CNHS/UHS FILM FESTIVAL 2011

Last year, the CNHS/UHS Film Festival was a showcase of only 4 five-minute films, so brief that the Festival ended up showing them all twice to pad out the length of the festival. Quality over quantity, I guess, but still. This year was just about the opposite of last year. There were more than twice the amount of films, but for the most part, it was quantity over quality.

Ignoring the numerous technical issues experienced by the tech crews at the show, this year’s was far superior and more engaging than last year’s, with less dead space between films, and thankfully we only sat through them once. I don’t wish to be too critical of student filmmaking, but out of the nine films, there were only 4 that I didn’t find painfully bad, and only 2 of those I actually enjoyed on some level.

So, in the sake of time, I’ll just talk about the ones I liked. Henry Trione’s film about the Tree-a-Thon was absolutely beautifully photographed, and while there really wasn’t much to the actual documentary part, it all looked pretty amazing, especially for a student photographer/filmmaker.

Second, the film by Colin Patty, the student behind my favorite film of last year’s festival, was interesting throughout but a total mess in the end. It looks great, as did ‘To Escape’, last year’s film. However, the movie, called ‘Timeless Flight’ has a total of one line of dialogue and ends up making absolutely no sense. I’ve watched the movie three times now, and the movie comes off as something that was a great idea crippled by a five-minute limit. It’s not the kind of story that works as a short film.

Third was a little silly movie called ‘Teen Ninja’, which was completely stupid throughout but had some clever comedic moments as well as several that fall completely flat. It’s basically about a teen boy challenging a bully to a fight and follows his training and the eventual ‘fight’, which entails playing tic tack toe, hopscotch and shoving each other. It’s pretty stupid, but, the production values were pretty good and the acting has a serviceable over-the-top nature that can work for the movie as well as against it.

Last, my favorite movie of the Festival, ‘Urban Struggle’. It follows a deal between a criminal and a cop being sabotaged by a third party, who turns the whole exchange into a bloodbath. It pays homage to corny cop/criminal movies pretty well, and the music, mostly music from “Inglorious Bastards”, sets the right tone and the film itself was probably the most enjoyable to watch of all the movies at the festival. It’s also worth mentioning that the whole movie looks great due to a bluish filter throughout, and there is some fantastic cinematography.

Finally, I have to mention the worst movie of the Festival, because there’s no fun in reviewing movies if you can’t tear into one every now and again. The worst film, who’s name I can’t even rememeber as I have blocked it from my mind, is filmed entirely with a phone, it seems, as the whole screen looks like a vertical strip. These filmmakers know who they are. The film is an unfunny, overlong, incomprehensible mess at five minutes long. Nobody seems to be trying to make a decent movie, the movie was over the time limit and disqualified as a whole due to distasteful material and language, the latter having been cut out of the final product. The sexual material consisted of one of the boys in the movie wearing short shorts and flirting with his friends for no reason other to contain the mandatory undercurrent of homoeroticism in a modern sophomoric ‘comedy.’ Screw that movie, it made me really mad.

As a whole, the 2011 Film Festival was far superior to the 2010 one, as the number movies I liked this year equaled the total number of movies last year, but that doesn’t mean that all the movies were good. I failed to mention some of the movies, and nothing against those, but I just didn’t feel like revisiting them because I don’t have much to say about them. I look forward to festivals in the future, and I hope that next year, maybe we’ll get 20 films.