June 27, 2004

Film Festival!

Thanks aplenty to sooz for hooking me up with a pass to this week's Boston International Film Festival, and indirect thanks to her friend David Baeumler, whose film was in the festival, but who couldn't use his passes - so I could.

Short synopses of what I saw:

First was David's I Cannot Understand You It's a short (5-minute) cinematic love letter to Vienna, beautifully filmed and narrated by a philosophical tape recorder shown in various places around the city. The best line (I paraphrase): "We don't ask the fireworks, or the flowers, what they mean -- why do we ask this of art and music, and people?"

Next was Felix Allen's Economics 101, an amusing short about a student whose attempt to bribe his teacher backfires horribly. More humor came from Dara Resnik's Great Lengths. A teenage girl breaks up with her boyfriend because he's not Jewish, so he decides to convert. He can do the studying, he's willing (if not eager) to give up bacon cheeseburgers, but the surgery....

Next was Nothing Exceptional, by Douglas McGowan. It's the story of the most blase bunch of teenage girls on earth, trying to decide if the events of September 11th change anything in their lives.

The first feature-length film I saw was Australia's Straight To You, directed by Michael Egan. I'm not a big romantic-comedy fan(!), but this was funny and pretty cute. A temp/aspiring actor goes to work for a type-A female lawyer, and of course their initial hostility breaks into mutual attraction. I enjoyed it more than I expected.

Next was Andy Cambria's The Wet Floor, with an interesting twist on a convenience-store heist. The funniest film I saw all week was Talmage Cooley's Pol Pot's Birthday. As the humorless tyrant watches with disapproval, his petrified staff try to throw him a surprise party. Hysterical. Less funny, but still well-done, was Martha Pinson's Don't Nobody Love This Game More Than Me, where four thirty-somethings finish a game of pickup game and discuss life, basketball and desire.

Then came Saran Barnum's The Hillz, about four jaded whitebread teenagers who turn to a life of crime (except, for a while, the college baseball stud). It's a pretty interesting portrait of bored-to-mayhem suburbians, though it's almost derailed by the presence of Paris Hilton, looking more like a science experiment gone awry (like the attempt to mate a human with some sort of stick insect). Still worth a look.

(We're on the home stretch now.)

Warren Hooper's Out of the Shadows is a melancholy look at loss, death and forgiveness, without a bit of dialogue. Cliche, by Dallas Jenkins, is a pretty funny short piece: a cop-on-the-edge sets out to avenge his partner in a movie intentionally packed with every movie cliche in the book (right down to the grocery bags with the French bread loafs sticking out). Clever. And I liked Tap Heat more than I thought, too. It's also without dialogue; the whole story is told by tap-dancing. Better than it sounds.

The final film I saw was Nathan's Rebellion, directed by K.M. Fitzgerald. Shot in Western Massachusetts on an almost-literally shoestring budget, it's the story of a misfit 13-year-old who takes his teacher's advice to take the "road not traveled" and finds himself traveling through time to befriend a 1780s farmer. It's got a higher ratio of heart to dollars-spent than anything I've ever seen before, and the kid who plays Nathan is fantastic.

Sooz confessed that she brought me along because she thought it might rekindle my interest in writing and filmmaking. And, as is so often the case, she's right. I'm gonna go dust off some old ideas I've had.

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