prog | (no subject)

Went to see a few locally produced film shorts with

cthulhia, part of a week-long film festival going on at the Coolidge now. A couple of them were really good, especially Toonanooda, a cute animation in the same school as "Dr. Katz" (and featuring anthropomorphic pickles, so you know Cthulhia was all over it); Birdbeat, a gorgeous and very slick animation perfectly pairing twitchy, flighty CG birds with saxophones on the soundtrack; and Happy Peppy Sparky Dog!, which was much less painful than its title led me to expect. We all laughed in the intended fashion at it, and it kept itself to under three minutes: exactly the right length for a one-note gag-film.

The other shorts could have taken a lesson from Happy Peppy and applied some editing jesus god. One of the stinkers was a semi-coherent student film featuring a bunch of guys with Southie (Boston) accents drivin cahs around bahs and bein MOVIE STAAAAHHS and was made all the more b'zaa by the fact that the same guys and 200 of their friends were actually in the theatre, and shouted Hey, BUBBAY! Hey, CHUCKAY! at the screen whenever another person they knew appeared in the movie. Actually, it was kind of a novel experience. That didn't make the too-long movie much fun to watch, though.

Uh, and there was another one that was an interesting concept, rassling with the relationship between a person's name and her identity, but making me grit my teeth and squirm the whole time because (a) the actors were really, really stinky, invoking each line of casual conversation as if it were from an epic poem, and (b) it was interspersed with scenes of the characters walking around in the Cambridgeside Galleria (I think) reciting English 101 essays about why malls are evil and America is a capitalist sham. It was like the worst parts of Waking Life except without even the animation to distract you. Gaaaaaaaa.

Somewhere in between was an intentionally corny student-film-flavored student film that engaged in autoMST3K. Nothing outrageously clever, but a cute concept. The film instructor was the best part. "Er... why are you framing the doorknob like that? Is the doorknob important somehow?" Heh.