San Francisco Jewish Film Festival 2013

[Chris Knipp]

Red Flag (Alex Karpovsky 2012)

The idea of going on a trip with someone who's far from being the first person invited reminds one of Michael Winterbottom's Steve Coogan vehicle The Trip, a really funny movie -- which this isn't. According to Steve Seitz in the New York Times when the two showed at Lincoln Center early this year, Red Flag, a low-keyed, depressed autobiographical film by and about the actor Alex Karpovsky, "may be baggy and solipsistic" but "goes down more easily" than Rubberneck, a more fictionalized effort that was paired with it at the Elinor Bunin Theater. Karpovsky would be nowhere, Seitz says, without Lena Durham, who cast him as the barman in her big hit HBO show "Girls." Here, he gets kicked out by his girlfriend and has to go alone on a film tour in the south for something about woodpeckers (an actual film of his) being saved from extinction. Red Flag may be an actual cri de coeur from Karpovsky, who's seen as mildly suicidal here, but it's hard to see any new age mumblecore Woody Allen in Red Flag as some suggest. This is miles and miles from Woody Allen, and not even good mumblecore. As Seitz wrote, Karpovsky needs to stick with Lena Durham and only she can really save him, for the moment, from extinction. But he was in Andrew Bujalski's Beeswax and Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture has a part in the Coen brother's new film, which did very well at Cannes, Inside Llewyn Davis. Maybe his "acclaimed" debut film, The Hole Story, maybe even Woodpecker, are really better than Red Flag,, even if Rubberneck isn't. Maybe if he's not Woody Allen, which he certainly isn't, he's a downbeat Jewish Steve Coogan (if there could be such a thing). Actually he's neither, but I am glad to be aware of him, just in case. Online critic Jordan Hoffman wrote a realistic rundown on this and two other Karpovsky short features. I suppose Hoffman is right in saying that Karpovsky's features feel like "glorified shorts." Hence it does fit with the SFJFF shorts.

Length: 85 mins.

SFJFF show times:

July 27, 7:15, Castro Theatre, San Francisco
August 11, 8:45, Grand Lake Theatre, Oakland