The New World
I haven’t seen all of Terrance Malick’s films (though now I’ve seen 3 out of his 6, so I’m halfway there), but so far I’ve thoroughly enjoyed them all. I just love the meditative atmosphere that he creates with his haunting combination of image and voice-over. It really helps the viewer get into the heads of the characters as we hear their inner thoughts waft over a luscious, long-held shot of nature. There’s just something about this style of filmmaking that is alluring to me. That being said, The New World is engaging, but only for about 2/3 of the film. Telling the story of Pocahontas, though never actually confirming who the Indian princess is by name, the film becomes disjointed once the woman moves to England. The early scenes of colonialism in Virginia are fascinating, showing a distinct difference between the lush, natural beauty of the lives of the Native Americans and the mud-covered raggedness of the English. While the last part of the film attempts to show the beauty of the urban lifestyle as well – with great success thanks to costuming and set design – something rings false. It’s as though Malick isn’t completely sure he agrees with his own message that the city can be just as wonderful as untamed wilderness. However, because this is only a relatively brief part of this 150 minute film, it doesn’t spoil the first 100 or so minutes of grace in filmmaking.

3.5 / 5 bananas

Spider-Man 3
I’d hesitated watching this one. I was never really excited about it for whatever reason. Maybe I had felt like I’d seen enough with the first two installments. Maybe the trailers weren’t really doing anything to inspire my interest. I don’t know what it was, but I was more than willing to wait for video on this one. However, I gave in and, for the most part, I was right to not get terribly excited. There are some incredible moments in this film – mainly centered around the special effects and action sequences. The character moments, though, I could have really cared less about. This isn’t good considering the first two films were able to make me interested in the story of Peter Parker and of Spider-Man. Actually, now that I think about it, I didn’t really care about Spider-Man in this one, either. I just wanted them to hurry up and get to the next fight scene. As with most superhero sequels, this one suffered from TMV (Too Many Villains) Syndrome. There are so many bad guys that even if 60% of the movie hadn’t dealt with the personal struggles of Parker, there wouldn’t have been enough for them all to do to be effective. So when you have that 40% left and 3 bad guys trying to find time to give Spidey trouble, you’re in for a film that will be lacking. By the way, there’s a moment that’s been much talked about, when there’s actually a dance number in the film, and I just want to throw my 2 cents in on the discussion. Personally, it cracked me up. As a fan of Sam Raimi’s older works like the Evil Dead series, it’s swagger and tongue-in-cheek goofiness had me from the first moment on. It was exactly what this emo heavy film needed to free it up a little. If the same scene had appeared with Bruce Campbell starring, it would have been praised by all the fanboys as one of the greatest scenes in movie history. But because they wanted their Spider-Man to be dark and brooding and made for a more mature audience, they seemed to forget that comic book movies are supposed to be fun.

2.5 / 5 bananas

The Prestige
Shortly before The Prestige hit theatres, I downloaded the audio book the film is based on. I found the premise – two dueling, obsessed magicians in late-Victorian Era London – intriguing. The book was done in an interesting way – mainly using the journals of the two men as the story’s vehicle. Best of all, it took a rather surprising, sci-fi turn that I wasn’t completely expecting, which is always a pleasant surprise in this world of too-well-defined genre fare. The film version does an excellent job of conveying the main crux of the story, if not the scope the novel implies, delivering much of the excitement of watching the two men battle for domination of the crowd’s money and respect. As with the similar film, The Illusionist, this film has quite a few twists, turns, double-crosses, and, perhaps not surprisingly, a bit of a magic trick ending. As with any trick, if you’re watching carefully you’ll see the man behind the curtain, but if you let yourself be taken along for the ride you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

3.5 / 5 bananas

MST3K: Overdrawn at the Memory Bank
Andrea’s been getting me to watch Mystery Science Theatre 3000 since I missed much of it during its television run. So far I’m really not complaining. Aside from the RiffTrax we’ve done, we have quite a few of the MST3K DVD’s lined up on our Netflix queue, and this was our first full-length episode of the show. And what a doozy it was! Overdrawn at the Memory Bank is a horrible, horrible PBS-produced film from 1985, starring Raul Julia who must have owed someone a great big favor for starring in this POS. The story has remnants of THX1138, 1984, even Tron and Philip K. Dick stories, but it’s so poorly produced, written, acted, and directed, that you would never mistake it for any of those influences. The plot of the film has something to do with the evil corporation/government removing people’s personalities and transferring them to cubes. Later these personalities are transplanted to a wild animal, in our “hero’s” case, a baboon, for what reason no one really understands. All that’s known is that there’s a social aspect to the type of animal you’re implanted to based upon how many “credits” you can afford. There are numerous jokes about anteaters, which must be pretty low on the totem pole (pun somewhat intended). During our hero’s transplant into his animal “dopple” (short for the German Doppleganger, meaning a sort of evil twin), his body is lost, meaning he could be stuck as a baboon forever. Have I lost your interest yet? Yeah, this is a bad film and totally deserving of the MST3K send up. As usual there were quite a few good cracks at the film but I’m hard pressed to remember any of them considering it’s about 90 minutes of one-liners. Still, if you’re looking for a good laugh you could do worse than MST3K’s butchering of the film or finding the original film on eBay and having a go at it yourself.

2.5 / 5 bananas (for the MST3K version anyway)

Apocalypto
I’m someone who can completely dismiss a celebrity’s public profile from their work. Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch like a lunatic does not prevent me from enjoying War of the Worlds. Just as Mel Gibson’s anti-semitic ravings won’t keep me from being astonished by this film set in the waning years of the Mayan civilization. While I still love small films that deal with only a handful of character going through real emotions and stories, sometimes you just want to see a big spectacle of a film. Believe me, this is film is a spectacle the likes of which we haven’t seen in quite some time. While some say it is little more than a subtitled action film, it’s one of the most beautifully-directed, gorgeously filmed action movies of all time. The scenery is amazing. The costuming is insane in its detail and variety. The camera movements are superb. And, yes, the story is engaging, violent, and exciting. There are places and people in this film that you have never seen before and probably never will again. It’s just an all-around incredible film and an astonishing accomplishment. Look past his drunken rampage and give Mel’s film a chance. Trust me, you won’t be disappointed.

4.5 / 5 bananas

Smokin’ Aces
Speaking of not always wanting to see small personal films about real emotions and real characters – enter Smoking Aces. I dig Joe Carnahan. I’ve only seen one of his other films, Narc, but have another on the way from Netflix (Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane), but so far I really love his style and his eye. Smoking Aces is such a simple setup – Mob informant holes up in a hotel room while awaiting his transfer to the FBI. Mob sends in waves of hitmen with $1,000,000 bounty on the informant’s head. Whoever kills him and brings the mob his heart as proof of the deed, wins. Of course these hitmen can’t be your run of the mill ex-cops or ex-military guys out looking for a buck. These are the rock-n-roll stars of the hired assassin world and they’ve come to Lake Tahoe to play. The film is violent, crude, rude, gritty, and yet beautifully shot and composed. The story has its moments of cliche, but the twists and turns are fun in the end. Apparently the film is developing quite a cult following thanks to DVD, which I have to say I could be counted as a member of the cult.

3.5 / 5 bananas

Superman Returns
I’d avoided this one for unknown reasons. All my friends said it was decent, quite a few internet sites I go to said it wasn’t too bad, but no one was really ranting or raving about it one way or the other. It seemed like a sort of No Show in the summer blockbuster game. I finally decided to rent it because I’d basically been avoiding it too long. Now that I’ve seen it, I wish I’d just stayed away. The movie picks up…sometime. We don’t really know what’s happened before, we just know that Supes has been gone for 5 years after astronomers thought they found some pieces of his blown up homeworld, Krypton. Right off the bat we aren’t really expected to feel for Superman. It would have been excellent for us to see him traveling through outer space, arriving at Krypton and seeing the empty, dead husk of his home. Immediately I think we would have understood his feeling of loss in going about this pilgrimage, only to find disappointment and sadness when he finally arrived. This would have made us care more when he returns to earth and finds that his crush, Lois Lane, has moved on, gotten married, and has a child. She even wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning article called “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman”. But instead of seeing his initial sadness upon visiting Krypton, we are left wondering just what Superman is feeling when he returns. So right off the bat we already feel this sort of emotional disconnect from Superman as we aren’t allowed to share in his sadness. For once I wish there had been more scenes of the brooding superhero a la Batman Begins and Spider-Man 3; maybe then we would have cared about our protagonist. In the end, I wish I had gone with my gut and let this one pass by unseen. Superman is such a great character who could have really had a chance to connect with modern audiences if he had been played even remotely human. Without a heart he’s just an action figure.

2 / 5 bananas

A Bug’s Life
I accidentally watched A Bug’s Life the other night. I put it in as background while I folded laundry and did some ironing. It was something I’ve seen a million times, so wouldn’t feel too bad about going upstairs to hang clothes or shutting it off when it was time to go to bed. Instead, I folded some clothes and then sat there and watched A Bug’s Life for the million plus one time. I still adore this Three Amigos/Seven Samurai knock-off. The animation completely holds up today even 9 years after it came out in theatres. Why? Because Pixar didn’t try to make the bugs too realistic. Yes, the grasshoppers are extremely detailed and marvelous, but the animators seemed more interested in making claymation-style characters than photorealistic representations of the creatures. Mixed with the still-stunning background artwork, these clearly fantasy characters inhabit a world we can believe. I can’t wait to show this one to my kid(s) someday…

4 / 5 bananas

Kill Bill: Vol. 1
After my failed attempt to not watch A Bug’s Life, for some stupid reason I thought I’d do better trying to not watch Tarantino’s homage to the grindhouse kung fu flicks of his youth. Once again I failed miserably at ironing my shirts. I’ve only seen the KB films a few times. I saw them both in the theater and I think I’ve watched the DVD’s once since I bought them. So, yeah, probably 2 times for each one then. For whatever reason, I was never able to fully embrace the KB films. I can’t quite put my finger on why, either. I don’t know if I was expecting something else or maybe I just wasn’t in the right mindset when I saw them. The important thing is last night that reason was swept away and I am now a raving fanboy of KB. And what really sold me this time was the music, I think. Not the spraying arterial fountains of blood. Not the slick fight scenes. Not even the semi-noir blanket that covers the whole thing. There’s just no better musical cue than when we see O-Ren Ishii walking down the hallway at the House of Blue Leaves with her henchmen flanking her. Those horns, that grooving baseline, it’s the kind of theme music we all wish we had. I also really noticed the influence of the Sergio Leone films and the Spaghetti Westerns in general, not only in the music, but the overall tone of the film as well. Thinking about it, I really just think that I wasn’t cinematically ready for KB before. I wasn’t interested or fully prepared to see all of the many influences in the film and how well they all work together. I’m really anxious to watch KB2 now…

4 / 5 bananas

It’s payday here at the City of O’Fallon and once a month our PR Department puts out a small company newsletter that’s included in our paychecks. Unlike most company newsletters, this one is pretty well-written and people actually read it.

One of the most popular highlights of the newsletter is the Employee Spotlights, where employees from different departments answer a questionnaire so we can all get to know them a little better. Sometimes the answers are generic as hell, but there are those times when you’ll actually be surprised to learn something about a person.

I keep a low profile while at work, therefore no one at the City knows who I am other than a face they see a lot in the halls. Needless to say I will never be asked to fill out one of these Employee Spotlight questionnaires. So on a lazy Friday morning, I took a quick 15-minute break and wrote up what my responses would be were someone to ever notice I exist and ask me to do an Employee Spotlight interview.

Enjoy!

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Birthplace:
Kankakee, IL

Birth Date:
2/28

City of Residence:
On the St. Peters/O’Fallon line

Inhabitants at my residence:
Andrea, wife; Peekaboo, cat; Rufus, cat; Baby to be named in January

Start date and current position with City:
12/18/00, GIS Technician

What I like best about working for the City:
Being in GIS, things never get boring. Every day brings some new project, new toys to play with, and new information to learn.

Best job:
While I love this job, the one I will have fondest memories of will be when I was 22 and one of my buddies setup his own computer consulting company. I worked there with Monte Ellis and a couple of other guys my age and we had the time of our lives until we made the mistake of merging with another company and the business went sour.

Worst job:
Code Enforcement. I worked with some great people, but it just wasn’t the right place for me. But I stuck it out for five years until I could get to where I wanted to be. (See my “Motto or Personal Mantra” entry for more information)

Favorite place to live:
I’m still looking for it.

Motto or Personal Mantra:
“Ya gotta do what ya gotta do.”

I’m happiest when:
The sun is shining and I’m surrounded by good friends, good food and good beer.

What I fear most:
Fear itself! And spiders. And werewolves.

I’m proudest of:
Getting my Associates Degree (Mass Comm/Advertising) and my Bachelor’s Degree (English) while working full-time. It’s taken me forever, but it’s definitely not something just anyone could do and stick with it. Of course the irony is I’ll probably never use either one now that I’m in GIS. Oh, that and beating Mother Brain in “Metroid.”

Favorite sports or pastimes:
I’ll read just about anything I can get my hands on (fiction, non-fiction, magazines, comic books, boxes of cereal, legal disclaimers, etc.). I even listen to audio books while I’m working (currently slogging through 52 hours and 19 minutes of “Atlas Shrugged’). I’m an aspiring author, a film nerd, an internet addict, an industrial design enthusiast, a woodworking novice, a photographer wanna-be, a punk rock poseur, a sometimes video game player, and general pop culture geek.

The Top 3 Highlights of my Life:
1) Getting married
2) Finding out I was going to be a father
3) Finally getting a job in GIS

People would be surprised to know:
1) That I work here.
2) That I have a couple of tattoos and will be getting more before it’s all said and done.
3) That I killed a man in Reno, just to watch him die.

If I could do it all over again, I would:
Live in New York City for a year. Just long enough to experience it and say I did it. Although I have a feeling I wouldn’t leave after my year was up.

Favorite Memory:
To avoid being cliche and say “The day I got married” or “The time I was beat up by Joan Baez”, I’m going way back to when I can honestly remember unwrapping my first Star Wars action figures on Christmas morning. I couldn’t have been more than 3 or 4, but I remember it rather vividly. And I still have those toys today in a hermetically-sealed box with a time lock that only allows it to be opened once every six years. I think the next time I can play with them is sometime in 2011.

Pet peeves:
I start to go insane when I hear incessant sounds like beeps or thumps. Ironically, I love old school hip-hop.

Favorite song, movie, book, or comedian:
Song: If Mozart, The Beatles, Dean Martin, The Sex Pistols, Public Enemy, and Ben Folds got together, they would produce my favorite song ever.
Movie: Toss up between Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai”, David Lean’s “Bride on the River Kwai” and W.D. Richter’s “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension”. I’m only kind of joking about that last one…
Book: The academic in me loves George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”. The non-academic loves Chuck Palahniuk’s “Survivor”
Comedian: Patton Oswalt (for obvious, geeky reasons)

Best Vacation:
In the year 2000 I went to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. I don’t know that it gets much better than that.

Favorite Vehicle:
I would love to own a 1968 Camaro, the most badass-looking car there ever was or ever shall be.

Before I die, I would like to:
Take a few of those brain-eating zombie bastards with me!

++++

Hmmm. Maybe they shouldn’t ask me to fill out the Employee Spotlight questionnaire after all…

This is part of an interesting article written by a New York Times military analyst in 1948. The article is called “Has Russia the Atom Bomb?”

++++

Should we then, attack Russia now before she has the bomb—wage a “preventive” war against her—to protect ourselves against possible future atomic attack?

The answer is emphatically “No!”

The reasons are many.

First, such a course would be morally wrong. We would be putting ourselves in the same class as the Nazis we hanged in Germany. We cannot attack another nation merely because we are afraid.

The supporters of a “preventive” war assume, erroneously, I believe, that we have enough atomic bombs now to insure our quick and easy victory. This is wrong. The Russian armies would overrun Europe. The war might be long and hard.

In defeating Russia we would destroy the values in Europe which we are now trying to save by the Marshall plan. That continent already is weary and war-torn. Another war now would almost certainly finish it and would undoubtedly eliminate our friends. We would solve nothing. The eventual outcome, even after we had won a long hard war, would be worse chaos than now exists.

Those who believe in “preventive” war make another false assumption. They regard a future war with Russia as “inevitable.” That is a strong word. No man can predict the future. Stalin will certainly die in the next decade or so, and there may be a “palace” struggle for power to determine his successor. Internal pressures in Russia may force changes in external Russian policy. However, should war come a quarter century hence, the fear of retaliation might prevent use of the atomic bomb and other mass weapons of destruction—even if no satisfactory system of control has been worked out.

++++

I think you can draw your own parallels, can’t you?

For about a half hour this morning I was lying in bed rubbing my beautiful, pregnant wife’s hip with one hand, while the other hand was being licked by Rufus as he sat on my chest. It was the most relaxing 30 minutes I’ve had in quite some time.

I really can’t complain if that’s how my day is going to begin…

Almost a month ago, my long-time buddy, Steve, sent out an email asking if anyone would be interested in participating in The 48 Hour Film Project.

The project is a pretty cool idea: At 7:00 on Friday night, you draw your genre of film from a hat. You then have to write, produce, shoot, and edit a 4-7 minute short film by Sunday at 7:30. The whole idea is to get people up off the couch and put a deadline on them so they can’t use the excuse of “I’ll get around to it” when it comes to doing something creative. This is often an excuse I use when it comes to my writing, so I know the feeling.

Due to an air conditioning issue at our condo, I wasn’t going to be able to afford to go with JK on a trip to Tennessee that same weekend. So I figured I’d help out Steve at least for the writing portion on Friday night as I felt that was the only place I would really be of service. As the weeks wore on and I kept coming up with story ideas for almost all of the 22 genres possible in the contest, I began to get more interested in maybe helping with the shoot itself. I felt I had some solid ideas and thought it would be great fun to see my idea come to life should one of them be chosen.

On June 8th, Steve sent me a text message saying that our genre was “Fantasy”, of course one of the few genres that I hadn’t really developed any ideas for. At the time of the drawing you are also given a few key elements that have to somehow show up in your film – a line of dialog, a character, and a prop (in our case it was “Don’t look now, we may have trouble”, Rita Coccinelle an entomologist, and a doll, respectively).

Once I had the genre, I ran around the house grabbing any book I could find that dealt with dragons, knights, fairies, ghosts, and mythology (which is quite a few to be honest). I even grabbed my old school Dungeons and Dragons books from my childhood. Back in about 1998 or so, I was at my parents’ house going through some old boxes in the machine shed. I was heavily into writing at the time and wondered if maybe those old D&D books might make for good references for a story. I’ve been carting a copy of the Monster Manual, Dungeon’s Master Guide, and a few DM screens with me ever since, from apartment to apartment, to finally the condo. I don’t know that I’ve ever actually used them for anything all this time. Well, here’s one time where being a pack rat paid off.

I traveled to Steve’s house and met the rest of the crew – director Grant and our group of otherwise untitled laborers, Chris, Steve, Jack, and Peter. We immediately headed to a local bar to grab a bite to eat and start kicking around ideas. I had to admit to them that Fantasy was one of the few genres I hadn’t any ideas for, so we began brainstorming immediately. We thought it might be a difficult genre simply because of all the props involved in doing a traditional Fantasy film like swords, armor, castles, even all the dragons have traveled north for the summer. However, we also felt like this was a genre that could be somewhat loosely defined. It didn’t have to be about knights and damsels in distress, it just had to be fantastic.

After a few rounds of beer, we finally mashed a couple different ideas together and it seemed to click. In our world, accountants and computer geeks play role-playing games to escape from their mundane lives. What, then, do hobbits, wizards, and barbarians play to escape from their less-than mundane world? We figured they’d play as accountants and computer geeks. The light bulb went off and the next thing you know we were spitting out ideas in rapid-fire procession.

The idea changed slightly as we decided to show both worlds – the “real” world of the barbarian, a wizard, and a thief, and the “fantasy” world of an accountant, a lawyer, and an entomologist. We then made the “fantasy world” a bit more like an epic role-playing game adventure in that their big quest was to print out and fax a document to their boss. It was bizarre and filled with plenty of RPG/computer nerd humor, but, well, they say “write what you know”.

We hurried back to Steve’s so I could get pounding away on a script and the other specifics of the shoot could begin being ironed out. This was around 9:30PM. I don’t really know what anyone else was doing during that time, but I was busy writing just over 8 pages of script, which was going to need to be slightly edited because roughly one page of script equals one page of film. We knew a few things were going to have to go once we began editing, but we figured we’d shoot the whole thing and cut whatever didn’t work.

I left Steve’s house around 3:30 in the morning. Steve lives down near St. Louis. I live in St. Peters, which is about a half-hour away. I got home and snuggled into bed next to Andrea around 4:00, but because I was going on pure adrenaline and creative juices, I didn’t fall asleep until probably 4:30. It was a rough night, but it was only a precursor of what was to come.

My alarm went off 2 hours later. No, seriously. We got up and gathered a few props we would need from around the house, then headed to Wal-Mart to pick up a few more. Finally we made our way to St. Charles where we were rousing our friends Mike and Melissa out of bed to come help us. Mike has shot a few short films before for one of his high school buddies, so I figured he’d be good for our crew. His girlfriend Melissa is a teacher at a local Catholic school where part of her curriculum is shooting and editing student films. Needless to say we thought both of them would be helpful and we recruited them pretty hard.

We arrived at Steve’s around 9:30, tired, but excited. I had made some script changes as we drove that morning and there were a few suggestions from the rest of the crew that I made as well. I’m not a diva writer, especially not in a situation like this where I’m under a lot of pressure and have to try to be funny, something I don’t always excel at in my writing, so I was more than willing to take advice from others. And it was here where the guys came up with the title for the role-playing game, as well as the movie – “Cubicles & Co-Workers” – a play on Dungeons & Dragons.

We also had hair and make up to do, which Steve decided to take one for the team and shave his head to complete his barbarian look. Andrea did an amazing tribal tattoo on Steve’s now-bald head, neck, and shoulder and he really looked like a wild man. It completely sold his character and setup a great gag later on.

It took a while to gather props and generally get things moving, so the guys going to the office shoot didn’t leave until around 1:30. They expected to be back around 5:00, but that gave us left at Steve’s house time to setup the scene for the Medieval pub where our fierce warriors were going to be playing as accountants and lawyers.

The office crew returned later than expected – around 7:00, I think – where we had a nicely-designed set and Pizza Hut waiting for them. We didn’t spend much time before jumping into costuming, setting up the shots, and fine-tuning things, preparing for the role-players scenes. Shooting began around 10:00PM, I think, and wrapped somewhere around 4:00AM with all of us exhausted and struggling to stay awake. We got home around 5:00 when we immediately went to bed, meaning I had been up for 46 of the last 48 hours.

Andrea had gotten a few hours of sleep at Steve’s, so she was more refreshed than I was come Sunday morning. She forced me to wake up around 12:30 just so I wouldn’t sleep the whole day away and have a heck of a time going to bed that night. Thankfully we got moving and ran some errands because I got a call from Steve who said they had a rough cut of the movie…and it sucked…and it was 10 minutes long! He said the jokes just weren’t funny, some of the scenes were too slow, it just generally didn’t work. We were already planning on heading back down there to get the things we’d left the night before, but we jumped that schedule up and left immediately.

We got there around 2:00 to find that Grant, the director/editor, hadn’t even gone to bed. After everyone left he started going through the shots, putting things together. On the way there I had scribbled up some quick notes on things that could be cut, could be trimmed down for time, and maybe a few things that could be moved around. But first we watched the rough cut and…laughed, which I think gave some renewed hope to the guys. Sometimes when you’re so close to a project for so long, you sort of lose perspective on it. They needed to hear us laughing to understand that, yeah, some of this actually worked. Some of it didn’t and would need to be reworked or cut, but for the most part it wasn’t that bad.

We jumped into editing – slicing bits here, moving things there, we even re-recorded some dialog to make things work. Somehow we got it down to something ridiculous like 7 minutes and 12 seconds. You have no idea how hard it is to find 12 seconds worth of stuff to cut. Eventually we whittled it down to 6 minutes 59 seconds – just a hair under the 7 minute cut-off. By this time it was right around 6:45 and the freaking out officially began.

The guys who were going to deliver the film left around 7:10. Luckily the drop-off point was just up the highway, so they had no problem getting there with a few minutes to spare. Granted, they were burning the DVD of the film in the Mustang as they traveled, but, still, the film got submitted in time…barely.

It was while our boys were sprinting to the finish line that those of us left behind sat and finally watched the finished product. Unfortunately, in our mad rush to get it turned in, we forgot to cut one bit of dialog and somehow the audio from one cut wasn’t there. So we had a little bit of an audio issue, but otherwise it looked like it was fine. We were disappointed, but not devastated considering how much we had accomplished in such a little amount of time.

Every movie turned in, regardless if it was turned in my 7:30 on Sunday or not, has a chance to be screened before an audience. It might not be in the competition, but everyone’s work will seen on the big screen at the Tivoli Theatre down in The Loop. Out of 72 teams, something like 57 of them made the Sunday deadline and only 2 didn’t turn in any film at all (I think those numbers are correct, but I could be wrong). To allow enough time for everyone’s films to be seen, they split the screenings over a few nights with different groups going at different times. Our night was last night at 9:15.

Before the screening I was nervous. I hadn’t gotten a good night’s sleep even after our marathon weekend because I was up late thinking about what could have been, what we should have done better, how we could have been more efficient, etc., etc., etc. I don’t know why but I could not get this stuff out of my mind. I guess I just wanted to present the best product possible and was disappointed that it wasn’t perfect, knowing full well that we did the absolute best we could given the time and resources provided. Still, I now understand the mental trials and tribulations that a director must go through while presenting his vision to an audience.

This nervousness calmed considerably as we watched the seven films presented before ours. I began to understand that everyone else did the same thing – they struggled to get things done, they stretched the limits of their physical and mental abilities, and wound up with a rough film. I now understood that our presented film was never going to be perfect considering the time limitations pressed upon us. Grant was talking about going back to the film after the competition and reworking it a little bit for our own personal DVD collections and I know now that that is the version I’ll be showing to friends and family, but this screening was the raw output of our insane weekend. There was something to relish in that as well.

The screening was plagued with more technical issues. There was some odd pixealization on the screen and our 16:9 aspect ratio which was supposed to covert to a 4:3 letterboxing, wound up scrunched and out of proportion. Did I mention the sound was turned way down, too? Needless to say it was anything but a perfect presentation. Still, we got some laughs in all the right places and even in some places we weren’t expecting. After the screening we even had one kid come up to our director on the street and say it was his favorite film of the night. He was quoting lines back to us like a rabid fanboy. And, really, the fact that we were able to reach one geeky guy and make him laugh, was enough for us. It was more than we ever hoped for as we otherwise felt like the experience was there for us to have fun, be creative, and come out with something we could show our friends some drunken Friday night. We got that and more and I don’t think any one of us could be happier.

Obviously this is where I would normally post a video of the film. However, the rules of the competition state we have to wait until all judging is over, so that will have to wait a while. I’ll let you know as soon as it’s available.

In the end, this was an amazing experience for me. I was forced to stop making excuses and write, because people were depending on me. I couldn’t take the time to agonize over every word or story structure. I just had to do it – right or wrong, good or bad. I also got to see something I wrote (or at least mostly wrote as it really was a collaborative project) come to life. That’s a first for me as I’ve never had a play produced or definitely never a movie made from my work. That’s pretty exciting for any movie buff like me.

Best of all, though, is we’re not done yet. We enjoyed the shoot and working together so much that we’re planning to do another one in October. This one will be quite a different experience than the 48 Hour Film Project, what with time to write a script, scout for locations, and as much time as needed for Grant to edit the film to his liking, so I’m anxious to see how it will turn out. Considering how well we did with only 48 hours, I’m expecting something pretty excellent the next time around.