Palm Springs: Sunshine, movies and more

Anyone who has ever visited Palm Springs, Calif., knows just how many cool things the city has to offer.
Good restaurants, challenging golf courses (but still mostly manageable for those less skilled among us), museums, the Aerial Tramway and, of course, the surrounding area’s natural offerings – not limited to but featuring nearby Joshua Tree National Park.
Over the first part of January, though, the city offers something special – beyond, of course, a lot of sunshine and daytime temperatures that seldom get higher than the mid-70s (and mid-50s at night).
No, the something special I’m referring to is strictly for movie fans. It’s the annual Palm Springs Film Festival.
Now in its 36th year, the festival does a lot of the same things as the Sundance Film Festival, which comes a few weeks later. Besides showing a number of highly rated domestic and international films, the festival manages to attract a number of the filmmakers and celebrity movie stars to specific screenings.
My wife, Mary Pat, and I have attended several different film festivals around the world, including two in Italy (in Florence and in Taormina, Sicily), two in New York, events in both San Francisco and Los Angeles and, closer to home, in Seattle and Vancouver, B.C.
All that in addition to having visited Park City, Utah, for 10 years (1999-2008) to see movies at the Sundance Film Festival, not to mention our annual trek to the Spokane International Film Festival – which this year will be held over three days beginning March 7.
For a number of reasons, mainly because Mary Pat was still working full time, until this year we’d never attended the Palm Springs event – even though, in an attempt to flee Spokane’s winter weather to bask in the California sunshine, we’d flown there a couple of times in early December.
But we’d never attended the festival, despite the fact that our mutual friends (and my Going Mobile colleagues) Leslie Kelly and John Nelson, had for a number of years encouraged us to join them. Leslie, using her connections as a food and travel writer, had earned media accreditation at the festival, and she was convinced that we could do the same.
So, we applied in December, using my connections with both The Spokesman-Review and Spokane Public Radio. And we were accepted.
That’s how we found ourselves in the sixth row (or thereabouts) of the Palm Springs High School Auditorium to see the movie “Babygirl.” Mary Pat and I had already seen the film in Spokane, and in fact we’d already discussed it with our SPR “Movies 101” partner Nathan Weinbender. But it was a new experience for Leslie, so we agreed to give it a second viewing.
The additional draw, of course, was that the movie’s star, Nicole Kidman, and the film’s writer-director, Halina Reijn, were scheduled to attend. Besides begin able to see movies that you might never have the opportunity to otherwise, this is the biggest benefit of attending festivals: You get to see stars up close and personal.
I can still recall being at Sundance and sitting in the row ahead of Ethan Hawke and his then-wife Uma Thurman. Or the time we stood in line at a Park City theater to see a film and had a conversation with the movie star Christopher McDonald (note: he was totally a regular guy, unlike some celebrities I’ve had the misfortune to interview over my career).
In a post-screening Q&A, moderated by Turner Classic Movies host Dave Karger, Kidman and Reijn talked about the making of the film. At one point, when explaining why she took on such a challenging role, Kidman said that “Babygirl” was about a character gaining something instead of – as so many of the other movies she’s starred in – having to deal with grief and/or loss.
“This is love,” she said, “this is long-term relationships and what that means, and it’s also an exploration of female desire.”
Seeing “Babygirl” a second time afforded us the opportunity to revamp our views of the film, which does tackle some fairly controversial topics. And it did help to hear Kidman and writer-director Reijn explain their intentions.
We were able to enjoy the same kind of situation when we attended a screening of the Brazilian film “I’m Still Here,” which stars the recent Golde Globe winner Fernanda Torres (Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Motion Picture, Drama). Both Torres and director Walter Salles participated in a post-screening Q&A.
In all over 10 days, we managed to see 23 films, which may sound like a lot. But some people we met while standing in line saw more than twice that number.
Attending the festival proved to be one of the easier moviegoing experiences we’ve ever had. Of course, because we had media passes it meant that we didn’t have to pay for tickets. But passes are available to purchase, and individual tickets were available at most of the screening venues (we saw movies at five different theaters), and only the closing-night film (“The Penguin Lessons,” starring Steve Coogan) appeared to be sold out.
So, we’ll likely return to Palm Springs for its 37th annual movie extravaganza. And if we get tired of sitting in the dark, well, the city has a lot of other things to offer.
Sunshine and warmth being two of the best.