyor belt of useless auditions and bad dates. Even decked out in her best date-ready Breakfast-at-Tiffany’s dress and ’do, Frankie only elicits apathetic responses like, “When I look at you, my mind wanders.” But when David Schrader (MacKenzie Astin) brings his blue eyes to Cafe Blue Eyes—the Sinatra-obsessed coffee joint that provides Frankie’s living—her world is suddenly flooded with longing and color. David seems like her perfect match: literate, young and pretty. Even Uncle Leo (Seymour Cassel) approves. However, life is never that simple. Tiffanie DeBartolo’s first feature mines the same ground as Singles and like-minded movies, but in a sense it’s truer to the rhythms, banalities and playfulness of the post-college set, acknowledging pop culture as the social glue that binds these urban hipsters together. And even when she’s at her most indulgent—in a Reservoir Dogs-style roundtable that pits Frank Sinatra against the holy triumvirate of Eddie Vedder, Bono and Michael Stipe—she knows her audience and her characters, and her unassailable romanticism is, quite frankly, infectious.
—Nick Tangborn
FACTOID #125
According to the November 29, 1959 San Diego Union, The Village on the River was the first Dutch feature ever shown in the U.S. (at the Third San Francisco International Film Festival).
