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