Here are some somewhat belated(by about a week) about the annual 48 hour film project Fargo 2008. This part of an international endeavor, with the winners moving up a level and the eventual winner being shown at the Cannes Film Festival, as I understand it.
But first let's define our terms. On Friday May 16, thirteen teams of filmmakers met at Babb's Coffee House(one of the sponsors) at 5 PM to draw a film genre(e.g. Western, Romance, Horror, etc) and are then given the rules: they are to make a film in 48 hours in their genre that must include a particular character, prop, and line of dialogue. In this year's project, the film must contain a character with a particular name, one for a man, a different one for a woman. This character must be the treasurer of something. The required prop was a pair of scissors, and the line of dialogue "We'll know when we get there." Twelve of the films were shown at the Fargo the ensuing tuesday night. These nights are always a lot of fun: loud, cheerful adolescents/young adults, many of whom had probably been up all weekend making movies, laughing, cheering, etc.
The movies themselves were actually pretty good. The acting was, for the most part, pretty good and the scripts pretty inventive. Much of the humor was in the way the required prop, dialogue, characters are snuck into the story. Obviously I'm not going to review each of the mobird, but it was interesting to see the sites in the area at which the movies were filmed. To give some idea, one of the entries, "No Shoulder" was about a pedestrian hit by a couple's car on one of the many gravel roads in the area. The story is standard from there, but who cares(do they call the police or just leave, etc) but on a county road where the visibility is, oh say, 5 miles or so and there's nothing to see anyway?
Another was a comedy, "Death Perception," about a young detective who is asked to determine a cause of death and is totally mislead by his more experienced colleagues. I'll close with the last movie shown: "Precious Metal: The Otto Steinholz Story," the life story told in a few minutes about a man that can't stop coughing up nuts & bolts.
Aside to Ben & Riley: you would have had a great time.
Paranoid Park probably has just left the Fargo. This is a story about teens from broken homes that would rather skateboard than do anything else. The action takes place in Portland, Oregon, and in the seedier part of town thre is a skateboard park that is populated, according to the kid doing the narrative, druggies, throw-away kids, and other individuals that are probably best not met after dark. One finds out eventually that the main character and his friend decide to go there one night, and something bad happens. Once again, the kids are in a quandry about what to do, and neither has any significant adult in his life to go to to for guidance. I'm being intentionally vague about what the event is, in part because the the movie is shot in flashbacks, scenes that make no sense at the time, but then are shown again later when they do, so you really don't know what happened until the end of the movie.
The story itself, once put together, is straightforward and interesting enough with some good issues and questions raised. But perhaps if the story itself is told in a straightforward manner, there wouldn't be enough there for a movie, so the director chopped and shuffled to keep it interesting. Even with that, it's only about 80 minutes long.
The hype for the movie claims that all the actors were recruited from the social networking website MySpace. If this means they were amatuers, they did a pretty good job.
If you like the movies coming out now about the Columbine kids and the like, you'll probably like this. If not, you might anyway: it's pretty inoffensive, but not great art.
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