The very name of the Philadelphia Film Festival & Cinefest is a testament to the wrangling that went into fusing what would have been two separate festivals from two separate factions. Still, you would not have known this for the wealth of offerings, no different than any other year for the level of curating. For my part, a new address and a newborn meant a slightly leaner diet of flicks this year, but there's still plenty to talk about...
If Don Draper has given the general public a new respect for advertising professionals, Art & Copy provides a non-fiction basis for those props. Doug Pray's doc looks at a variety of creative professionals responsible for everything from the "I Want My MTV" campaign to the "1984" Apple ad. We get the inside scoop on Nike's "Just Do It" (originally inspired by the last words of a death row inmate) and "Got Milk?" (an exec balked at first, declaring, "That's incorrect. It should be, 'Do you have milk?'").
More importantly, we're shown the impact of these advertisers' work on client and consumer alike. Tommy Hilfiger credits George Lois' audacious campaign with forcing him to work harder than he ever had in his life to live up to the hype. A man confesses that he asked out his date to the prom based on the "Just Do It" ads.
Pray reveals the true artistry of his subjects. We assume that an advertiser simply meets the demands of his or her client with no regard for their own artistic oeuvre, but these creators, like any artist, have motifs. Hal Riney (captured here not long before his death in 2008) in particular, creator of the Reagan "Morning in America" spot, invests a little bit of his own childhood yearnings for hearth and home into many of his ads.
What's more, these advertisers (and I specify these advertisers because even according to them there is a very thin slice of advertisers who work this way) aren't looking to simply meet the demands of their clients but strive to unleash the potential for what that company could be.
If you've been paying any attention at all to the festival circuit, you don't need me to tell you about Steve McQueen's (not that one) Hunger. If you haven't, here goes. Hunger tells the true story of Bobby Sands' 1981 hunger strike in the HM Prison Maze. The short backstory is that IRA prisoners there wanted political prisoner status and the British government did not want to give it to them. This led to "blanket" and "dirty" strikes on the part of the prisoners and increasingly brutal treatment at the hands of the guards.
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