well, it’s not as fun as fantastic fest, or as relevant to this site, but it’s a hell of a lot cheaper. i’ve been telling myself that i would take a week out for one of the local festivals for a couple of years now. i used to do it all the time. i would drive myself to exhaustion and sickness in order to catch every single showing that was humanly possible. so i decided to re-live my old glories and my old passions. i put down $35 bucks and gave myself a week of only worrying about biking to the next screening of the AUSTIN FILM FESTIVAL.
i’m not going to bore you with a synopsis of everything i’ve seen, because quite honestly, i don’t think a lot of this is really worth watching outside of the festival context. in past years there’s only been a couple of films out of the twenty-some screenings i’ve attended that were really awesome.
here are a few of the mentionables after muscling through half the fest:
STREET TEAM MASSACRE
what an incredibly stupid film. i should have known how bad it would get when the synopsis mentioned a cameo by lloyd kaufman, a man who is the very badge of trash cinema (which he insists on calling ‘alternative film’, because he totally misses the point of what that term means). this is a zombie movie that’s so cheaply made that they couldn’t even afford zombie makeup. when the zombie transformation occurs (from drinking bad sports drinks) the unfortunate victims simply grow a unibrow.
but this is so stupid, so intentionally stupid, that it’s hilarious. one of the few times that strategy works. there’s a constant stupid reparte’ between the members of the ‘gophercum’ street team, as they pretend that they’re cool and that they have an important and difficult job to do: handing out sports drink samples to people on the street. here’s a sample of the stupid dialogue that somehow manages to be hilarious.
hippie: you should come out to my jam band festival. it’s going to be totally amazing.
street team member: really? that sounds cool.
hippie: yeah, everyone’s going to be there. here, take a flyer. it’s my only one.
it’s like an episode of strawberry shortcake acted out by adults. catch it as a DVD at the dollar store five years from now.
The Living Wake
the living wake follows the last day of K.Roth Binew. he is a brilliant and mis-understood artist and author living in a sleepy new england town. he knows he’s going to die at nine-oclock in the evening because he’s suffering from a "grave and vague disease." he goes about, inviting people to his own wake, and wrapping up his affairs. the character is amazing, and it had better be, because the movie is all about him, and you’ve never seen a more self-absorbed character in your life. he’s like don quixote re-incarnated as truman capote. you may never get a chance to see this movie, but don’t miss it if you do. imagine a less insipid wes anderson flick.
The Zombie Diaries
the filmmakers swear that they had no idea that george romero was making almost exactly the same movie with almost exactly the same title. but no matter. anyone renting this movie instead of the romero one will have nothing to whine about. this was terrifying. imagine blair witch meets night of the living dead. everything is shot from the point of view of the documentary filmmaker. the scariest part was the slow buildup from the first news reports and man-on-the-street interviews about the viral outbreak, to the midnight search of the darkened farmhouse as the documentarians try and find what’s making that bumping sound. i swear i had to cover my mouth and my ears to keep from screaming.
here’s the premise. it’s "ten minutes into the future" and gasoline casts $32.49 per gallon. a kindergarten teacher and avid vegan thinks he has the answer: a car that runs on wheatgrass. only, after an accident in his bedroom laboratory, he finds that what it really takes to run the car is blood. human blood. hmmmm. is that supposed to be some sort of political message?
this movie had several things going for it. one, there’s few things as funny as someone sobbing "but, i’m a vegan!" as they toss old ladies into a trunk-mounted meat grinder. two, it highlights the sad hypocrisy of al-gore-style liberalism. and three, it has boobs in the very first shot!
expect more movie prattle from me soon.
