Last night I went to a small film festival with Kane, Lisa & Allison, called No Festival Required. Let me just say this before I even get started: I am embrassed to tell people I am an artist for fear of being grouped together with the "non-conformist" assholes who make stupid pretentious arthouse films like the ones I saw last night.
There were only two (maybe 3) movies that I liked, and they were the last two. I liked them because neither was filmed in black and white, and neither was narrated by some tripped-out "enlightened" tragic artist who recites poems about how love is an illusion, and how society needs an enema. Neither one was saturated with thinly(or in some cases-thickly) veiled political commentary. The two that I liked actually told stories, and had real people, instead of endless crudely filmed shots of windy roads and naked tree branches against a barren grey sky. I say that I maybe liked 3 of them, because the third was an obvious rip-off of SNL's Fun With Real Audio sketch. It still made me giggle though, so I forgive it.
Now I understand that not every movie has to tell a story, and that film itself is a blank canvas with which we can express anything we want. I appeciate that these people are at least trying to think creatively. So all of the movies at least get a C for effort. But my god, stop working so hard to get your message across until you are sure of what that message is! You're not fooling us by using big words that you just looked up in your thesaurus. Every art student film is exactly the same, with the same 3 things to say:
1. Love sucks. Whoever makes these movies has been scorned by someone they felt they had an eternal connection with. They probably believe they met this someone long before this life, but luckily they ran into them at Starbucks. There's nothing much to say about love sucking, except that it's a lie and it brings nothing but pain and makes you listen to your stupid wimpy whiney music and cry alone in your room in your parent's basement. Get over yourself.
2.The world is toxic, and the government wants us all to be miserable. The movies about this stuff are always, ALWAYS black and white, and are so deep that it hurts. These are the musings of a 19 year old kid who sees the world clearly since experimenting with drugs, and now has EVERYTHING figured out, and knows everything there is to know about the world.
3. No message...or is there? These movies are just random, unrelated shots (probably just stuff that the filmmaker thinks look cool), with some distorted voices or just a bunch of mechanical beeps and blips over it. Don't get the message?? Don't worry, the guy who made the movie doesn't either, but he's gonna play it off like you're just not smart or lucky enough to understand. You're probably too jaded by society and conformity. Poor little sad you. Example: one of the films last night was just a shot of a car's turn signal arrows, blinking left for a minute, then a shot of a blank blue screen, then the right turn arrow, blinking for another minute, then a shot of a blank yellow screen, etc. This went on for about 5 minutes. Over these images, we hear what sounded like a heavily distorted police radio. Oooooo. Lisa said she thinks it was supposed to be something about 9-11. But what?, she was not enlightened enough to figure out.
Like I said, at least these people are trying to be creative, and that's more than I'm doing at the moment. But overall, the films were pretentious crap, and had us laughing all the way home.
So I am an artist. Just please don't call me one!