AIFF - Last Movie is Over - Coyote's Brett Spackman

Hoar frost decorated Anchorage today when the fog lifted. The temp was around 10˚F (-12˚C) as we headed for the PAC to see the Alaska Theater of Youth production of Fiddler on the Roof. (He's not on the roof in the picture.) The voices were really impressive. Then we split during the curtain call, but got to the Bear Tooth so late that Only really didn't make much sense to us. Then back home to rest until the 8 pm showing of Coyote. I'll post the after movie Q & A with the filmmaker later.

Coyote doesn't quite have the polish of a Hollywood movie and that's good. But I would never guess that two guys made the movie on "as much money as two guys can raise" with friends helping out and the writers/directors also the leading characters. Very impressive. One of my movie standards that I think should be used more often in judging movies is a ratio between quality and cost. While Brett was circumspect about how much money this film cost - Blockbuster and Walmart will have the DVD's soon, and they are working on outside the US rights now - he suggested it wasn't all that much.

[I took the picture of Brett yesterday at Out North]

And, as he said in the Q&A, the immigration, particularly the illegal immigration question is morally murky and it's more shades of gray than black and white. So the topic was interesting, important, and they took a relatively neutral stand. Well, they were really probably sympathetic to Mexicans trying to get to the US, but they raised a number of caveats. But this was more an adventure/action film than a message film.

And I could see why it got the audience award for best picture.

Here's a video of Brett I got Saturday when we were both at the animation workshop. [As I'm putting this up Viddler seems to be extremely slow loading. Hope it clears up soon.][Switched to YouTube, Viddler is having problems.]



And then the Festival was over. I couldn't be happier. The Festival was great - there were some really good films - but ten days movie going and blogging is enough. Now I just have to catch up with my video clips and thoughts on some of the films.