But enough about what didn't hit my eyeballs; here's what did:
"One More Day"
"Love and Other Devices"
"As You Were"
"One Day Some Day"
I Was a Teenage Superhero Sidekick
Fade to White
... and then, after that, a presentation by visual-effects legend Douglas Trumbull.
Accommodating that presentation made for a word back-and-forth day. The shorts program was in the Somerville Theatre's "Micro-Cinema", I Was a Teenage Superhero Sidekick back on screen #2 where most of the features ran, but we went back to the Micro for Fade to White so that they could rig everything up for Trumbull's presentation. Since these rooms aren't exactly built for anything but showing movies, it took a while and involved cables snaking up the aisle. I'm not sure whether that was appropriate for someone who made a name for himself when visual effects required being extremely hands-on or ironic for a man pitching the future of theatrical exhibition.
Trumbull is still pretty spry for a man his age, although he did occasionally mention that there are some things in his field that he simply doesn't have time left to learn. He's the best sort of speaker for both film and technical things, at least in term of attitude - justifiably proud of what he has accomplished over the course of his career, but not dismissive of what the younger generation is doing with their CGI and performance capture.
It was a sort of two-part presentation, covering his career past and present, with the first half covering his work in film from 2001 forward, which would later detour into things l like the Back to the Future ride at Universal Studios. It was interesting and informative; Trumbull is not gossipy and not exactly self-deprecating where his accomplishments are concerned but advanced enough from them that he can be casual in describing what was clearly a great deal of engineering at the time, with this occasionally taking the form of tossing off terms that laypeople in the audience like myself might not quite catch.
(A note on the audience: Easily the largest of the festival, it had a bunch of students who certainly had some interest in doing this for a career.)
This segued into what Trumbull is doing now, building a company in the Berkshires that aims to revolutionize theatrical exhibition with a combination of high frame rates, high-resolution digital capture/projection, immersive sound, and massive curved screens. It's called MAGI, and although I'm not sure how serious he was when he invited us all to come see it and his proof-of-concept short "UFOtog" at his studio, I may try and find a way to take him up on it, because it looks like some seriously awesome technology. Again, the presentation could get fairly technical at times, with great detail on why their high frame rate 3D interacted best with the human eye, and it seemed to very much be adapted from a sales pitch, touting how they were able to do everything from engineering to filming to, I believe, creation of the "pods" that would allow them to place a standard, calibrated auditorium anywhere.
I hope he succeeds, because this stuff looks amazing and his ambitions for a MAGI feature must be sky-high. I must admit, though, to generally feeling like he was going to be fighting an uphill battle. Imax has made inroads by diluting their brand, certifying rooms in multiplexes that attempt to create the illusion of a true giant-screen experience, and I don't know how many theaters are going to give a MAGI pod the real estate it needs for what will be at best a handful of movies that can truly take advantage of it (they're compact for what they are, but you're still talking about a 90-foot-wide screen). And while Trumbull emphasizes that his technology will make the movie experience more realistic than ever, getting past the barriers of other attempts, people generally did not seem to like the HFR presentations of the Hobbit movies, and there had been a lot of push-back against 3D as well. I'm not sure that audiences necessarily want movies to be just like looking out a window, even if they don't love grain or black and white the way film critic-types do. Nobody knows that they're waiting for a quantum leap until it's happened, of course, but I often get the impression that a more high-tech movie experience is not really what anyone is after right now, especially if it's linked to more expense.
"One More Day"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 February 2015 in the Somerville Theatre Micro-Cinema (SF/40: Approximate Paroxysms, digital)
One of the first and most amusing things I ever learned during a film festival Q&A was that an independent filmmaker can raise their project's profile and star power immensely by having a good part or two for older actors, because you would apparently be shocked at who responds. John Heard in "One More Day" isn't quite the same as the example I'm thinking of, but he's a definite boost for a low-budget short like this.
He and Adair Jameson play Tom and Chloe, two octogenarians reunited when Chloe enters a senior center in 2084, a time when people are guaranteed eighty years of God health and then are expected to shuffle off the mortal coil graciously. This center is less about providing elder care than helping them let go of life and old connections. Chloe isn't entirely sure about this to start, and seeing an old friend/lover who is trying to quietly buck the system soon has her rebelling too.
I always wonder about how systems like this come into place in sci-fi stories - as much as the Faustian bargain implied is an idea worth pondering, in reality, old people vote and lobby enough that I can't ever imagine it becoming law. Still, it's worth pondering the idea of how callous the young can be toward their elders, and how many still have plenty to contribute. And while much of the film shows the limits of filmmaker Jean Baker's resources - it gets heavy-handed at times - Jameson and Heard make for a very solid emotional center to the story.
"Hemera"
N/A (out of four)
Seen 14 February 2015 in the Somerville Theatre Micro-Cinema (SF/40: Approximate Paroxysms, digital)
I'm not going to lie - I remember close to nothing about this one. Don't let a month and a half pass between a festival and a review, folks.
"Love and Other Devices"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 February 2015 in the Somerville Theatre Micro-Cinema (SF/40: Approximate Paroxysms, digital)
Comedy on film is tricky, and you can sort of see filmmaker Elle Stanion struggling to master it in "Love and Other Devices". She's got an amusing premise - a closed-off engineer (Hunter McClamrock) is about to present the artificial intelligence he has developed to investors, only to find that it has developed both a sense of humor and, at the very least, a crush on its inventor, and that is not what the money men are looking for. The cast is game. The special effects are decent and well-deployed. And still, the "hit rate" for the jokes is only pretty good as opposed to great.
Not impossible - Stanion and the cast & crew deliver a fairly steady stream of chuckles, especially if the audience is down for the sort of reference-based humor where half the joke is "I recognize that thing!" It's not all that they've got, but enough for groaning. Fortunately, the jokes come quick enough and are delivered with enough relish by Kate Bowen as the AI's holographic avatar to keep things pretty well-lubricated. It's played a little big, just enough that one may wish they weren't visibly trying so hard, but it's at least only an uneven piece rather than something that feels ill-conceived.
Part of it may be that I'm a bit worried about the underlying message - amazing person who identifies as female needs to bury her personality and just look pretty to be accepted. It is probably not deliberate and portrayed more as an act of love than anything else, but then, hasn't it always been? I'm in no position to lecture Ms. Stanion about this, but it is something that stuck in my mind.
"As You Were"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 February 2015 in the Somerville Theatre Micro-Cinema (SF/40: Approximate Paroxysms, digital)
From the standpoint of 2015, it's a bit hard to make the leap to the "anti-prosthetic prejudice" that the veteran protagonist of Trevin Matcek's "As You Were" faces; the societal pressure to not treat those who served as anything less than heroes is immense. Of course, that's what we see from outside, not being subject to people discounting our abilities. Also, our vets aren't coming back from a war whose weapons include humanoid robots, either, and I imagine that would change the calculus.
Matcek and company are generally able to get past that. In some ways, there isn't a whole lot of science fiction to this movie; replace the futuristic war footage with something out of Afghanistan and you could tell the story with the same sort of shell-shock, not feeling totally human anymore, mood swings updating the wife, and competing curiosity and fear from the kids. That's no bad thing, I suppose, and the cast, particularly Trey Holland as the vet, execute fairly well. It does wind up being a science fiction story without a terribly big idea, and without that, I wonder if it just adds distance to the real-life issues the short is meant to address.
"One Day Some Day"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 February 2015 in the Somerville Theatre Micro-Cinema (SF/40: Approximate Paroxysms, digital)
There's a category of short films like "One Day Some Day" that probably has a proper name that I'm not aware of, one which runs hot and cold for me. They use the length constraints as a way to inflate techniques that might become grating in a full-length feature - semi-cryptic narration, aggressive music, a blur that shouts that there is more to this situation than meets the eye - to make an idea with some grandeur even larger. It hits the spot when it works for a viewer, and if it feels pretentious otherwise, at least it seems to have a good heart behind it.
Filmmaker Arthur Cartwright seems to have more than a good heart here, presenting the idea of a plague of sorts that causes some people to wake up in a new life every day, with a narrator who had been numbed by it, although he was disconnected to begin with. It's actually a tricky balancing act, presenting this man's resignation whole the rest of the presentation is so darn earnest about how this could give humanity, or at least some segment of it, such a wonderful understanding of what it is like to be other people. As much as you know in which direction the film is trying to nudge you, there's no lack of sincerity to it.
Admittedly, I have my quibbles - the premise of some entity jerking souls around seems like something that would be acknowledged more in everyday life rather than the sort of background oddity panted here, for example - but they're relatively minor when looking at the film Cartwright is making. "One Day Some Day" is about getting a certain emotion across, and does so much better than many films of its type.
I Was a Teenage Superhero Sidekick
* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)
The trick to something like I Was a Teenage Superhero Sidekick is to do at least a little more than just poke fun at comic-book clichés, both because there's no real accomplishment in replacing fun with smugness and because over seventy-five years of growing superhero universes, the various publishers and individual crappies have done every bit of self-examination and mockery there is, and emphasized their point with rampaging robot dinosaurs that an indie comedy can't afford. Filmmaker J. Hanna had better be able to do more than point and laugh, which Fortunately turns out to be the case.
The former sidekick of the title is Larry (Barrett Mitchell), who dropped his "Kid Dynamic" identity some time ago and has been in therapy since. His shrink had just taken a job with the planet's premier super-team, requiring a relocation to their satellite headquarters, but refers him to a new doctor (Milena Mortati), whose methods involve more outdoor yoga than sitting on a couch. She sees trouble ahead with Larry's new girlfriend Susie (Emily Sandifer), an anti-superhero activist, and it will be difficult to hide that part of Larry's life with his ex-teammate Frog King (Andre Antwan) crashing on the couch after a series of ill -advised hookups with his nemesis Croc Queen (Nicol Razon) destroys his confidence.
Because Hanna is working with a tight budget, it's kind of difficult to get any kind of handle on what sort of scale the heroes and villains of this world operate - even the occasional drawn/animated sequence doesn't exactly present them as dealing with regular alien invasions - and that is a bit of a shortcoming. Monsters and mad scientists, somewhat paradoxically, can actually mean the story is more accessible and just being played out on a grand scale, while putting on tights and a mask to fight street crime in a world not unlike our own indicates a more extreme sort of personality. For the most part, Hanna deals with this by making sure that nobody really bats an eye at the heroes most of the time, and it tends to work just well enough for the movie to get by.
Full review at EFC.
Fade to White
* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 February 2015 in the Somerville Theatre Micro-Cinema (SF/40, digital)
Fade to White alternates between three science fiction stories taking place in and around New York City's Central Park over the course of 112 years, and while they are in some ways a bit of a mixed bag quality-wise, the overall quality is quite good, with none actually being duds. That's a pretty good showing for a movie that kind of looks like it was made by sneaking a camera into the park when it would be less occupied during the winter hours.
Sneaking in is a bit of an issue in the past set in 2018, when Eileen (Margie Stokley), a middle-aged woman suffering from memory problems being researched by her fiancé David (Arthur Aulisi), has to pass security checkpoints and give her itinerary to get into the supposedly-public space. There, she meets Cal (Jesse Swenson), a younger man who has been traveling and asks her to run away with him. Or at least, that's the way it seems; there is a revelation or two to come. They may not be huge surprises, but they pack a bit of an emotional punch, and their reminiscences are filled with bits that are both hints and natural details. Margie Stokley and Jesse Swenson don't quite have the sort of age difference to make for an inverted May-December romance, but they're an unusual pairing. Fun to watch, though, with good work from both.
The park is even more off-limits in 2070, when a man breaks into the park to retrieve an item that he can trade for help that his ailing wife badly needs, only to be hunted by the cyborg "Seffer" that patrols the park and confronted by another man with a surprise of his own. This is probably the least accessible segment, a puzzle box that requires much more attention be paid to the plot but does not necessarily supply the sort of compelling question or conundrum that keeps the viewer curious as the movie shifts to the other segments. Rick Busser and Ryan Bronz are both doing good work as the men at odds over the object of their dangerous scavenger hunt.
Full review at EFC.
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