AIFF 2011: The Dead Inside - Travis Betz and Year Zero -Richard Cunningham

Year Zero showing at workshop today

I spent all day at two Film Festival workshops. The afternoon workshop was Animation with Richard Cunningham's workshop and video. I'll do more on the workshop later. 

The Animation group is showing at 6pm at Out North, and if you haven't seen it, GO!  I think this is the strongest category at this year's festival and I think Cunningham's Year Zero is the best film in the festival. (My opinion, take it for what it's worth.)  It has a look and feel that, for my Anchorage eyes, is original and spectacular.  Watching the whole thing for the second time today it was even better.  The sound too is amazing.  And the detail.  This is, for me, great animation.  But everything else in the program is good too. 

World Animation

6:00 pm

Out North

Today - Saturday Dec. 10

All the animated films in competition are in the second half of the show, so you can get there late and still see enough to be worth while.  Year Zero is almost at the end.

Travis Betz did the first one.  I have lots of video on my sound card, but there's no way I can edit it before I leave for more festival.  We saw various examples of work he's done and discussions of how it was made and how YouTube was helpful in getting an audience and making contacts.  The movie tonight is The Dead Inside.

Today (Saturday Dec. 10)

The Dead Inside

8pm

Bear Tooth

[Portrait from Travis' business card.  
You can compare that to what he looks 
like on the video.]


It's a zombie musical.  We saw the trailer.  This is real film festival stuff - a young, hungry, passionate film maker who's made a low budget film and one day you'll be able to say, Yeah, I saw The Dead Inside when he was unknown in 2011. 

AIFF 2011: Corridor and Amigo

 The Corridor

I'm not a horror movie fan.  I look away before the blood flows.  But I stayed in the Bear Tooth Thursday night to see the beginning of The Corridor.  I don't want to say anything about the story in case you see it - it's playing again Sunday Dec. 11 at the Alaska Experience Theater at 2pm.

But I did want to say I thought it was a good film.  The characters - four young men who had been friends a long time and were starting to go off in different directions - were interesting and real.  The story had a very satisfying ironic twist to it.  The special effects in this low budget Canadian film worked well.  And Alaskans will appreciate the familiar look of  a remote cabin in the snow.  I found the movie genuinely scary and I stayed most of the way through until one nasty bout with a big knife.  But even as I walked out, I really wanted to know what was going to happen.


Amigo

Tonight we saw John Sayles' Amigo, which takes place in a small Filipino village after the Americans win the Spanish-American War and are finishing up their takeover of the Philippines.  This film was brought in at the last minute to fill the hole for a film that would have been a North American premier.  But at the last minute the film got accepted in a much more prestigious festival where it would get much more attention, but only on the condition that it was the North American premier.  So, we lost it.  But Amigo was a good substitution and it was nice to see members of the Anchorage Filipino community there to see Joel Torre, who, I was told, is a major Filipino film star.

The film focused on a prosperous village whose head man followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and who owned most of the land which others farmed.  Then the painfully young American troops come in, and despite the local American commander's decency, things do not go well.  The characters in the movie speak their own languages - English, Spanish, a Filipino language (not sure which one), and a Chinese dialect that had a Cantonese ring to it.

I couldn't  help but think about the young American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I was also struck by how much the technology of war has changed since those days of horses, swords, and simple guns.  I'm glad I got to see it.

AIFF 2011: Break Back Skiing, Learn Again - The Movement, Sat in Anchorage, Sundance Later

How much can I get into one title?  I left out the rest of the title (One Man Joins An Uprising).  I talked briefly with film maker Greg Hamilton who was particularly excited about being notified last week that the film was accepted at Sundance.

I don't know much more than what he told me in the video below.  It plays tomorrow (Saturday) at the Wild Berry Theater (down the road from the Peanut Farm on Old Seward and International Airport Road).  This is a great little theater.  I've seen live plays there, but never a movie.  2pm.  The film is about a skier who has to relearn to ski - in a skichair - after breaking his back.  I think this is the third festival it's shown been shown in.  They submitted a rough copy but tomorrow the final cut will be shown.

But get it straight from Greg:

AIFF 2011: How Do Actors Deal With Sex Scenes? Garrett Swan Explains After The Casserole Club

I talked to co-producer and actor in The Casserole Club after the showing last night.  The was about five couples who had casserole dinners together in the late 1960s, that included a lot of alcohol, which led to clothes coming off and various couplings.  Not everyone in the movie did this voluntarily and there were regrets among many.  I asked Garrett, since the characters had problems with this, how did the actors handle it?




The movie wasn't very satisfying for me and after a night's sleep, I think it's because I simply didn't get to know any of the characters well enough to understand their underlying malaise or why they participated in something they didn't really want to do. I may have gotten more insight into why they participated from the movie I saw before Casserole - Lesson Plan - which looked at peer and other pressures on high school students to join an exclusionary club.  It was a lesson to help them understand why people joined the Nazi party. 

You can judge for yourself. The Casserole Club plays again today at Out North at 7pm.  


Other good movies to choose from today include:

Amigo - This is a special selection (not here for competition) directed by well known director John Sayles.  It's about the American presence in the Philippines after the Spanish American War.  It will make the third movie I've seen this week that takes place in the Philippines.   8pm at the Bear Tooth.

The Flood - An Israeli movie about a family whose mentally disabled son is coming home when the institution he's in shuts down and how the family copes.  A strong film. 
8:30 at Alaska Experience Theater

Animation World Wide- This collection of animated films includes all those in competition.  This is, in my mind, the strongest category of films.  Every one has something original in it.  And near the end you get to see Year Zero which I found to stand out.  But others like Something Left Something Taken are also special.  I've got interviews with several of the film makers up (see my overview of videos of film makers here and my overview of animated films in competition here) and I believe that the creator of Year Zero, Richard Cunningham, will be there tonight. 
7:20 at Out North

Kinyarwanda - A solidly good movie about Rwanda that focuses on the healing. Out North at 10pm


Click here for today's whole schedule

AIFF 2011: Lesson Plan Worked For The Audience

I was pulled right into this documentary about a high school teacher who set up an experiential learning situation in his Palo Alto classroom in 1967.  The intent was to show the students how normal people can be pulled into a rabid group mentality like what happened in Nazi Germany.  It was very compelling cinema.  I caught a few folks as they left the theater:



This definitely would get my vote as best documentary (of the ones I saw.)

As a teacher who likes to use experiential learning, it was interesting to think this sort of thing would be very hard to put on today because of the need for informed consent and concerns for an unstable student to flip out.  These are valid concerns.  But they ought to be weighed against the fact that 40 years later at a class reunion, the students said it was the most important lesson they learned in school and it continued to affect their lives. 

It is also similar to an elementary school experiment that was captured in a movie called "A Class Divided."  The teacher divided the class into two groups - the blue eyed students and the brown eyed students.  The blue-eyed students were praised as being good and smart and the brown-eyed students were chastised for being slow and lazy.  Within a day, the blue-eyed kids began lording it over the brown-eyed kids and the brown-eyed kids were feeling oppressed.  You can see the Front Line report on this experiment here.

I would add that the film suggested that the teacher, Ron Jones, was not that much of a planner and this whole exercise was pretty off the cuff. Enough so that one might question how apt the title is. Did he even have a lesson plan?

Both film show how easy it is for people to move into the in group if the conditions are right and to exclude the outsiders.  It seems that most people are susceptible, though one in particular actively protested. 

This is powerful stuff and important for as many people to see as possible - to see how easily this happens.  Of course, the point of the movie is that actually going through the experiment is considerably more effective. 

This is a film festival and a key criterion ought to be how well the movie was made as well as the content of the film.  I don't think there was any particular magic in the film making, except that the story flowed without me really even noticing the technical processes at all.  That's a sign of a good movie. 

AIFF 2011: Busy Thursday, Lots of Interesting Choices

Hard decisions tonight.

For the early birds, Lesson Plan is playing at Out North at 5:50pm and  High Sierra:  A Journey on the John Muir Trail is playing at 6 at the Alaska Experience Theater.

Lesson Plan has won several Best Documentary prizes at other festivals.

Then, lots of good features:

Inuk - the opening night movie from Greenland which features a cast of kids from a real shelter for troubled kids going on a traditional seal hunt is showing in both theaters at the Alaska Experience Theater.  The main theater at 8pm and the smaller theater at 8:15pm.  I saw it last Friday - a story Alaskans can relate to.  Link goes to post showing  Q&A with three of the film makers.  Audio works, video dim. 

The short Views and Voices of Bristol Bay will have a free showing in the large theater at 7:20pm

An Ordinary Family (see audience reactions from last night here) is showing at Out North at  7pm.  Man brings boyfriend to annual family holiday.  At the door he tells bf the family doesn't know.  Brother is a minister, has trouble handling the unexpected guest.  Saw it last night and enjoyed it.

And at 8pm at the Bear Tooth is The Casserole Party.  From the trailer it's 1960's, five couples, the men will judge who made the best casserole, and then things get out of hand - here it's sex rather than violence.  As Mark Bell writes at Film Threat:

Image from IMDB

As the evening wears on, and the couples get drunk and silly, stupid parlor games turn to couple-swapping. From there, the film deals with the fallout of a bunch of sexually repressed couples working out their sexual appetites under the false pretenses of dinner get-togethers. As you can imagine, it’s all fun and games until someone falls in love… or gets pregnant… or may be a closeted homosexual.

 Ethan Berkowitz look-alike (at least in this picture) and actor in the film, Garrett Swann, is scheduled to be at the showing. 

And there are Snowdance  (Alaska related) shorts at Out North at 8:15 - including Nanuq (see interview with film makers Jill Jones and Brent Yontz from Tuesday night.)

Then at 10:15pm at the Bear Tooth - wear clothes you can get blood on - is Canadian film The Corridor.  James McCormick at The Criterion Cast writes (in part):

The Corridor is a very good low budget horror effort from Canada, which harkens back to the good old days of Canadian genre films of yesteryear. While watching it, I got the influence of The Thing mixed with an early Stephen King short story but is well executed with their limited budget. When it comes to the script, it is more about the psychological elements, where friends start to go against each other, maiming (a fantastic gore effect that is best left unmentioned until you see it, but it involves Jim, played by Glen Matthews, who is the friend who didn’t take part in the intro to the film, that is one of the best I’ve seen in quite some time) and murders, showing the underlying anger and what something as mysterious as the corridor can do to a group of lifelong friends who are all in a mid-life crisis.

Sounds like Casserole Club without the women.

AIFF 2011: An Ordinary Family - Audience Reactions

[NOTE: I'd recommend An Ordinary Family for people looking for something good to see tonight. But read more to see if this is for you.]

I'd decided to just stay at Out North after watching Give Up Tomorrow - a very compelling Filipino documentary about framed convictions on kidnap, rape, and murder.  [The film focused on one of the convicted and identified the film maker as a distant relative.  I assume the film is accurate, but I really know nothing about the case other than what I saw.]

But another festival junkie said she'd heard An Ordinary Family was one of the best films at the festival and the Out North offering was a Polish movie, Odd One Out [Nie ten człowiek], that had the word surreal in the description.  Ordinarily that would be an attraction, but I was tired and thought something I didn't have to work hard at was more appealing.

An Ordinary Family plays again tonight (Thursday).

The video has some audience reaction:




An Ordinary Family turned out to be a good, easy to watch (good characters, fairly predictable plot) film about a man coming to a family vacation with his male lover.  His brother, a minister, doesn't know they're coming.  The film's press kit (pdf) says the family has no clue about the boy friend or that Seth is gay, though it's not that clear in the movie. There are lots of ways a film can be categorized and most probably drive film makers crazy.  That said (and apologies to film maker Mike Akel, who wasn't able to make it last night) the basic theme - adjustments in people's heads to the new realities created by GLBT folks being more open and visible reminded me of the movie The Kids Are Allright without the star power of Annette Bening and Juliane Moore.  In terms of audience appeal, while The Kids, in my memory was technically better [slicker], I think this film would have a similar appeal if it had the same sort of advertising budget and its leads had the same sort of name recognition.  I suspect if you compared budgets and evaluated the two in terms of quality/cost, An Ordinary Family would come out way ahead. (One of the audience reactors  in the video said the photography was "a couple of steps above home video," I didn't notice that at all.)

I was particularly struck by the kids in the movie.  My guess is that they just left the camera running during down time and then used some of that footage of the kids just being kids. [It turns out that the son was the real son of the actor playing Thomas, Troy Schremmer.]

I'd now love to see the very same movie with the actors Troy Schremmer and Greg Wise switching roles (they played the two brothers Thomas and Seth).  It would be interesting to see how that would change the movie.  That thought just popped into my mind near the end of the film.

One question people had after the movie was:  where was it shot?  The director is from Austin, so that was suggested.  Going through the press kit, New York is mentioned several times, but I finally found a few references to the shoot being in Texas.  But nothing more specific.

Other interesting notes:  The character Thomas and his on-screen wife, are off screen husband and wife.  The actor, Troy Schremmer, is quoted making a fascinating observation in the press kit:

On working with his real-life wife on screen: “Fighting with Jonny (Janelle) is much, much more fun with a room full of cameras than it is in real life. Itʼs safer, for one thing, because of all the witnesses. Plus, weʼve got a director in the room to tell us when to stop or when weʼre getting too dull. And if we screw up and say something really out of line, we can just go back and start over again. I highly recommend it to any couple whoʼs looking for a little therapy or to spice things up a little bit”

There's a lot of interesting back story about creating the film in the press kit.
And if anyone is interested, you can get a Grandma ringtone.  (That will make sense after you see the movie.)

Here's the trailer:


AN ORDINARY FAMILY - Official Film Trailer! from Matt Patterson on Vimeo.

AIFF 2011: LA Film Makers With Anchorage Based Movie - Jill Jones and Brent Yontz

I caught Brent and Jill Tuesday night at the Bear Tooth after Moon Point.. They're up from L.A. with their Anchorage based story. It's in the Snowdance Program Thursday - details below. [A comment below suggests it was filmed in Anchorage, but not intended to actually be Anchorage specifically.]




Snowdance Program
Thursday, Dec. 8, 2011 - 
Out North Theatre - Main

My Offering | T Scott 2011
Bike/Ski/Raft Denali Traverse | 2011
Chablis | Slavik Boyechko 2011
Change | Michael Burns, Dean Q. Mitchell 2011
Nanuq | Jill Jones 2011
My Six (Known) Brushes With Death | Peter Dunlap-Shohl 2010
The Way | Kelly Gwynn, Jay Rapoza 2011
Eyes for Amber | Kyle Murphy 2011
Hell Yeah | Claudio Oakley 2011


I was a little concerned when I learned they did a movie set in Anchorage without ever having been to Anchorage.  But their short film is really about the little girl and her connection to Nanuq and the live action is all in the hospital.  (They gave me a DVD so I could see it.) The shots out the window are ok.  The parts that distort Anchorage badly are animated dream sequences and anything can happen in a dream. [UPDATE:  See comment below that says dream sequence wasn't intended to portray Anchorage, but stylized winter setting.] The film itself is believable and the acting is fine.

Pear, Satsuma, Apple, Cabbage, Kale, Carrots Leek, Cucumber

I picked up our Full Circle Farm box today.  All those fruits and vegetables to perk up a grey December day.  To remind me that the solstice is two weeks away, and then the days start getting longer. 

"Its fruit is sweet and usually seedless, about the size of other mandarin oranges (Citrus reticulata), smaller than an orange. One of the distinguishing features of the satsuma is the distinctive thin, leathery skin dotted with large and prominent oil glands, which is lightly attached around the fruit, enabling it to be peeled very easily in comparison to other citrus fruits. The satsuma also has particularly delicate flesh, which cannot withstand the effects of careless handling" [Wikipedia]

Dental Spam Response Part 2: "I understand you have an opinion, but I am respectfully asking that you . . ."

You can see Part 1 of this here.
The original post about the spam is here.

The first response to the post from the dentist was a threat of legal action. I sent a response to the threat [in Part 1] via email Tuesday night - a week ago.  Wednesday morning there was an 8:04am email waiting for me. 

Steve,
I am proactively looking into why this happened in the first place as I was not aware that the SEO company that we work with was doing this. The internet, though, is a free market and what they did is completely legal. If it was a problem that you didnt want this comment on your log, it would have been as simple as to call my office and request that we take it down or like your website states“Comments will be reviewed, not for content (except ads), but for style. . . Ads disguised as comments, unless closely related to the post and of value to readers(my call) will be deleted.” It seems that you are going completely out of your way to make calls to the local paper and have a reporter check into it and waste your time. The first line of your blog states that "..I have better things to do than this, but I can't help it." but it doesnt seem that way. I appreciate that you are educating people about this matter but I do not want my practice specifically mentioned as your comments about sleezy dentist and XXXXXX Dental Arts can be easily misconstrued by any patient or potential patient of mine. I understand you have an opinion, but I am respectfully asking that you take the  XXXXXXX Dental Arts name out of your blog.

"It started out as a snarky post about a tacky dentist. Now I'm not sure how tacky the dentist is..." -This negative opinion has no baring and is not helpful and doesn't compare at all to your example of diagnosing a cavity
"They are a tacky, factory dental clinic that will do whatever it takes to get customers." -All of this information is deduced from from one comment on one blog?
"I still think there are signs of tackiness here on the dentist's part - the long hours, the heavy push on SEO, including a staff member who knows the term, and the multiple offices in the area." We have long hours as to accommodate patients at all times due to the patient population that we see. We are one of only 3 medicaid providers in the greater XXXXXXX area. There are about 140 dentists in the area that do not take insurance or only take a few of the best insurances. I pride myself and my practice on the ability to see all of these lower middle class and low income families that nobody else wants see because of the very low insurance reimbursement. This is in no way tacky. Also, my marketing team is very familiar with the term SEO as they should be considering that is what their job entails...marketing. And Im not sure what multiple offices in the area means either since this is my only practice.
These are just a few of the things that are offensive and untrue. I do not want them associated with any names at my practice or the name of my practice. Otherwise, say what you want but I hope this is a lesson to you that things aren't always what they seem.

XXXXX  XXXXXXX

I took some time to think about it.  I'd like to think I'm not into win-lose type competition.  Most situations can be imagined in new ways that allow everyone to come out ok, if not well.  What did he want?  What did I want?  Most of what I wanted had already happened.  We'd moved from "Take this down or I'll sue" to "I'm respectfully asking . . ."

But underlying that, and even more important, we went from trying to use power to get one's way to using reason and persuasion to work out an acceptable solution for us both. 

I don't agree with everything said in the email.  I didn't make statements as much as speculate possibilities, for example.  But I don't need to quibble with him about the details. [Readers can read the original post and then Part 1 of this post to see for themselves.] 

And he made some good points.  Do I have an invalid stereotype about chain dentists just being out to make money? I even said "factory dentists."  But if one moves from the professional model of dentistry to the business model, then one moves from the polite to the rough and tumble, including occasional bad reviews.  But dentists always had to run a business as well as care for their patients.  And I certainly think assisting medicaid patients is a good thing but it's not without risks. I heard many tales from my mother who worked in a doctor's office about how medicaid (and medicare) often didn't cover the doctor's expenses and how easy it is to get in trouble over paperwork mistakes.

Am I biased because all my life I've only gone to small private dental offices that got patients through word of mouth, not a marketing team?  Does that mean that there aren't other legitimate models?  I don't need a fight with a  Dental Center in the Eastern time zone.  I made my point that businesses should be careful about hiring sleazy SEO operations.  (BTW, the original post collected two more dental spam comments and I had to delete two comments from an airport taxi service.) There's no real need to have a particular dentist's name in the post. (The one dentist whose spam/comment to this post I left as an example, put his own name there.)

I sent the new email to my attorney and proposed that I would delete references to the specific dentist office and town, but add the follow up emails.  I didn't hear from my attorney. [I just found his quick Wednesday response in my spam folder.] I did see him at the film festival though on Monday.

I told him the dentist had called me that morning (I wish East Coast people would check time zones before calling Alaska.)  We had a pleasant conversation and I spelled out my proposal and he was agreeable as long as his name was left out of things.

So, we each got what we wanted through civil rational discussion.  Neither of us will have to pay for an expensive legal battle.  Both of us are satisfied with the resolution. 

I will quibble on one point.  I simply called a reporter in his area to find out if this dental center had a reputation or not since I had no local connections I could check with.  I wasn't trying to stir up trouble.  

On the blogging side, yes, we have the First Amendment that allows us to say quite a bit.  But just because we have the right doesn't mean we should always use it.  We should be mindful of the unnecessary harm we can cause others.  There should be a good reason for inconveniencing (or worse) others in our exercise of free speech.  And there are also times when we need to hold our ground.  I respect a dentist willing to care for this medically under served population and I have no reason to disbelieve what he says.

Thanks, Dr. XXX for engaging me civilly.  I learned something through this, and I hope that you've  taken something positive from this as well. 

And other bloggers, you might want to consider joining a blogging association if only to get some coverage for unanticipated legal expenses. [I tried getting a link to the Media Bloggers website, but I got "Forbidden" messages.]