Surprisingly enough, the Film Fest made a come back this year. Apparently, there are enough people in this crazy town that appreciate non-mainstream movies… At least, from time to time.
Anyway, since I was rather busy and had other plans (the Mushroom Festival in Kennett Square! Check out my pix), I only watched 4.5 movies. Before I start ranting about the 0.5, let’s have a look at the other 4:
– “Wordplay” — The world is full of nerds. Some hack computers, other collect Ü-Eier, others… well, solve crossword puzzles. But not any: obviously, the celebrity of all is the daily New York Times puzzle. Starting Monday, it gets increasingly more difficult till the Sunday edition blows your mind and wrecks your self-esteem. Actually, I reach that point already on Mondays. But the people shown in this lovely documentary solve the Sunday puzzles in 10min or less time! This is so amazing that the NY Times chief “enigmatologist” Will Shortz is organizing the Annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournamen, this year being its 30th anniversary. All in all a wonderful picture about people with a very special, uh, gift.
– “A Prairie Home Companion” — Robert Altman’s latest movie is an hommage to a live radio show on NPR. If you know that show, you’ll love the movie. If don’t, there is no reason whatsoever to watch it.
– “Half Nelson” — Ryan Gosling (brilliant in “The Believer”) plays a history teacher and basketball coach working in high school in some big city. Though trying to inspire and interest his pupils, he himself seems lost and aimless, sinking deeper and deeper into his drug addiction. Meanwhile, he slowly develops a fragile bond to one of his students. This friendship strengthens over the cpourse of the film and becomes his only support in a time of distress. I loved this movie. It is very slow and rather silent (not much dialogue), but the actors are superb and the storytelling is great.
– “Who killed the electric car?” — In the 90s, GM and some other companies produced electrical cars for the Californian market. For evalutation purposes, these cars were only leased, not sold, to a few hundred customers. Though these cars had the usual limitations of electric cars (long charging times, low range), they not only gained appreciation by their users, no, slowly, an infrastructure started emerging in and around LA where you could charge your car while shopping or so. However, the whole thing didn’t last very long and GM collected all their cars and destroyed them. So, the question is, why? And who is to blame? As a documentary, the thing isn’t as solid as “An Inconvenient Truth”, for example, but it is nevertheless an interesting piece, especially in times where gas prices are sky rocketting….
All in all, the whole festival was rather entertaining. Albeit, there was one movie left that I wanted to see and that turned out to be an desaster….
This year, the festival featured four movies by local filmmakers. I decided to watch “The Legend of God’s Gun”. The director seemed to be more a musician than a movie maker (he was there to introduce his movie). So naturally, it seems, he got the idea for the film while shooting a music video to something and thought that there is more to it. Slowly, over a period of five years, the whole thing grew into this, uh, “Machwerk”, that was test screened for the second time in front of an audience (which consisted to 80% of friends or people involved in the film) during the Fim Fest. Apparently, the plan is to release it next year to festivals. I hope that it’ll never happen….
See, everyone can go ahead, get a camera, and shoot something. One might have a grand idea or just enjoy doing it. However, if the product at the end is supposed to come together and become whole, a film that can tell a story to an audience, having a funny idea isn’t enough. Albeit, that seemed to be the case here. The director was so proud that thanks to Final Cut Pro he was able to do lots of stuff with colors, special effects, cuts, slow motion, and what not that he seemed to have forgotten that it is a story that drives a movie and not its effects. Believe it or not, he even added some scratches and textures to make it look like shot on film. But all those effects were arbitrary, as if someone was just browsing through the menues of that program and trying things out. Same with the characters: no one had tried to make an effort to define them thoroughly, so that the actors (all non-professionals, friends mostly) didn’t have any clue what do to. Awful. Finally, the story. What story? The movie, supposed to be a western, starts with some narrator telling of a person would draw his gun to bring justice. Or something. In the movie, as far as I saw it, this guy or his magical gun were not mentioned once. Instead, there was some outlaw, and a bounty hunter, and a sheriff, his wife and a deputy…. I am not kidding! The whole thing was just arbitrary scenes patched together. To make things worse, the DVD player had problems reading the disc. At some point the movie stopped entirely and restarted after 30min or so. When it happened a second time, I just got up and left.
Puh, I needed to get that of my chest. Anyway, so much for the Film Fest. The rest of the weekend I spend outdoors so check my pix from Longwood Gardens (harvest themed) and a few from Kennet Square. Enjoy!