Sometimes everything seems to be in place -- the crowds are there, the stars are arriving, there is an air of expectation and excitement -- but that can all change once the actual movie starts. Such was the case on Friday night with the world premiere of "Passion Play," the directing debut from longtime screenwriter Mitch Glazer ("Scrooged"). The expressionistic fable was received as something of a spectacular folly, made all the more crushing in that Glazer had first written it as an expression of his feelings while in the process of falling in love with his now-wife, actress Kelly Lynch.

The script has been around for some time -- Glazer noted that star Megan Fox was 3 years old when he first sold the script -- while the screenwriter held tight to the idea of directing it himself. In the film, Mickey Rourke plays a Chet Baker-ish jazz trumpeter who gets taken out to the desert by a hood. After the hood is killed off by a roving band of Native American assassins, the trumpeter wanders until he comes across a traveling carnival. There he sees a woman with wings (Fox) and immediately falls for her. After getting her away from the carnival, the pair become ensnared in the clutches of a cruel mobster (Bill Murray) who wants the woman for himself.

While it is difficult to beat up on something made with as much seemingly genuine sincerity as "Passion Play,"  it comes together in such a loopily haphazard way that it is hard to think of it as even much of a movie.

Those seeking a quick primer on Film Independent’s Spirit Awards need only YouTube Mickey Rourke's acceptance speech at last year's ceremony.

The “Wrestler” star, as you can see above, began his address — which clocked in at an Oscar-unfriendly six minutes — by imploring the room to hire Eric Roberts, then nearly broke into tears over the death of his dog and, in what may or may not have been a joke, threatened to beat up host Rainn Wilson over a “Wrestler” impersonation.

Is Rourke available for an encore?

As the Spirit Awards prepares to stage its 25th-anniversary show Friday night in downtown Los Angeles, it will try to capture the anarchic tone that over the years has made it a fun and sometimes headline-worthy alternative to the Oscars. But reaching that high bar won’t be easy. The show has instituted changes in venue, time and format and also must cope with the contraction of the specialty-film business, an absence of the year’s most buzzed-about independent film and the eternal question of its balance between the indie and mainstream.

When Film Independent, the nonprofit group that runs the Spirits and the Los Angeles Film Festival, announced last summer that it was making a number of changes to the event, the announcement was greeted with a few raised eyebrows. The group was moving the awards out of its slot on the Saturday afternoon of Oscar weekend, which it had occupied for the past 10 years, to an 8 p.m. Friday slot. The show was also moving from its customary location under a large tent on the beach in Santa Monica to a venue at L.A. Live.

Those may seem like small trivial changes, but in the small, incestuous world of independent film — which can be just as tradition-bound in its way as its studio counterpart — many veterans privately wondered if the Spirits were simply trying to save a few pennies. In the process, they said, it was fair to ask if the show would lose its let-down-your-hair feel.