Alphabet Soup

The ABCs of Death (2013, various directors) is the anthology movie as complete clusterfuck. The premise finds 26 filmmakers assigned a word corresponding with a letter of the alphabet. Apart from the letter and word, the filmmakers were given their heads to produce whatever they felt like producing. As with all anthology films, the results are highly variable. The rate of signal to noise in this collection is depressingly low. A lot of these films play like student films. A lot of them are profoundly scatalogical (full disclosure: totally not my thing). Depressingly few of them are any good.

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True/False 2013, Day Two: Crashing and Burning

One of the difficulties anyone who writes about True/False has is the practice of "Secret Screenings." These are films that, for one reason or another, cannot be publicized. Often, they are contracted to debut at other festivals. Sometimes, they are films that aren't quite ready for prime time for some other reason. Either way, the festival asks that attendees not write about or tweet or discuss these films on social media, and I'll honor that. The Secret Screenings are sometimes a crapshoot, anyway. This is the part of the fest with the highest likelihood of me not liking the movie, and, in truth, that has happened to me at every T/F I've attended where I saw Secret Screenings. I don't feel bad about not being able to write about these movies because contrary to what people often think about film writers, I don't actually enjoy slagging movies. I want the movies I see to be good. I want small films, especially, to succeed. Of course, many of them aren't good and don't succeed. The flip side of the Secret Screenings is when I hit a real gem of a movie. That happens, too, and I'd love to write about these and champion them. This is the dilemma I'm facing this weekend, unfortunately. If I had any brains at all, I'd skip the Secret Screenings all together and focus on movies I can actually write about.

In any event, Friday's viewings were a mixed bag.

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Life Among the Nerds, and Short and Sweet

I spent five days in Chicago at the World Science Fiction Convention this past weekend. I'm not much of a con-goer, even though I've had an interest in science fiction, fantasy, and horror all my life. I get bored at cons. I don't drink, so the room parties don't appeal to me, really, and while I like talking shop with writers and artists, I find that I can do that with less awkwardness on the internet these days. From all this, you might assume that I had a bad time, but I didn't. I had the opportunity to meet some people in meatspace with whom I've had long internet correspondences, and meeting people in meatspace is a rare pleasure. You get more of a person's overall presence when you share air and space and elevators with them.

There was also the vendor's area, a cavernous hall at this convention located somewhere beneath the convention center (a significant portion of Chicago appears to be underground, by the way, and I half expected to run into the mutants from Beneath the Planet of the Apes at any time). Various booksellers tormented me with collectible books. I've never seen so many $300 and up books in one place in my life. I'm poor right now, but if I had money to spend, I would have spent it. Probably for the best.

I had a good time, too, at the ceremony where the Hugo Awards were presented. I was a Hugo voter this year, and I was pleased to see that my own tastes aren't totally out of step with the rest of the world. Of the four main literary awards, I picked three of the winners, with my second place pick in the novella category taking the fourth. I was especially happy with the diversity of the winners. Genre fiction has well and truly broken the rule of straight cis white dudes. At the risk of indulging in identity politics, the fact that there's a trans woman with a literary Hugo award right now makes me squee a little inside. The fact that this level of diversity was acknowledged in the opening remarks by the event's emcee, writer John Scalzi, was flabbergasting in itself. I'm much more predisposed to loving science fiction fans this week than I was last.

Anyway...

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Festival Finds #1

The Girl and the Fox from Base14 on Vimeo.

I was a film festival screener last year (and probably will be again this year). One of the films I saw while I was screening was this one. It made the cut, screened at the fest, and took a prize. It's utterly charming. If you have a few minutes, it's worth watching.