Saturday, March 21, 2015

Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival 2015 Day #05: Shorts & Parallel

I hate that this is the case, but this is one of the most memorable days I've had at the festival portion of this event, and is not because of the movies or even the weather, but because the festival director and I were baking at each other for having different ideas of what this event should be and not a whole lot of respect for the other's priorities.

If you want to just skip to the reviews of the shorts & feature themselves (and I can't say I'd blame you), he's a table of contents:

"Ghost Light"
"Abandoned Planet"
"Strangers"
"I Remember the Future"
Parallel

Tuesday was the day that the entire MBTA was shut down pre-emptively, even though it wound up not snowing very hard, so that they could get the system cleaned up. It was a mess and I hope everyone who had a nightmarish commute in February sent their complaints to the International Olympic Committee. It is unlikely that there will be a blizzard during the 2024 Summer Games, but if they think our infrastructure can't take an event of their size, maybe they'll let Paris or Cape Town deal with that headache/expense!

That meant I was working from home and walking to the Somerville Theatre, which isn't a terrible distance but is a trek that one only makes under lousy circumstances, as there are otherwise a while bunch of ways to get there from my house via public transportation. I don't think it put any extra edge on my cynicism about this festival - I made the walk because I looked forward to what was on the schedule - but it likely didn't actually help my mood.

So, as we die-hards are hanging around theater 2, festival director Garen Daly comes down and starts chatting. We give him a bit of a hard time for some of the more obvious mishaps, such as Boy 7 lacking subtitles and Matt Mercury just generally lacking, and he says "take it up with the judges", but they thought kids might like it in regard to the second. The thought isn't fully articulated in my head at the time, but that's kind of a horrible thing to say about kids - either that you can/should fob something not very good off on them because they're not going to know any better or that they're going to respond to a parody of stuff their grandparents liked. Give them some credit, because they're used to better and deserve better. And if that's an audience they're trying to develop, do it with something comparable to what they're watching on Disney XD or Cartoon Network.

But the thing that got me was when he said there should be some crap in the schedule, to which I half jokingly responded "I disagree". After all, I said, people paid money to come to these screenings, and they deserved good value for that, to say nothing of their time. His response was that it shouldn't necessarily be a festival's first or only priority, that they are trying to create an environment that fosters new filmmakers.

I get that, on a certain level - as much as there are more ways than ever to get your film seen online, butts in seats are a real feeling of tactile accomplishment. There should be space in a festival to get promising and/or local filmmakers exposure, although in most festivals I've been to, there's a bit of separation between that and the good stuff - the material programmed more for good intentions than greatness winds up in lesser slots - and there is even a kind of coding in the way they are described in the program and put on the schedule that tips the festival-goer off. Hey, it is kind of a good thing that being selected to this festival helped Blessid play elsewhere. Making movies is tough and expensive and very few people deserve to go broke doing it, and while I am kind of personally indifferent to what happens to that movie after I'm done with it, I don't begrudge its makers any opportunities.

I do keep coming back to "I paid money", though. I wasn't sold a chance to help young filmmakers; I was sold movies. Most people, I'll bet, come to a film festival looking for something better in some way than the regular release next door - more accomplished, more daring, more specific, or more enlightening (if only because you may get to talk to the filmmakers afterward). The really galling thing was that while dismissing my expectations of value for my money and time, Garen scolds me for not respecting his investment, because of it weren't for that, the event would have died with the Orson Wells Theater and would be dying now (quite likely on the first count, I'm not sure on the second if we're specifically talking about 2015). After all, what have I done to help?

He mentioned becoming a "judge", and I mentioned that I hadn't seen any call for that; if it was in the emails that got sent out, I missed it under the progress reports about his documentary about the Welles. Something that didn't come up because we were talking past each other on whether he'd even made the need known, though, was that what he calls a judge is not how I think of the term: He's using it to describe the people who decide what gets in, whereas most other festivals I've attended describe those folks as "programmers" or the selection committee, with the jury being the ones who decide on awards. I suspect that the jobs overlap some, but I was still wondering why being a "judge" would help do anything about the cruddy selection. It's another way we were talking past each other, but one that further makes me wonder whether the people running this festival have ever even been to another one to know what the expectations are.

The kick in the teeth: He was in the auditorium to tell us that Fantasticherie di un Passegiatore Solitario, the film on the schedule, would not be playing because the technical director had left the movie at his house. We wound up seeing the shorts program that had been canceled the night before ("Temporal Globes"), and it was okay, but for crying out loud, this does not happen at festivals that merit the level of respect Daly seems to think his deserves. That this was why he was in the room when he decided to complain about me being too negative is what boggles my mind a bit.

I honestly don't know what to do with this. I suppose I could volunteer come fall, but he made it sound like that was just giving a 1-10 rating to whatever came in via Withoutabox, which makes any attempt to shape the festival very hands-off. I did participate one year, and while the stuff we got to see wasn't good, by and large, at least Izzy Lee made it a discussion. I just feel very frustrated as a fan, though - as much as my head knows better than my gut that the amount of snow I've braved to see some independent science fiction films in February over the years does not mean I should expect to be catered to, it is tough to swallow the idea that I should not expect "showing good movies" to be a film festival's primary purpose. It hurts doubly because in talking to the other attendees who showed up for a lot of screenings, I discovered that so many don't realize that there is a lot of great stuff being made right now, but presume that what gets screened at this event is the best material available. They just don't know that Predestination, Time Lapse, Automatons, The Resurrection of William Zero and more are out there. This could be a great event, but it's so often run like a way to serve the marathon (via submission fees, people who buy passes mainly for early entry on Sunday, and a title that it has been said makes obtaining prints easier) that I wonder if there's any actual intention to make the festival a great event itself. Sometimes, I wish I could just quit it the way I've effectively bailed on the Boston Film Festival, but I want something like this in Boston and there's no better local alternative since the Boston Fantastic Film Festival closed up shop. So I keep buying passes, at some point feeling like a schmuck for doing so.

Especially on a night when not only does this stuff happen, but I've got plenty of time to stew about it walking home.


One other weird thing: There were filmmakers in attendance for Parallel, with one producer here and seeing movies all weekend, but no Q&A or introduction. Sure, we all wanted to get home because of the storms, but it was really strange that a movie that had people coming wasn't given a 7 pm slot and some time for the people involved to talk about their film.


"Ghost Light"

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40: Temporal Globes, digital)

"Ghost Light" is done up to look like a comic book, with scenes suddenly freezing as rotoscoped drawings, sometimes with a pan to the next being used as a transition and sometimes with a bit more speech and action than you might expect going on underneath. It's not a bad idea for a theme, as the sort does call to mind the sort of horror comic that allowed Frederic Werthem and company to bowlderize the comic book industry in the 1950s: nasty and heavy-handed, more likely to base its final shock on a gross-out than any sense of irony.

As an homage to that sort of comic goes, it does all right. Abraham Benrubi makes a thoroughly unpleasant father reluctantly stopping at a dinner with the kid (Jordan Thompson) he doesn't much like but isn't going to cede to his ex-wife, only to find some creepy stuff going down. It's a recognizable, human nastiness, although it's not given a whole lot of contrast from the surly kids or the sinister folks at the dinner. Still, the audience will get is expected violence and cruelty, and if people suddenly switch behavior to act like bigger jerks for no reason, that's kind of a feature of the original material, too.

Director P.J. Germain might, perhaps, have pulled back a little bit. There isn't much beyond the presence of cell phones (which, naturally, don't work) to make us feel the foundation has been built on rather than just rebuilt. The comic-style images are also laid on rather heavily occasionally to the point where one might want to remind him just which medium he I is working in.

"Abandoned Planet"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 10 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40: Temporal Globes, digital)

Brad Clapper gets points here for some awfully fun repurposing - rather than building an elaborate or particularly futuristic spaceport set, he shoots in a small railway depot because in this future, that's all the poor folks left on Earth are going to get. It makes for some moments when the cast looks like overgrown kids playing make-believe out in the back lot (some sort of cheesy laser pistol effects add to it), but it also gives us trains leaping off their tracks and heading for the space station where upper-class humanity lives, and that's kind of cool.

Aside from that, it's about as generic as its title suggests: Class-based war, a mercenary who just happens to be converted to the rebels' cause when one of them happens to be a beautiful woman, some mildly satirical bits. The cast does all right with their prefab characters, the effects are clearly not state-of-the-art but they're passable. It does have the one neat bit, though, and that's more than a lot of films like this (heck, features like this) can claim.

"Strangers"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 10 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40: Temporal Globes, digital)

The double meaning in the title of "Strangers" is kind of clever - the two brothers that the film spends most of its time with have grown just that far apart, while something else is lurking around the edges of their town. Maybe if writer/director Justin Nickels did a little more with this, rather than just having one brother not trust the accounts of the other, this would be a more memorable short. Instead, it tops out a bit lower, not quite defining its own identity.

It's at least enjoyably energetic - with our without the fantastical element, many folks along these lines will go for clenched jaws and brooding, but Jason Wiley plays the brother just released from prison with an enjoyable self-righteousness. The moment when Nickels could choose to go gritty,he instead starts to play things a little larger-than-life. Tonally, it his the target intersection between sci-fi/horror and brothers who don't see eye-to-eye fairly well.

It's still kind of forgettable, though. Nickels has this great little metaphor ready to go, but no especially clever science fiction idea that pairs with these brothers at odds and the woman in between them, and while not every fantastic story needs to have that sort of obvious parallel with the characters' earthly issues, this sort of short that is built up from the human side can often really use that. It helps wedge the whole thing in the audience's collective mind, and given how short films like this are often meant to be calling cards, that would have served "Strangers" particularly well.

"I Remember the Future"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40: Temporal Globes, digital)

There's a large part of me that sighs sadly at stories along the lines of "I Remember the Future", where science fiction is a subject for nostalgia, and it's sometimes unfair to them. Take this one, for instance; I don't think there's a way to tell its particular tale of becoming lost in the past while transitioning to the big What Comes Next without engaging in a bit of that paradoxical indulgence.

Maybe it could have been done without such thick accents - the Australian cast is making darn sure you understand that Abe (Reg Gorman) was probably one of those New York writers who showed up to bounce ideas off John W. Campbell in person, and adult daughter Emma (Tiffany Lyndall-Knight) doesn't fall far from the tree, speech-wise. They're kind of stock characters - he's rooted to the old days, she's a bit less enthusiastically rooted to him, and this present-day structure feels awfully familiar, a lot of work to push his dreams in particular directions.

Those fantasies are kind of half-baked themselves, takes on Golden Age tropes that at least don't look like they've been given any sort of deliberate low-budget look: They are as they were in his imagination while writing them, and while that involves some anachronism, it's not done in a mocking way. It does takes a while to get to the really good bit, though, where the authors' creations are facing the heat death of the universe, and they may just be pulling him in after them. A little more time spent on this might have included more consideration of whether they are pulling him further into his own mind or whether the black hole in the story is a portal to some sort of afterlife. It's a meaty idea, which probably deserved a lot more of the short's running time.

Parallel

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)

It's not quite ideal that my strongest reaction to Parallel is to note its strong fundamentals - that the filmmakers keep a potentially-confusing picture clear is great, but this is a love story; shouldn't that be what sticks the best? The film is decent on that count, though, so viewers looking for a bit of science fiction more character-based than action-packed should not be disappointed.

As one may guess, the title refers to parallel worlds, and we initially see Dr. Vincent Jeffries (Terence Cranendonk) in two. One is seemingly hostile and unpopulated; the other has him attending a lecture by his mentor Stewart (Richard Portnow) at a conference on mathematics and physics. That's where he makes the acquaintance of Keira Benjamin (Liz DuChez), who is part of the staff. There is clearly chemistry there, but he pushes her away, and not just because he has a big trip to make.

Being that this is a love story, and small enough in scale that the audience is going to be spending a fair chunk of time with this small group of characters, a decent cast is no small thing. Terence Cranendonk and Liz DuChez give performances that are more likely to please than truly amaze the audience, but that's okay for this movie. Cranendonk is maybe a little bit more abrasive than Vincent really needs to be, while DuChez plays Keira as almost too good-natured to be true, but the pair do click together; there's a definite feeling of chemistry between Vincent and Keira that is more than just "opposites attract". And speaking of opposites, writer Keith Nickoson and co-director John Turk don't make the hackneyed choice of the various alternate universes containing doppelgangers with vastly different personalities. The various iterations of these characters certainly reflect different circumstances, but the cores are similar.

Full review at EFC.

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