Austin Film Festival 2007 – Young Filmmaker’s shorts/Kabluey/In Search Of A Midnight Kiss

YOUNG FILMMAKER’S SHORTS

This is the third shorts program I’ve seen at AFF this year, which makes the most shorts I’ve ever seen at ANY film festival. They just kind of fit into my schedule better this time around. Kinda weird, huh? Usually they put them up against big films. This year, they have them playing all by themselves with nothing against them. And they’re in the afternoon.

They had two programs full of films about kids and this one with films by kids. It’s a kid-friendly festival!

Ok. Maybe not. But there are a lot of kid-type films going on.

These films really need to be judged on a completely different criteria than most films. I mean, they’re by kids! How do you tell a kid, “Yo, you suck!” You just can’t! So, I’ll try to keep these as positive as possible. It helps that they all had something good about them. There were really no duds here. Some were slower than others, but they all had their moments.

AWAKE AGAIN–A zombie film! Big surprise, right? Well, this one seems to have been inspired by the preview for JJ Abrams new film, 1-18-08…or Cloverfield…or Slusho…or whatever the hell he’s calling it these days. It starts off at a birthday party for a 13 year old girl. Then things go horribly wrong. All the power goes out…and everyone dies? A few days later (I’m guessing) a boy has to kill his best friend because he’s bitten by a zombie. Then he meets the girl from the party.

Not bad. Not bad at all, actually. There’s no dialogue after the party. It’s all action and acting. It’s a little bit slow, but I liked it. Young Andrew Butterworth has some good work ahead of him…if he survives the holocaust.

PINKY–And this would be one that went on a little bit long. I never really thought that a kid could have the attention span to make a 15 minute short, but it certainly shows dedication in this ADD infected world.

A super-straight-laced kid finds out that his pinky won’t bend anymore. Then he meets a super-UNstraight-laced girl. (She eats boogers and cheats off of him.) Will she help him bend his pinky? Pretty good symbolism, really. It had some very funny parts, but it could have been cut down by about four minutes. Other than that, Ye Sul Park did some pretty good work.

FIRST DAY AT THE FIRM–A group of newbies at a law firm meet their boss for the first time. Can they handle him? Or are his three minute bathroom time limits going to kill them?

VERY funny stuff going on here. I really liked the entire scene in the board room. The big reveal near the end, I think, needs a little work. It almost seems like an afterthought. Or maybe it’s the fact that there’s another scene after it that seems a bit forced and long. (Too much time sneaking around the hallway.) But a very good film from Remington Dewan.

IN A PLACE LIKE THIS–A documentary about the house that Leo and Johnny lived in in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. It’s an old house out in Manor that, unfortunately, is about to be surrounded by crap…literally. They’re building a sewage plant right next door. The folks who live there are really cool folk and this film tells us everything that they know about the property. There’s even a really cool shot of DiCaprio with all of the kids!

This was my favorite of the shorts in this program. It was one of the longer ones, but it didn’t waste any of its 14 minutes. Very informative and it had a point to make. Make us know and like these people and then tell how things are working against them and how progress might just put them out of their home. Very good work from the Mobile Film School.

TRICK OR TREAT–The shortest of the shorts is also the slightest. It was a very funny joke about a kid who, every year for Halloween, dresses up as a girl. His friends start to think that he’s gay. But…all the girls love it.

These kids have no shame, and that’s awesome. It’s only 4 minutes, so I didn’t feel like they were wasting time trying to stretch the joke out too much. Funny stuff with no real substance…but it also didn’t really need any. Just a good skit caught on film. I wonder if Mitch Collier wrote it or if he just let his actors improv.

FROM THE WOMB TO THE TOMB–A very serious short from Jacobo Cardona about a young man and his pregnant wife. At the hospital he meets a man whose wife died in childbirth. He takes his son to her grave every year on his birthday.

This is very heavy stuff for someone so young. It makes me wonder what kind of tragedy this kid has seen in his life. Very good work. Yes, it looks amateurish, but that can be fixed. (And the dad wasn’t the best actor…there’s an emotional turning point that is really under-acted.) With time, Jacobo could be a very good filmmaker.

THE ESCAPIST–A boy wakes up, gets ready for school, heads out and then gets his head full of everyone’s jumbled ideas. When he gets home, he puts on his headphones and escapes into his favorite place.

It took me a little while to figure out what was going on here. There’s no dialogue and then the school day is all confused and hectic. But there was one word that flashed out at me during that scene: “autism.” Then it all came together for me. When he put on his headphones, that clinched it and I started to really like it. It’s as if Elizabeth Breazile was trying to show us what an autistic kid goes through every day of his life. And it all made sense. A very good, surreal film about an important subject. Maybe it should be shown to kids who go to school with autistic kids so they understand just a little bit better.

WHAT MAKES PEOPLE HAPPY–A documentary that asks high school kids what makes them happy. At first it’s all joking and fun because the kids are a little self-conscious about being asked something like that. Then they start to open up and it turns out that some very good things make them happy…like making other people happy. Sofia Anderson managed to get a lot of kids to tell some truths about themselves and kids in general. It was good to see that it’s not just new ipods that make them happy. And, yes, I’m old enough that I started to worry about that.

And, of course, there was the one kid who couldn’t resist repeating what the girl before him said: “and Italian food. And boys. I like boys.”

That’s it for the shorts. I wish I could have stuck around for the Q&A, but I had to truck it over to the Bob Bullock theatre for the next movie.

KABLUEY

Directed by: Scott Prendergast
Written by: Scott Prendergast

Leslie (Lisa Kudrow) is having some real problems. Her husband has been taken away from her by George W. Bush to fight for oil in a country that doesn’t want him. Her kids are holy terrors. And she can’t afford to get day care for them so that she can work. The only help she can get is her brother-in-law, Salman (writer/director Scott Prendergast).

Salman has problems of his own. He can’t hold down a job and has absolutely no money. Once he gets to Leslie’s house, he’s stuck there. He really has no business taking care of kids. Especially not these kids who tell him that they’re going to kill him and actually conspire to burn down the house.

So Leslie gets him a job at the company that she works for. He is going to stand on the street handing out fliers to passers-by to rent office space at the building. He’s also going to wear a huge, nondescript mascot costume. It’s big, puffy, no-faced, powder blue and named Kabluey. And the road he’s on is in the middle of a corn field…so there are no passers-by. Except for, occasionally, Teri Garr, who was apparently spurned by this particular company.

Of course, things go wrong. Things go right. And, oh yeah…Leslie’s a bitch.

In fact, just about everyone in this movie is a bitch. Salman’s boss (Conchata Ferrell from “Two And A Half Men”) asks him if he needs a ride back to the office after dropping him off in the middle of nowhere and then is annoyed when he says yes. A neighbor lady (Christine Taylor…how the HELL did Ben Stiller get her?!) acts like Leslie’s kids are burdens on her just because they aren’t rich. The girl at the grocery store (Angela Sarafyan) thinks that Salman kidnapped the kids even after she finds out that he didn’t.

Some of the characters turn around and redeem themselves, and I think that’s what saves the movie. I thought it was really funny all the way through, but I was starting to get annoyed with a lot of the characters…even Salman. He was just so freakin’ hopeless.

Leslie was almost a different story. As time goes on, you start to realize WHY she’s such a bitch. Her husband has been gone for a year and a half. She loves him, but things have just gotten WAY out of hand. The kids are terrible. Her job is the only escape she has from her morbid depression. It’s a story that comes from all over the country these days. Spouses stuck at home without help from the people they love, who are fighting a war that they don’t agree with.

And that’s where Kabluey really came from. A lot of this is true, except for the part where Leslie cheats on her husband. Scott went to his sister-in-law’s house to help with the kids (who were awful) and found her just laying on the couch in a horrible depression. We always think that war only affects the people who leave to go fight. But it affects everyone…and that’s the terrible thing about it.

As absurd as some of the Kabluey stuff was, it was all very real, too. And very funny. This is a great movie that balances the funny and the touching pretty damn well. The characters may start off a little rough and hard to deal with, but stick with it. It’s very rewarding.

And stay through the credits. That’s some of the funniest stuff.

This was all shot in and around Austin, by the way. Scott was driving Lisa around 6th Street and they saw the bar (probably corporate as a lot of the bars on 6th are these days) Friends. She looked over at it and she and Scott looked at each other. “What the hell is that?”

“It would be SO funny if you went in there!”

“I’m not going in there.”

Heh heh.

IN SEARCH OF A MIDNIGHT KISS

Directed by: Alex Holdridge
Written by: Alex Holdridge

A few years ago, I saw a film at SXSW called Sexless. I really liked the film that was basically like an Austin version of Manhattan.

Now Alex Holdridge is at it again. But he’s in LA now, so his film takes place in LA. (Except for the opening kissing montage, which really confused me. All this Austin stuff and then they show the Hollywood sign. Oro!?)

Wilson (Scoot McNairy, who is in all of Alex’s films) is lost in love. He left Austin about a year ago to sell a screenplay that just isn’t going anywhere. His girlfriend left him, but he still hasn’t left her. Now it’s New Year’s Eve and he doesn’t want to be alone. He’s just sick of it.

At his friend’s suggestion, he puts an ad on Craigslist at the last minute for a date. Almost immediately he’s called by Vivian (Sara Simmonds, also from Sexless). She tells him that he has five minutes to impress her.

They meet and immediately kind of dislike each other. But, of course in Film Land, that means that they love each other. They hang out. They lose each other. They find each other again. Sparks…maybe?

As Sexless was a love song to Austin, In Search Of A Midnight Kiss is kind of a love song to LA. It’s shot in beautiful black and white by Alex’s buddy Robert Murphy, who also plays a small role in the film. You can really tell that these guys love Woody Allen because so many of the shots are reminiscent of Manhattan, even more so than in Sexless. The locations are pretty much all in the old section of LA that is still kind of…pretty. (It’s certainly not the ugly, awful part that I saw a few years back.)

I really liked this movie a lot. It brought up feelings that everyone has felt at some point or another. Love lost, love gained, love never forgotten. And, like Linklater’s Before Sunrise/Sunset (which is an admitted inspiration), it’s all very real.

This film is opening in New York and LA soon and should expand into a few more cities (including Austin, hopefully) after that. GO SEE IT!!! HELP IT GET SOME OF ITS MONEY BACK AND OPEN IN MORE CITIES!!!

No movies tomorrow. I’ve got something else to do, unfortunately. So, enjoy some flicks without me!