Movie Night

On Monday night Chad and I went with our friends Heather and Grant to a small film festival at Liberty Hall. Heather and Grant's friend Ryan (who is the boyfriend of one of Heather's good friends from grade school) who we met at What Floats Your Boat (a fundraiser for Van Go Mobile Arts) a few weeks ago (which was such a fun event that I totally meant to blog about but just never seemed to have the time) is a producer/sound editor/special effects guy for a local movie production company called SenoReality Pictures. This small but very active company has put together around 15 short films in just the last several years. We watched nine of them on Monday night.

Overall, I have to say I was very impressed with the overall quality of the film productions. The cinematography was always well done and the effects were also great for small budget films. Some of the actors were really good, and while the dialog wasn't stellar, it was much better than a lot of the garbage that you see coming out of Hollywood these days. Almost all of the films were shot in and around Lawrence, so it was really fun to see area landmarks pop up on screen from time to time. If I had one complaint, it would be that because the writer/director was the same person on all 9 of these films, the pictures were...not surprisingly...remarkably similar.

That's not to say that all the stories had the same plot, because they didn't at all, but they were all the exact same genre--suspense/horror. I'm kind of a fan of the suspense type movies (not so much the horror), but seeing 9 of them in a row is just a bit much for me. There were lots of aliens, vampires and other creatures, and oddly enough, some subtle anti-hunter themes that Chad didn't find very amusing. Thankfully, only one movie was gory enough to make my stomach turn, and all of them had interesting enough plot lines and plot twists to keep my attention throughout. They maybe could have cut out a few minutes here and there on a few (at one point Chad leaned over and said "Isn't this supposed to be a short film?"), but I still always found myself very excited to see what was going to happen in the end.

I can't really decide which one was my favorite of the evening. They were almost all interesting and well-done--one of the films even recently one a regional Emmy (despite the fact that I think one of the performances in this particular short was pretty awful). The film is called Woman's Intuition and you can actually watch the entire thing on YouTube! Check it out!