Hey folks, Harry here - Rav is beginning to lose it at Palm Beach - you can tell because he's beginning to make as much sense as Harry Knowles at 4:11pm after the twelth twinkie. But that sugar charged hyper-sense just is too much for mere mortals, and through it all his mania for movies is felt like a pair of tented shorts during BAMBI! It's just so obvious it's all about Thumper. Here's Rav to explain it all...

I'm starting to lose track of my days here in Palm Beach, I think this is day five. Festivals like these can be sort of maddening, non-stop mediocre-to-bad movies don't exactly bring about happy emotions. These festivals also manage to totally redefine your tastes, being drenched in shit all day one becomes desperate to latch on to whatever quality they can find and champion it like mad, because after all the goal of going to a film festival isn't who can watch the most bad movies or spend their day miserable in their hotel room, it's to have fun seeing some really cool, new movies. So far for me, this really hasn't felt like a film festival, it's more like one of those Russian re-education P.O.W. camps in Red Dawn, where all day we are being shown bad movies instead of propaganda reels so that we will all go back home and love lame boring TV movies. And the fucked thing is that it's sort of working. For instance, this morning I woke up, I didn't want to get out of bed, so I grabbed the remote and started flipping through channels, on TBS and TNT were a few movies that ordinarily I'd cringe at their sheer title, but in the context of this festival had it me crying "GOD DAMNIT! SOMEONE GIVE PAUL W.S. ANDERSON A GOLDEN PALM AWARD!" I can't wait to get back home for a round of asian dvd film-love-de-programming, it's going to be great.

The first sorta-film I saw that day wasn't exactly part of the festival, but I had a tip from a friend and it sounded really good. That friend had written to me telling me that this film he had worked on was really amazing stuff and that it was perhaps the best thing he had ever been a part of. So my friend put me in contact with this really nice fellow named Jonathon Wyche, he directed the film. It wasn't exactly ready to be shown when I was in Florida, so Jonathon just brought me about five minutes of footage to see. The film's called Planet Ibsen, it takes place in the mind of playwright August Strindberg, largely including schizophrenic nightmares of fellow playwright Henrik Ibsen (Clint Howard). I really couldn't get much of a guage on the film from what was shown, though it was very visually striking and made me very curious to see the finished product. It really seemed like a sort of low-budget DV homage to Orson Welles' The Trial. But I could be totally wrong about that, it's hard to tell in 5 minutes with little dialogue. It's always a good thing to see that there's another well-shot movie floating around, someone still knows they have to light their movie. Thanks Jonathon.

After that I was really up to see a real honest-to-god full length feature film, hopefully a good one too, but beggars can't be choosers. The stars had aligned perfectly in that I could actually make a screening of a movie that I was really interested in. I was really hoping for something great in this movie called "Rancid," there was very positive early buzz from the transpo crew as well as it stars the great Fay Masterson (Babysitter in Eyes Wide Shut and Betty in Lost Skeleton of Cadavara). It's always a mistake for me to get excited about any movie here, as every time it's a setup for a great let down, nonetheless I was very excited for this one. While I can't say that Rancid's a great movie, it had very stylish camera-work and was a very nice change of pace from some of the stuff around. It's as flashy and over-dramatic as any of those prime-time cop shows, though of any film I've seen here so far I think this film has the best chance of getting picked up and doing some sort of business. It has a very run-of-the-mill plot to it, but it works, its fun, its fluff, hooray!

I ran out of the theatre sort of frightened, because the Russian mob was around the lobby preparing for the I Will Avenge You, Iago! screening next. I had to get out of there quickly and back to my room for screener-mania. There really wasn't anything I was interested in screening for the rest of the night at either of the theatres, so I planned to finally raid my stack of movies in my room and see what would come of it. Earlier that day, the duchess of Palm Beach PR, Alanna Kordell, had wrangled me a copy of a movie that was generating unanimously good word across the board from even some of the most jaded, discriminating people here. It was my only hope for having a good day here. I thank her very very very much, as the film Night of the Dog has saved my sanity and is by far (as i've seen) the highlight of the 10th Palm Beach Film Festival. Unbelievably, it's a fucking good movie here! The film is a light screwball, fun, silly, stupid, stupendously vulgar comedy following the adventures of a group of theatre employee's after work one weekend night in Los Angeles. It's jointly directed by a group of six guys, dubbing themselves "The Six," who also star in the film, these guys are destined to give the Broken Lizard gang a run for their money. Each one of the guys wrote and directed their own short segment in the film and then they were weaved together to make the feature, as stilted as that could turn out it works perfectly, it's fucking hilarious. It's a low budget film that is fueled on pure fun and spastic humor. I really encourage everyone to seek this film out, this is their Puddle Cruiser, god damnit it would be great to see someone give them a few million dollars so that they could make their Super Troopers. Apparently there's a trailer here, but my media player is screwy, check it out. http://www.yossarko.com/upload/filez/notd_trailer_high.wmv

Jaremy Catalino, Peter Donovan, Michael Patrick Burke, Esthon Nelms, Ian Nelms, and Peter Atencio, I love you guys, You've made my trip worth while here, thanks. I wish many happy panda's and flying bunny upon you.

Rav

If you would like guilt free sex with me at Palm Beach, I toss the salad with dressing!