Anti Matter - thought this was one of the best Festival movies I've seen in a long time. Low tech,tense, and well-plotted in the same way Primer was. Definitely want to watch this again at some point.

Teleios - has some strong performances, (Travis and Lulu, mainly) reminded me a bit of a BSG or Trek franchise episode, a bit too neatly tied together at the end.

Anyone have opinions on the old-school trio showing on Tuesday.. (The Green Slime, The Giant Behemoth, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth) ?

Two of the three old-school flicks have played the 'thon. WHEN DINOSAURS RULE is a a fun campy dino flick. GIANT BEHEMOTH hasn't played since the early Welles days. It's second tier compared to Harryhausen's big monster 50s films, but has it moments. THE GREEN SLIME. Loooooooooooooong story. For over 35 years it has been sought for the 'thon. I even tracked down a 16mm film print - but, we didn't have 16mm capability at the time. Unfortunately, it is only available on DVD for now, so that's why it's that fest.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Some decade.............



Drew wrote on Feb 11^th, 2017 at 2:01pm:

Anti Matter - thought this was one of the best Festival movies I've seen in a long time. Low tech,tense, and well-plotted in the same way Primer was. Definitely want to watch this again at some point. Teleios - has some strong performances, (Travis and Lulu, mainly) reminded me a bit of a BSG or Trek franchise episode, a bit too neatly tied together at the end. Anyone have opinions on the old-school trio showing on Tuesday.. (The Green Slime, The Giant Behemoth, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth) ?

Anti-Matter:  Pretty bad; it throws a lot of technobabble at the audience but doesn't build either the science or characterization into anything particularly surprising and affecting, and the acting is legit terrible once you get past the main trio.

Teleios:  Capable enough, and I kind of wonder if the filmmakers, knowing they wouldn't have the cash for both effects and good actors, wrote something that really only needed one strong cast member, with the others more or less able to pass as "weird because of their genetic-engineered nature".

I kinda liked Teleios when it started without sound and the audience supplied sound effects and dialog.

Day 2:

Domain:  Decent idea, though the filmmakers struggle with how to use the ensemble cast and the story falls apart when you look at it a little too hard.  Not bad, all told.

The Landing:  To a certain extent, more interesting for how he movie was made (an initial short edited into new material shot with the same cast 25 years later), but a solidly made picture.

Lost Solace:  Boring.  Way more boring than a thriller about a sociopathic grifter suddenly gaining some hint of human emotions while pulled into a plot to kill his new mark's rich father has any right to be.

I like Anti-matter a lot, reminded me of Coherence and Primer. Glad to see it was well attended.
Telios didn't hold together for me, generic Sci-Fi at best. Nice sets, the uniforms just had something wrong about them.

Day 3:

Castle in the Sky:  It's great. I can't say I like the dub track that much, but it's just a delightful pile of adventure.

Nova Seed:  Missed it at Fantasia last summer, so glad I got a chance to catch up.  As rough as the style is, the movie zips along fantastically and is packed with nifty world-building and black comedy.

Magellan:  Sets up a decent situation, but makes a lot of strange decisions, from talking about low gravity but building the action around Earth-like conditions to how the astronaut's chess game with his wife never feels right alongside her distance otherwise.

Project Eden: Volume 1:  Awful.  The first 75 minutes are a series of poorly-acted cliches that frustratingly avoid giving any details of what's going on, meaning nobody is doing anything for an actual reason.  The last 10 minutes or so are differently stupid, and it ends on a cliffhanger, having accomplished nothing.

Because Garen gives out trophies based upon attendance and a half dozen or so people from the production were there, this won the "Vision Award".

Electric Nostalgia:  Possibly the best of the festival so far, a nifty lo-fi bit of science fiction that has a good premise and an impressive performance by Lauren Analla.  Not the ending I would have gone for, but it's at least a legitimate one rather than simply a random gotcha.

Day 4:

Work ran too late to catch the 7pm show, so I saw John Wick 2.  Highly recommended, although it would give me unreasonable expectations for action scenes over the rest of the week.

Day 5:

Immigration Game:  Acknowledges its dumb premise early, but it's got real problems deciding what it wants to be about, and the extended epilogue not only undercuts any theme it has but just drags while the audience wants to go home.

Day 6:

Virtual Revolution: I was the last one sitting for this one, which has some good bits, but frustratingly spends so much of its time and budget on things that are kind of incidental (VR videogames) while anything that actually advances the plot is done in narration a dry-as-heck conversations.

Surprised we got to Wednesday before there were technical screw-ups, though.  New record for the event.

Day 7:

Diverge:  Kind of tired during this bland time-travel story, so I dozed off for ten minutes and honestly had no idea whether the protagonist from the future or the version from the past was doing something.

Day 8:

Dead Sunrise:  Frickin' inept.  The filmmakers had no idea how to point the camera, edit a scene, choreograph a fight, or get across basic information like how these five people on a camping trip knew each other.  Had no business being programmed at all, certainly not in a prime slot, especially when you consider...

Without Name: Not only pretty good on its own, but you can see from the start that its director knows what he's doing, packing information into not just what he shows but how he shows it, building to a really exceptionally well-done finale.  Bummer the delays and bad scheduling on Friday had a lot of folks bailing early.

Day 9:

The Tomorrow Paradox: Better than we usually get among the locally-made films, although a grating performance by the lead actor and an ending that offers one twist too many hurt it.

(subbed in for OMG I'm a Robot)

Occupants:  Spends a fair amount of time being amiable despite having a really sloppy script, but loses the plot toward the end, whether by missing opportunities to have the characters question themselves by seeing what their doppelgangers do or desperately handwaving parts of the plot that make no sense away.

Last Broken Darkness:  Why the heck was this thing over two hours long?  It does not have anything new to add to the post-apocalyptic genre or a particularly fascinating set of characters to justify stretching it out like that.  Dreary, bland.

2307: Winter's Dream:  Mostly decent VOD filler, although it had no business winning a "Best Action" award - the action was mostly guns fired in one shot and bullets going wide in the next, and when it tried to do one close-in, complex action scene toward the end, it was edited into complete incoherence.

The KOAS Brief - Unfortunate name, because it elevates the framing sequence above a first-person UFO movie that uses pretty standard mythology - we've all seen lights in the sky, metal implants, and men in black before - but executes it with an engaging, likable cast.  Like a lot of movies built on this model, it can't really come up with a satisfying ending, but it does very well until it gets there.


Overview:

In a way, this festival basically meets expectations - it's the movies where the producers are willing to pay a submission fee to get their film in front of a couple dozen people who can only create so much word of mouth, not quite desperate but generally needing a lot to break their way to be successful.  There was more basic competence on display this year than in some previous ones, but it also showed how 90% of genre films aren't really adding anything exciting, but are just going through the motions in familiar categories.

Also, this giving out awards based upon people showing up has got to stop if Garen wants the awards to be worth a damn.  Project Eden being given an award for "vision" and Winter's Dream for "action" is ridiculous.