Premiere Life @ LA Film Festival

LA Film Festival 2010
Location: Downtown Los Angeles, LA Live
11th St and Figueroa St
Los Angeles, CA 90189Entertainment Cost: $50 Despicable Me Package



Includes: 2 tix to Despicable Me World Premiere Sunday + 2 vouchers towards any Indie film (if you purchased with Amex, you receive a complimentary pass to the LA LiveLounge

Food Cost: Free if you have an awesome BFF by the name of Amy Chang!! (Thanks!)

Planning is worth a million words--words of persuasion, confusion, and frustration that could be altogether excised if I had bought my tickets for Waiting for Superman just a bit earlier, or perhaps pinpointed the exact location on GoogleMap® for the Events Tent will call that would have bought us enough time to place for the first redeeming 20 sinners aka “non-planners” in rush line to watch the movie. I wouldn’t even be wasting words on this blog if it wasn’t for the fact that I was the 21st person in line.

The upside of it all? Of course there’s always an upside—I was at Hollywood’s front porch, gazing in wonderment of all the glam and glitz that goes with the hype of a premiere.

Waiting for Superman, a documentary about today’s failing public education school system, directed by An Inconvenient Truth’s David Guggenheim had a red carpet welcome, equipped with pricy looking pole lights beamed against the backdrop of the movie’s logo, with the press making small talk, drinking their lattes, and interviewing the occasional who’s who that strolled down the thirty foot red carpet. Thirty minutes before the showing, black Cadillacs periodically dropped off celebrities (?) while onlookers turned heads, policeman and security shut down the perpendicular streets making it a minor inconvenience for mortals like me to get Access.

Though I knew it was a documentary with none of the A-list actors there, the inundation of commercial seduction pasted across the tempered glass skyscraper of name brand buildings, the 40+ pedestrian fans waiting at the doggie side of the sidewalk, and the swarm of security, volunteers, and policemen that surrounded the grand entrance to the theatre, made me all the more eager and fanatic to obtain access to watch the movie. Sure, I could’ve YouTubed the doc, but it wouldn’t have been the same without the lure of city stardom. Just standing behind the line for the two hours made

 me feel the tingle of the many What-Ifs of the film making industry.

Though we didn’t get to see, Waiting for Superman, we still went inside Regal Cinema, though we had to tread lightly through the cautious watch of Waiting for Superman security standing a few yards from the entrance to our plan B indie movie, 1428, a documentary of the Sichuan Province’s earthquake aftermath. Subtitled in English, 1428 is named after the exact time the earthquake took place, 14:28 on May 12, 2008 , and at first glance seems to address the initial response to the emergency disaster. On closer look, the audience begins to see a bigger infrastructural system that needs fixing. The film was a raw glimpse into the poverty in that region and into the Communist Party’s real motive behind “rebuilding” the villages. Without any narration or any particular loyalty to follow any one character, the selection of what the director wants the audience to see reveals the dichotomy of government regulated industrial opportunism and the inadequacy of traditional methods for farm bred self sufficiency.

At the end of the movie, it personally made me feel more appreciative of what I have, especially walking out to a beautiful third floor view of the nighttime city.

Afterwards, we drove about 8 miles from LA Live Stadium to Thai Town, specifically in Thai Plaza, specifically Red Corner Asia, where we had Tom Yum noodle soup, raw shrimp dipped in a sleuth of mixed spices, and spicy curry over brown rice, finished with fresh mangos with sweet sticky rice coated with coconut milk. The restaurant was one in five shops that doesn’t close until the wee hours in the morning, the earliest at 2 am and the latest at 3:30 am (or shall I say earliest at 3:30? Or latest? Wait…I’m confused now).

There is a Thai bakery called Thai Desert House where we picked up baked coconut milk, angel hair sugar, and make-it-yourself Thai ice tea pouches. We came home around 1:30 in the morning. It was a sweet day.