Fantastic Fest Day #1

Human-Filled Eyeball Pinata

Behold, a Zack Carlson-filled pinata!

The normal description: Fantastic Fest is a film festival in Austin, Texas, which focuses on genre films from around the world.

My description: Fantastic Fest is the heavy metal mosh pit of film festivals. And I love it.

Opening night was last night. I got to see my favorite Fantastic Fest buddies. Beers were handed to me. The Texas swamp-heat made us all smell real pretty. I got to play a stand-up arcade game called The Last Starfighter. I got to see a human-filled eyeball piñata. The live band was made of furries. It all ended with a food fight on the top of a parking garage.

Oh, and I also saw a couple movies!

Tusk is Kevin Smith’s newest effort. It contains some of Smith’s trademark dialogue-heavy comedy, but mostly it’s a horror film (or, rather, an over-the-top parody thereof). It involves turning Justin Long into a walrus. No, really. The tone is inconsistent, and Smith doesn’t seem to know how to make it read evenly as a satire. However, the film contains a ludicrous Quebecois detective played by [unexpected cameo by a famous person you would not expect] and Michael Parks. I can always watch Michael Parks.

In better news, there is this Indian film named As Seen by the Rest, which I thoroughly enjoyed. It follows the Citizen Kane structure where there is an end point that you are not told, and as a journalist interviews various people to get at the story, you are shown out-of-order facets of the truth. It’s also a little bit of Rashomon and a whole lot of Pulp Fiction, to the point where the film shares a MacGuffin with Tarantino. As a whole, the film could use another pass in the editing room, but otherwise I was pleased that Fantastic Fest poured it into my eyeballs.

Now, I need to go wash the fest funk off my body so I can go join humanity. I am aiming for five films today!

One Comment:

  1. Take a listen to the recent Nerdist podcast with Kevin Smith. He’s going to try to open source as much of the Tusk production as he can, just to get people to try making films.
    http://www.nerdist.com/pepisode/nerdist-podcast-kevin-smith-3/

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