Blog-o-STIFF

Swamper Screening Tonight!!!!

This month's STIFF Nights screening will feature the film, Swamper.  Some people might say that it would be classless for a festival director to screen his own film.  They might even be right.  But, this December marks the 5 year anniversary of when we began the film and I thought it would be fun to get some folks together and watch it.  You should come join us for what is probably the last ever theatrical screening.  I believe that a few cast and crew members will be there too. In this week’s Seattle Weekly, Brian Miller essentially says that the pacing of the film doesn’t quite live up to the excitement level of the source material and there may be something to that assessment.  He also calls it a mumblecore movie.  For those who haven’t heard the term before, it is a name for dialogue heavy movies that focus on the day to day minutia of personal relationships.  I briefly met Joe Swanberg and a few of the other filmmakers at the forefront of the mumblecore movement at SXSW last year and I am honored for Swamper to be mentioned in the same breath.   

Swamper

If Jack and the Beanstalk was set in Seattle and mixed with heavy doses of drugs, strippers, snowboarding, masturbation, skateboarding, animation fireballs and set to a badass hip-hop soundtrack, it would be Swamper - a dark comedy about a week in the life of a jizz-mopper.

Follow Jared (JP Moore) for a week at Christmas time as he navigates the underground trades.  The characters you meet along the way include his crazy old ex-truck driving pot dealer (Billy St. John, Mr. Deeds), his burned out dotcom millionaire roommate turned MMPORG Blacksmith (Cam Buckenberger), and a hot new dancer named Sinimun (Jacqui Olivas) that catches his eye.  Jared eventually meets a snowboarding thug (Kevin Gilbert, The Last Stand) who turns him into the speed king of

Seattle - for a minute.

Swamper features an incredible Northwest soundtrack featuring tracks from THC, Blue Scholars, Boom Bap Project, Pale Soul, Drop-6, Cancer Rising, Mista Ock, Sleep, Snafu and the whole Oldominion crew.  Swamper's underscore features award-winning composers Mark Petrie, Alan Haskel and THC.

Brian Miller’s review in this week’s

Seattle Weekly:

Casual sex and drugs should be a lot more fun than they are in director Clint Berquist’s low-budget local indie, which premiered at his Seattle’s True Independent Film Festival (STIFF) two years ago. His slacker hero works at the Lusty Lady, mopping the floor of what customers leave behind—hence the movie’s title. Young Jared (J.P. Moore) also dates one of the workers there, making Swamper something of a cautionary tale about dating coke-fiend strippers. It takes about 91 minutes for Jared to see the limitations of said stripper (Jacqui Olivas) and, by implication, those of his aimless, drug-seeking life. Musical interludes and a snowboarding sequence don’t really make the time pass any more quickly. Despite the surface appeal of peep shows, crystal meth, and murder, Swamper’s energy level seems awfully close to Mumblecore. (NR) BRIAN MILLER.

Central Cinema 

$10. Thu., December 27, 7:00pm

Another Classic British Romance

I am in the middle of a big move right now, so I didn’t take any screeners to watch at last night’s planning meeting because I don’t want to risk losing any of them in the shuffle.  I took the advice of the Stranger’s film editor Annie Wagner and decided to head out to see Atonement at the theater.  This isn’t normally what I would consider my type of film.  I’m usually not crazy about period pieces.  The payoff almost never lives up to the investment of time necessary to get into the story.  And, as much as I enjoy looking at Keira Knightly, I just couldn’t get too excited about seeing her in another classic British romance.  Atonement sucked me in surprisingly quick though.  The acting was excellent and I kept finding myself wondering what would happen next.  The pacing of the first hour actually held my interest quite well, but the apex of the film came when Robbie Turner and two other soldiers reconnected with the battalion they had been separated from.  The one long take that follows them as they make their way from one end of the beach to the next is one of the best I have ever seen.  I have a hard time imagining the planning and execution that went into pulling it off and it truly inspired me as a filmmaker.

Buy Film Festival Acceptance for $1.99?

As most seasoned filmmakers already know, and many new filmmakers are just about to find out, rejection is part of the filmmaking process. With Sundance and Slamdance recently announcing their acceptances and a slew of other fests getting ready to announce, this is the time of the year where rejection can really seem daunting. As a recently rejected filmmaker myself, I understand just how tiring it can be to read “We received a lot of excellent entries this year, but unfortunately…” This year, STIFF has teamed up with the Stranger to offer something that I don’t believe has ever been offered by a film festival in the history of film festivals – a LEGIT way for a filmmaker to buy his or her way into a set of film festival laurels and help a great northwest charity at the same time.

 

For those unfamiliar with the Stranger, it is Seattle’s largest alternative weekly (similar to the Village Voice, Austin Chronicle, San Francisco Guardian or Portland Mercury) with a print distribution of over a quarter million per week and online distribution of over 8 million a month. Every year, they put together an online holiday auction called Strangercrombie where they sell one of a kind items that range from the exquisite (private dinners with the city’s best chefs) to the obscure (a phone conversation with Chris Crocker, the idiotic “Leave Britney alone guy” from Youtube). All of the proceeds go to a fantastic local charity. You can read more about Strangercrombie here.

This year, STIFF is contributing a feature and short slot in the 2008 program as part of 2 filmmaker packages that are coupled with either a scholarship to the Seattle Film Institute of a 6- month membership to the Northwest Film Forum.

This is full acceptance for your film that comes with a screening, inclusion into all program materials, laurels to put on your DVD boxcover, and all of the other filmmaker perks. Bidding starts at just $1.99, so it may be possible to get guaranteed acceptance into a festival for less money than it would cost to actually submit to a film festival. Hurry, because the auctions end at 5PM Pacific time on December 14th. If you’re looking for a good way to promote your movie, you may even want to look into bidding on a film review, news story , or full page in the Stranger to do whatever you want.

Thanks,

Clint Berquist

Director, Seattle's True Independent Film Festival

www.trueindpendent.org

Grand Jury Prize Announcement!

We are very pleased to announce a partnership with Hollywood Video for the STIFF 2008.  The winner of this year's Grand Jury prize will win a meeting with a Hollywood Video Acquisitions Executive.  You can read all about it by clicking HERE!

I think that this is a great opportunity for someone and we are really excited to help filmmakers get a chance to get their films in front of people who can make a real difference in their career.  Good luck to all who enter.  The deadline for submissions is January 15th.      

Getting Doors Slammed in Your Face

Rejection happens to everyone... Even Festival Directors... Here is something from my inbox today...

Dear Filmmaker,
We am so sorry to tell you we were unable to include your short film(s) into the 2008 Slamdance program. Thank you so much for submitting. Slamdance is limited by space constraints in Park City to program less than 70 shorts every year, though the quality of submissions would allow us to program many many more.

Please keep in mind that Slamdance is just one festival out of hundreds of others. Our film program is based on the subjective decisions of our programming committees. Please don’t take this rejection as any indication of the quality of your film, or its potential for a successful, well-regarded future.

We wish the best for you and your film.

Warm regards,
Slamdance Programming Department

Going Out With a Bang!

The early bird deadline for submissions just passed yesterday and DVD’s have been rolling in for the past month. This is just about the time of year where we begin to hunker down with indie movies and I rarely get to see Hollywood films until the summer. So, I decided to go out with a bang last weekend and went to see three movies in the theater.

Beowulf was the first movie I saw. A lot of people have been dumping on it for the use of computer animation. This is obviously still a new technology and there are still some rough edges to knock off of it, but overall I was pretty impressed. I think it has come a long way since the creepy eyed little kids in the Polar Express. It was especially interesting to see how they completely re-imagined the bodies of Ray Winstone, Angelina Jolie and Anthony Hopkins. I’m very interested in seeing them improve on it, but am admittedly a little weirded out by any non-surgical option that can take 10 years or 30 pounds off an actor. I was most impressed to see how far 3-D glasses have come since I was a kid though. They used to be those cardboard red and blue things that gave you a headache, and now they could almost pass for really cheap, nerdy sunglasses. Almost.

My wife really wanted to see No Country for Old Men, but I talked her into seeing Southland Tales instead. In retrospect, this is kind of like talking someone out of a 4-star restaurant so you can drop acid and hike to McDonalds. Just like a big portion of America, I fell in love with Donnie Darko. I even had the opportunity to meet Richard Kelly at a film event that I was volunteering for a few years ago. I wanted to like it so much, but this movie was such a mess. It really showed what happens when someone has too much success too fast. Name actors had lined up to be part of the project (I read later that many of them still don’t understand it) and it was as if people couldn’t throw enough money at it. The result was a self-indulgent, bloated, wandering film that couldn’t figure out what it was doing. The best part, was Justin Timberlake’s lip synch and dance number, but I’d look for it on Youtube somewhere instead of wasting 2 and a half hours of my life waiting for a good 2 minute part. If Dwayne Johnson wasn’t such a good looking guy, I don’t know if my wife would have forgiven me for making her sit through it.

So, we decided to finish with No Country for Old Men. It was a plotline that felt like it had been done a few times before, but nobody has ever made it work like the Cohen brothers. Josh Brolin plays Llewelyn Moss, a rugged hunter who wanders onto the scene of a drug deal gone bad. He finds a briefcase full of money and hightails it out of town with an airgun weilding psycho in tow (played brilliantly by Javier Bardem). Almost everything seemed to hit in this movie. The casting was fantastic, the suspense was riveting, the details of each scene were incredible. The only thing that left me wanting was the ending, but the rest of the movie was so good that I was willing to let it slide. All in all a great way to cap off the weekend.

Now, to this stack of indie screeners. If one of them is yours, thanks for sending it in. If you haven’t sent one to us yet, please do!