The winner this year was Shovel Ready. No runners-up were announced, but Under My Skin, My Friends in Sudan, and Saving Face won numerous awards.
Again, I've gone around trying to find high-quality online versions of these top movies, and here's what I've come up with. This year I was pretty careful and took notes during the screenings:
- Staple Remover Melodrama: a hilarious Romance, with a twist ending. Very original and minimalistic, and started off the night with tons of laughs.
- High as a Kite: Comedy done as an SNL-style short. Goofy, great cinematography, and an extremely impressive original song.
- Ordinarily Extraordinary: Drama. Kind of a tough genre to do straight, but an interesting take on it. This is a story about loss and death and things that can change in an instant. (Can anyone find it online?)
- Shadow Tale: Dark comedy that was in our screening group. Features lesbian park rangers and a dead talking squirrel. Very funny, very weird, and very fun to watch again.
- Koma: Our submission in the film de femme genre!!! It's about a woman who wakes up from a coma to find a changed world, and I'm happy to say that it looked even better in the theater with tough competition. It got a lot of laughs from the audience tonight!
- Dash: Thriller/suspense, but it came out as a comedy, and a very good one at that. Imagine the movie Speed, but with people running rather than on a bus. Shot with a Canon 7D DSLR.
- Rent in Peace: Horror, starring Jeanne Brooks who made Paradigm Smash with us last year. Very funny, especially the clever names of the prospective tenants.
- FDA: Adventure serial, with a hilarious premise and intro scene. Impressive fight scenes and agents running around with guns (how did they shoot this without scaring the neighbors??). This one featured a really great child actress, who won the award for Best Portrayal of the Required Character (Muffin or Marco Gabbowitz).
- Jackalope: Thriller/suspense about a scene of torture that winds up on a VHS tape at a video store, and the mystery behind it. Also shot on a Canon 7D.
- The Continuing Saga of Bud Chestrock: Adventure serial, with over-the-top and very funny intro and final scenes, about a hero who doesn't seem very heroic at all.
- Quelques Instants: Drama about a day in the life of a serial killer, combining aspects of the Foreign Film and Silent Movie genre. Very dark, but not gratuitously so, and very contemplative. Brilliant cinematography. It was narrated in French from the perspective of the serial killer. The French narration was well-done, but I'm not sure about its overall effect on the movie, since it was clearly set in DC and since the only speaking part was in English.
- tHERAPY: A brilliant, clever, and really funny Travel/Doppelganger movie about half-brothers Jesus and Satan in counseling. This was shot on a Canon 7D as well, and was the runner-up for acting.
- Kill The Monsters: A Dark Comedy about an aviator-sunglasses-clad hero who gets the girl. Sort of like Lost meets Army of Darkness. Silly low-budget special effects that remind me of 100 Million BC... except that this movie is actually a ton of fun to watch. Probably my favorite dialogue of all: "Oh, so you're just going to go around rescuing every damsel in distress?" "Till I find one I like."
- Mainframe: SciFi movie about a computer that takes over the office in which it's running and kills all the humans. Nice sets and cinematography, but the story and acting were... meh. (Can anyone find it online?)
- The Puppy Wrangler: Buddy film. Funny, and I really like the earnest style of the actors. An unexpected twist ending. (Can anyone find it online?)
- Chloe: Another film de femme. This one's a very straight, dramatic take on the aftermath of a crime. Serious props for getting an actual cop and an actual cop car, which really made the movie.
- Breathe, Focus, Octopus: A Silent Film with very clever and artful use of text captions. This is about a group of people (and one dog) sitting in a park doing yoga silently, and all the conflicting and overlapping thoughts running through their heads. A runner-up for Best Music.
- My Own Worst Enemy: Another Time Travel/Doppelganger film. Great scenery, great interactions between the doppelgangers, great cinematography, and great acting. I thought this one should've won some awards! Also shot on a Canon 7D. (Can anyone find it online?)
- Hörn: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Internet: Historical fiction by the always-clever Betamacks, and shot in anaglyphic red-green 3D to boot. This one was in our original screening session. Funny and well-acted, with a great variety of scenery, costumes, and props. As a linguistics nerd, I loved the line, "You remember my love but you forget my umlaut?" I thought this should've won cinematography awards, and maybe acting as well.
- Under My Skin: Another brilliant Silent Film. Great acting, amazing locations, great writing, funny, mysterious, perfectly paced, heartwarming, and surprisingly... deep. This was a runner-up for Best Music, and won Best Cinematography and Best Editing.
- Tiebreaker: A funny Buddy film from our session, about two roommates who can't agree on anything and hire a tiebreaker to resolve their differences. Hilarious and shot with a Canon 5D.
- My Friends in Sudan: Amazing film de femme. Last year there was this movie called The Imperial which was technically amaaaazing, but lacked a good story; this one has similarly high production values (they used $20-30k worth of equipment and software and shot on the NIH campus). But it's also a pretty good story of intrigue among intelligence agents. The female lead characters won the Best Acting award, and it was a runner-up for Best Music. (Can anyone find it online?)
- Shovel Ready: A pitch-perfect Dark Comedy. Such a clever and original concept that I don't even want to hint and spoil it. Great acting, great shooting with a Canon 7D, great twist ending (but it was great even before I figured out the twist), and a great concept by a first-time team of only 6 people. They won the Best Writing and Best Film awards... and I think they deserve it. My hat's off.
- Saving Face: Uproariously funny Fantasy by WIT films, who made last year's genius "foreign film" Rakirovka. Rakirovka is what I show friends to convince them of the amazing stuff people can do in 48 hours. This one probably elicited the most continuous laughter from the audience, but it's not just funny, it's a pretty good love story too. I was impressed with the versatility of the actors, several of whom took on completely different roles from Rakirovka. They won Best Direction and I wouldn't have argued against them winning Best Film too.
