Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with our good friend Rav, who is giving us his last official Palm Beach Film Festival report and found a movie that he really dug, the Colin Hanks starrer RX. It sounds like it could be glorious if it lives up to Rav's words. I trust his film tastes, so I'll be greatly looking forward to this flick. Enjoy!
Last day of the Palm Beach film festival, as much as the films may not have been a hit, it attracted a fun happy group of people that made this fest worthwhile. It's a very bizarre circumstance to have fun at a film festival in which you find ninety percent of the films abysmal, it's not supposed to happen. Especially for me, because when I go to a film festival I normally try to stay away from any party of any sort rather in favor of seeing 6-7 films a day, usually it's a bit more fun to experience some new good film rather than sit around watching silly people for a bit. Although in the case of palm beach I'd recommend the latter, there's a fun crew of people running the festival, just not the greatest film programmer. This man I've never met who's supposedly been their programmer three years running named Alan Elrod should be shot, killed, dragged down the highway, and pissed on by a group of inebriated rednecks. On the last night of the festival I saw one film worthy of much notice as well as another that should probably be left undistributed and perhaps the MPAA should issue a new rating for it in which no person under 77 should view it. It was sick demented bland geriatric pornography. Enough of that on to the good stuff.
Before my first film of the day was a horrible horrible short starring Alison Eastwood. After 2 minutes I tried blank out and day-dream something better, it didn't work and I had to endure the rest of the crappy short. I don't understand how people are motivated to not only make boring movies about nothing, but are into selling them too. God, I guess it's all about recoup'ing production costs, but sometimes I'm tempted to start a charitable organization to buy the rights to shitty little movies so that they never have to be shown again. Oh well, I'm an asshole, on to the good movie.
Okay first up was this little film called RX, starring Colin Hanks and Eric Balfour, one of the chopped-up teens in the Chainsaw Remake. It follows a couple of kids on a quick trip to Mexico to go to a rave and score a small cache of prescription drugs. What seems like to be a fun druggy road trip movie turns into a bit of a horror movie halfway it's like Maria Full of Grace except with gay german men with guns instead of the spanish gang members and the kid from orange county instead of that Moreno girl. The film has some very nispel'y flashy cinematography that works out well with the trippy story, it's shot by cabin fever veteran Scott Kevan, like Cabin it really feels very Daniel Pearl-like, great stuff. Colin Hanks is pretty damn good in this, with this and 11:14 he's showing a bit more of his acting range and is proving to be much more than just the son of forrest gump. Budding Chainsaw dead kid's Eric Balfour and Laura German though it's actually not much of a change from running from leatherface to running from homo-german-flamboyant drug dealers, they pull it off very well and have quite a future ahead of both of them. Personally, the real stars of the movie are Alan Tudyk and Ori Pfeiffer, both creepy and fucked, one's a bit more restrained the other is channeling a very evil version of Peter Stormare in The Big Lebowski, they steal the show. It's amazing that this is Ariel Vormen's first film, he should be very proud of himself. This movie kicks all sorts of ass and it's a travesty that this film doesn't have distribution yet. Of any movie I saw this weekend this is the only one that I say could perform quite well on a 2,000 screen release. Someone get some balls and pick this fricken movie up!
The next film I saw was the closing night film, I'm not going to bother with the title as it very much fit the previous qualifications as a shitty movie. It really kind of pissed me off as it had a very good cast and should have been a sure-thing. I wouldn't wish this film upon anybody, but like all bland ensemble family comedies it'll probably find an audience and make 100 million dollars. Though I really can't figure out who would want to watch this movie, it's sorta well shot, but it's just uninteresting. Perhaps old people who fantasize about being rich and messing with their kids heads one last time will like it, it's a bit of geriatric-sploitation in that respect. Though I can't see the appeal for any other human being under 80 to watch this thing, the guy that directed the boring alison eastwood short even walked out, as well as a retarded man next to me groaned in boredom. You know a movie's bad when you can't even entertain a retarded person with pretty moving colors. Bad movie, eeek eeeek eeeek.
And with that it's over. It was a fun week in Palm Beach, there's a lot of potential in this festival it's just got a lot of tweaking that needs to happen over the next year. Notably it needs most some sort of passion taken into it's programming, the slate of films every year seemingly are thrown together randomly, it would be nice if someone truly geeky was behind it and put their all into finding some good movies for the fest. In the past I would say that perhaps Palm Beach couldn't support a cool film festival, the community kinda has an older not exactly filmy skew to it, but this year the most popular movie was Night Of The Dog, a real kick-ass cool funny movie. It sold out all three showings it had as well as took home the audience award. So obviously there is an audience in the town for a real cool fun festival, it'll be interesting to see if the festival heads more in that direction and away from bland fare like Checking Out and The Aryan Couple. There can be a really good festival there, let's hope.
I also really need to mention something, I'm fucking retarded. I made a couple mistakes this week, firstly the kick-ass director of X, Y's name is Vladimir Vitkin not pritikin as written. It was really late and I screwed up. Oddly enough in the same article I also fucked up when reviewing the Planet Ibsen footage, it was not shot on DV, rather it was good ol beautiful Kodak 16mm.
I've got three screeners from the fest to watch this week, Duck, The Bituminous Coal Queens of Pennsylvania, and the revered "39 Pounds Of Love." I'm going to be on break for a couple of days, but I should be back with reviews of em by around wednesday. Then the Palm Beach film festival will be truly over for me, hooray!
Lastly, I wanted to thank every single one of you down there in Florida that made this a fun fantastic week. Jessie, Becky, Roger, Alanna, Carol, Tom, Hal, David, Ray, Jason Tim, Beth, Jami, Jeremy, John, Hal, and everyone I'm forgetting here, you guys all rule and are the greatest! Thanks for the good week :)
later,
Rav
email: Send rav your love, hate and bodily products of both to this email address!!!
