Two slacker repo guys, one with girl troubles and one with brain troubles, decide to steal back all the cars they’ve repo’d to make a profit.
It’s a perfectly fine movie, the first official full-length made by director and star Ben Gourley. My only problem with it is there’s very little that stands out and makes it memorable. Sure it has Jason Mewes of Jay and Silent Bob fame, with short dark hair even, but his new character for this movie acts more or less the same as Jay. Gourley’s character Leon, while an actual sensitive and caring male soul, seems to have the fates conspiring against him once he finds a girl he actually wants. And since Leon is the manager of his apartment complex, there are several other zany characters to choose from to make life more interesting: the fat and sensitive ever-present computer geek, the strange and brooding but good-hearted hard-rock star, and so on. There was one thing I clearly recalled though: T.J.’s wife Dominique is a bit of a larger woman and ethnic too, and that’s slightly unusual for most movies, I was glad to see it here.
Not a bad movie at all, a good waste of time that may appreciate with age or theatrical release, Repo is the kind of movie that reminds us all how important it is to have life long friends who would do anything for you – whether you like it or not.
William Shatner’s musical and spoken word album Has Beenis made into a full blown ballet with the help of choreographer Margo Sappington.
The movie itself is actually pretty good, although it really does help if you’ve heard Has Been before and are a fan of Shatner’s dry wit and personal style. Fully half the film is devoted to entire ballet dance numbers to a few of the songs, while the other half encompasses splicing in private moments with Shatner revealing how he made the album and where the inspiration came from. It is not simply a film taping the entire ballet for the album from start to finish.
The ballet numbers themselves are sprightly and comical and genuinely warm, with choreographer Sappington happily touting Shatner’s album and always asking for creative input from her dancers. The dancers themselves are dressed in costumes I wouldn’t have necessarily chosen, but they are bright and cheerful. And every dance number they do, from the sprightly every-dancer-involved romps to the single-pair slow and melancholy pas de deux, shows the heart and soul of the dancer thrown into every move, every lift and every turn. I recommend, if you can find it of course, that everyone who appreciates creativity in all mediums see this movie. And it doesn’t hurt to have Henry Rollins and Ben Folds running around in the movie either!
Watch William Shatner talk about how the movie was named Gonzo Ballet at the San Diego Film Festival showing!
So this years San Diego Film Festival was a lot more hopping than last years.
For one thing, they had a DJ set up right in the movie hall, albeit at the top of the rendezvous stairs, this guy: DJ Kray-Z-K.
Marine life artist Wyland did a showing of his movie Wyland: Earth Day, and a book signing afterwards!
The SyFy Channel sponsored a showing of their upcoming show Caprica, which I actually enjoyed.
I made friends with Selena Parker, entrepreneur and entertainer, star of Selena’s TV Showcase.
There were a bunch of Panels and Workshops for the aspiring actor, filmmaker and such; I had too many movies to watch to make those.
There was the Evening with Richard Dreyfuss, profits going to The Dreyfuss Initiative which is trying to bring back the teaching of civics in American schools.
Then of course there were the parties, most of which I was honestly too tired to go to.
The Limelight PR Industry Party at the W Hotel was pretty nifty, Patron Social Club and GQ sponsored the taking of large professional pictures for free.
The best party by far had to be the 944 Magazine sponsored Actors Ball & Awards party, at the Hotel Salomar. A pair of award-winning filmmakers actually hopped in the pool when their names were called, it was fairly funny. Here’s the list of award winners:
Best Short Film – True Beauty This Night
Best Music Video – “Sunlight” Reilly’s, directed by David Altrogge
Best Narrative Feature – Formosa Betrayed
Best Documentary – American Harmony
Best San Diego Film – Wyland Earth Day by Chris Morrow
Best Screenplay – The Job directed by Shem Bitterman
Best Actress – Mira Sorvino, Like Dandelion Dust
Best Actor – James Van Der Beek, Formosa Betrayed
Indie Icon Award – Seymour Cassel
Audience Choice Award Documentary – Jessie’s Story
A huge sci-fi geek actually pays a couple of guys he met on the internet to come out to the desert and play RolePlay, or make believe if you will, Science-Fiction with him. But things get alarmingly real when the Captain takes a knock on the head and begins thinking things are real. Very funny and a little too close to home.
Review Rating: 8
Check out the preview Here:
La Frontera (The Border)
Directed by Ira Parker
We have a Mexican family with a girl who wants to be a doctor, a petrified mother and a father determined to give them the best he can; even if that means getting caught and arrested in a dupe border run while his wife and daughter escape.
Review Rating: 6.5
Dockweiler
Directed by Nick Palmer
Tony Todd stars as The Duke, the leader of a work release program that cleans up the beach and recovering rage-monster, who receives a new worker to the program that is just as angry and only seems to want to slack off. This was such an amazing short, it’s hard to believe it was a short film; the barely reined-in rage from Tony Todd’s character and heartfelt emotions from others makes it feel like a full length feature!
Review Rating: A solid 9
Check out the preview here:
The Off Track
Directed by Jordana Spiro
A poor man seems to have the American dream of money, a house and a good woman collapsing around him as he tries desperately to scrape it all back together. The ending seemed rather anticlimactic and very sad.
Review Rating: 6
Sparks
Directed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Based on a short story by Elmore Leonard, Sparkstakes us into the world of insurance fraud and rock star-dom, with Carla Gugino as the former siren who may have torched her own home, and Eric Stoltz as the insurance agent who spends the night finding out why. Wonderfully funny and dark.
Review Rating: 8
Preview Here:
Nowhere Kids
Directed by Eric Juhola
A teenage runaway girl meets up with some street kids and has to make the decision of running away with them to an uncertain future, or the safety of fragile family bonds.
A docu-comedy following the trials, tribulations and triumphs of a whole film crew and their movie Ten til Noon, touring the film festival circuit and the real reality behind it.
I absolutely adored this movie. Not just for it’s warmth and grinning self-depreciating humor, but for it’s honesty and unapologetic forthrightness. Yes, there is a fair amount of cursing; frankly I saw little wrong with that, as the filmmakers had the idea to catch their interviewees in their natural habitat and ways. Seeing people like Kevin Smith and Troy Duffy going on about their difficulties in first making movies reminds me of when I wondered how the hell they got there in the first place. Official Rejection doesn’t entirely answer that, but sympathizes in a wholly amusing way.
I’ve been doing the Press thing for 4 years now, and while I usually greatly enjoy myself, there is often a great deal of actual work involved. Official Rejection talks about a great deal of the things we reporters have to go through, even while we’re sitting down to review the same movie: difficult theaters, rejections from the movie festivals, festival directors who are so unaware they ought to be shot dead, weirdness with fans and fanatics and all sorts of other things. The film goes on about what the fondly named SWAG actually means, the stupid changing weather between festivals, the big film festivals they all got rejected from and the general downturn of the espoused “independent” festivals that have gone way too commercial.
For anyone who ever wondered what it’s really like to be a filmmaker and be touring the tiring, insane, raucous and occasionally actually fun film festivals, Official Rejection is totally for you!
Bubba can’t seem to catch a break, find steady employment, or be with his sweetheart the waitress with a limp, until he meets a drifter who sets him up with a job interview that turns out to be a real killer!
First off, let me apologize for that rather short and trite synopsis for this particular movie. The Job is actually a lot more complex than that, so complicated in fact that with the twists included towards the very end of the movie, I would have to say that fully half the theater didn’t actually get the plot. (I did, but that’s my job.) And then of course they, the audience, start firing confused questions at the director during the Q&A while I’m trying not to laugh at being blindsided by the very end of the movie.
So, Bubba can’t hold down a job to save his life, though through no fault of his own, just the way the economy currently is. And then drifter Jim, played by the totally awesome Ron Perlman, comes into town for only 72 hours and right away makes friends with Bubba. Bubba, who is a genuinely nice guy and who just wants to live well with his waitress girlfriend Joy, implores Jim with his troubles and is rewarded with a place to go to look for a job where you can “be your own boss”. Enter Joe Pantoliano, with a shaved head and white eyebrows a la Monopoly Guy, playing Perriman, the man who informs Bubba that he’s been hired for the job, but not what the job is until the next day. Turns out a “Mr. D” wants his son in law murdered for some bad choices the guy made, and Bubba gets to sit there talking to the son in law himself about how he wants to be killed; that’s the job, murder for hire. But, is it murder if you, the client, are genuinely sitting there asking to be killed in a specific manner and willing to pay handsomely for it?
As much as the movie centers around Bubba and his troubles, Ron Perlman as Jim in his seemingly relaxed and groovy style, and the murder for hire that culminates the films title The Job; I’m totally going to ruin the surprise and state what I think the plot was really about. The movie clearly demonstrates that Bubba is a good, decent man who just wants to have his job, his house and his woman. Then the movie does it’s level best, through high and low characters of all sorts of stripes, to corrupt that good man into committing what is, lets face it, a sin: murder. The snippets thrown in at the very end of the film, things like the legend “66.6 weeks later”, the name “Mr. D” and so forth, lead me to believe that this whole thing was a setup by a group of devils to corrupt a genuinely good person into working for the Devil at the end of the day. How cool is that?!
Even if your interpretation is different from mine, The Job is a fine plot experience for any avid movie-goer!
In a post-apocalyptic world where the U.S. has been divided into Provinces controlled by psychotic army guy types and a plague has infected 100% of people, one man searches for his long lost wife.
This is actually a truly fantastic movie, very similar to 28 Days Later but without the zombies, and I do mean that in the kindest way possible. Writer of the story Gary Weeks also stars as main character badass Sean Kalos, alongside Brian Tee, who plays the extra twitchy character Jax. Basically, as far as I understand it, some years ago the world went to hell, we all bombed the snot out of eachother and the result was a plague that infected 100% of what was left of the worlds population. Most of the infected need these little white pills that can generally only be gotten by dealing with the military government, who seems to have taken on more than a little despotic. However, rumor and legend have popped up around the fortunate few infected who gain superhuman strength and powers unspecified, called Steeles. Sean Kalos, however, doesn’t give a flip about any of that, he’s searching for his five year estranged wife Kate, who left him after he lost their house with some lousy stocks. (Pay attention to those stocks, they become important.)
Brian Tee does a wonderfully nutty job as Jax; it’s very strange to see an obviously disturbed asian man with the Popeye eye wandering about with an undetermined southern accent and a singular survival instinct. The trials Jax and Sean face, what the military has done to the poor “Pennies” (peons, powerless plague “survivors”) and women, and even what’s happened to the world at large is all secondary to Sean finding his wife, that is clearly evidenced throughout the movie. Of course, “what happens after” doesn’t factor into his plans, but then he wasn’t really thinking about after anyway. All in all, a fine horror and sci-fi experience that was a pleasant surprise in the bustle of festival films!
Deadland comes with it’s own easter egg after the credits, that leaves a door open for a sequel!
1. All Fest Passes, Press passes, Tickets, and related items are to be found at the Borders bookstore across the street from the Gaslamp movie theater.
2. Noone, and I do mean nobody, likes a Critic. It may have something to do with the word itself, but referring to yourself by that title gets frowns. If you are, announce yourself as Press and start an actual conversation.
3. The theater, and the SDFF folks, generally don’t care if you bring your own snacks, and are kind enough to provide cold water for the entire festival. Just don’t flaunt it if you bring your own stuff.
4. Really, show up at least an hour early for any movie you want to see, even the collections of short films. This show is a lot more popular than you think.
5. Yes, you really can get close enough to shake the hand of and take pictures with people like James Van Der Beek and Richard Dreyfuss. Please just bear in mind that they are people too, give them the personal space rule and be polite. They’re already being blinded by flashbulbs and trying to be heard over squeals; you will get a turn. And please, don’t throw a tantrum if you don’t get a turn, you will be uninvited.
6. The Q&A after the movies is designed for the directors and producers to get your genuine opinion of what they made that you just saw. However, be prepared to be booed by all your neighbors if you loudly announce you didn’t like it and spend the entire rest of the Q&A telling the director why.
7. The parties really are totally cool, but I strongly recommend comfortable shoes to battle all those stairs.
8. Never be afraid to ask. The worst response you’re likely to get from any of the SDFF, volunteers, or Gaslamp theater staff is, “I don’t know.” And it’s usually a safe bet that they can find you someone who does know the answer.
Based on the novel by Karen Kingsbury, Like Dandelion Dust is the story of the struggle between the biological couple and the adoptive couple of a small boy.
Regardless of your personal opinion on children, this movie and its’ storyline manage to hit very hard in the emotional spots in a wonderfully painful way. Imagine, you’re one half of a wealthy couple who adopted a lovely boy and spent seven amazing years with him, only to get a phone call one day stating that due to a technicality in state law, the biological parents are going to reclaim their son and you’re expected to cooperate fully with it all. The flip side of that being the biological parents, an alcoholic who recently got out of prison and the wife who called the police on him years ago when he beat her, and who never told the man that she had even had his child until after he got out of prison and they were back together. With all that in mind, the movie raises the question of who should the child be with, because both sets of parents have a perfectly valid claim upon him, and he’s not old enough to decide for himself. Or rather, the courts won’t let him. Things continue on their merry way for a bit, Joey is sent (by himself!) across the states to stay for a bit with the biological parents, and as we can all guess, it goes pretty horribly. The adoptive parents are informed that there will be a succession of visits with the bio-parents, 3 of them, and then Joey will go to live with the bio-parents for good. And after the second visit, where Joey is bruised and scared witless, the adoptive parents decide to make a run for Haiti with some religious folks off on a Mission – a last desperate effort to keep their family together, to just disappear, like dandelion dust.
Barry Pepper, who stars as alcoholic and enraged bio-dad Rip Porter, does a phenomenal job at portraying his role. Rip is a broken man, he tries so very hard to hold his little newfound family together and things are just conspiring against him. There’s plenty that’s his fault, yes, but outside influences aren’t helping either. Pepper’s efforts at Rip’s emotional state draw you right into the mind and frustration of the character with surprising ease. Mira Sorvino stars as Wendy Porter, bio-mom and rock of strength. True, she spends a great deal of time with sparkling eyes because she’s crying – you would be too, if you had to go through this mess. Cole Hauser of Pitch Black fame stars as Jack Campbell, adoptive dad and moderately wealthy potentate. Jack, along with his wife Molly (Kate Levering), tries to buy his way through the mess of keeping ownership of his one beloved child, always afraid for Joey and in the end willing to throw away all his creature comforts in order to stay together. And of course we have up and comer Maxwell Cotton, who plays child Joey in the movie. Although the subject matter revolves around the child, there’s probably more focus on the adults, as they are the ones deciding that small boys future.
Right now, Like Dandelion Dust is a festival movie only, let us hope the film makes it to the big screen worldwide, because yes, it really is that good.
