gungho girl

Tonight I wasn’t so sure that I wanted to go to the 48Hour Film Project screening. I mean I wasn’t too satisfied with the entry we submitted and the writer/director of the film (a friend of mine) wasn’t planning on showing either. Truth is what got me out the door was the opportunity to pass out flyers for the Day of the Dead Cafe Indie Nite. I am glad I went though. Not only did our entry do better than we thought, there wasn’t one film shown tonight that I didn’t truly enjoy. With nearly every genre represented and all films telling their stories well, it made voting for my top three favorites very difficult.

Claudette’s Biggest Hits was a story about a woman who fell madly in love with the instruments she played. They were her lovers. And as in “lovers,” I mean, “murder victims.” This film de femme genre short  was, funny, twisted, suspenseful, & cool. In Mafia, a group of college kids play a card game of mafia one night (as per their usual). The “loser” of the group (who ,incidentally, is always “murdered” first) gives this clique some final payback. The violence in this flick had people rolling. Myself included. I laughed like the devil.

The best comedy always seems to be intrinsically interlaced with some tragic truth. Laughter is an interesting thing – what it does for the body and mind. On the heels of Columbine, the Virginia Tech massacre, a the Monash University shooting in Melbourne, Australia, trots this hilarious, crazy, absurd, satire. To follow suit two others made me LOL’ing. Mop Up My Love, a buddy genre film about two janitors. One wants to be a rock star, the other – to be buds forever. Comical. And the title song they sing is worthy of a “D” (as in Tenacious D that is). The detective/cop film, Zoë/Malone, was a great parody on the oeuvre of the genre.

Don’t get me wrong the stoner film, Smoke or Die, had me cracking up. That brings me to the next set of flicks that I fondly refer to as kick@ss PSA’s. Each of these flicks contained some element of social consciousness within their stories. It is a facet of life I respond to so, of course, I have an affinity for it and I did like what Smoke or Die had to say (essentially). Arbor Day delivered a profound message about family relationships via the subtle contrasting of a woman who recently miscarried, her husband, and his sister who is an expectant mother in a lesbian relationship with a black woman. This film succeeded in showing us this kind of drama without the melodramatic overtures.

Personally, I think everyone’s favorite film that night was Free To Be. Cheah. (^_^)

This was our family flick of the evening. Herbert the Puppet (who hates his penis and wants to a girl) walked away with the accolades that night. This story is right up there up Greg the Bunny, Avenue Q, The Muppet Show, and Sesame Street! I felt like a little kid and a dirty grown-up all at the same time. WhoMentors.com produced Absolutely, Positively, On Time, a comedy about a skater charged with delivering a package on time. This charity took the 48 Hour Film Project and turned into a learning experience for a group of youth. They gave them production training, hosted a comedy workshop, and produced a short all within 48 hours!

I’m an artist at heart and filmmaking is not a separate subset of creativity for me. It was the writing, art direction, cinematography from the likes of Richard Linklater, Terry Gilliam, Pedro Almodovar, and others that inspired me to pursue this form of storytelling. These are the things that appeal to me as an artist. Three films really delighted these sensibilities in me. I really loved the cinematography and art direction of The Night Is Cold. They shot in black and white. All characters poised in front of a translucent shower curtain backlight only. This was a retro, dime novel, Sam Spade style buddy flick and the combination of the minimal, stylized art direction and the black and white film noir silhouettes put a nice edge on the story. The Package, a fantasy genre flick, had nice surrealist twists it. 1/3 successful kept the audience engaged while we, in voyeuristic fashion, peer into the tiny bedroom box of love shared by lovers one night as they deliberate moving into together. I think the two hardest genres to draw are comedy and drama. Sometimes you end up more drama in your comedy and vice-versa. Not the case with Away. The story was written well and their actors delivered.

I have to admit one of the reasons I always hesitate to attend contest screenings is to avoid this syndrome of “sizing up the other.” It’s inevitable in any competition but both years I’ve attended the 48HFP that feeling dissipated once the films start to show. I felt not only the crowd enjoying their particular contribution to the night but the works of others as well. This observation was further substantiated once the floor was open to Q/A. The packs that follow the 48HFP are truly interested in each other. I like that.