Dam Short Film Festival

This weekend starts the 4th annual Dam Short Film Festival in Boulder City. This festival celebrates filmmakers of short films. There were over 350 entries submitted and 125 were picked for showing. The short films range from animation to documentary, comedy to drama and last anywhere from 5 minutes to 17 minutes long. They are grouped into sections.After viewing the short films you leave the theater where you are given a chip and then instructed to place it in the bucket of the film that you thought was the best. There are 8 sections of films and the winner of each section receives a special award. Here are the movies that we will be seeing today.

Twists and Turns

Treasure of Riverside Park"
5 minutes, 2007, Student
Directed by JSOK
Contact: jsok (at) jsokfilms (dot) com
A man weighs a wedding ring against a detective's envelope.

"Stone"
13 minutes, 2007, United Kingdom
Directed by John Comerford
Contact: info (at) labelleallee (dot) com
Three generations of men try to understand each other as they build a stone bench.

"Joe's Room"
5 minutes, 2007, Canada
Directed by Finn Fisher
Contact: jennifergrant555 (at) hotmail (dot) com
A woman tries to hide her lover from her visiting mother.

"Tool"
8 minutes, 2006, Subtitled, South Korea
Directed by Yong A. Yoon
Contact: yongyoon717 (at) yahoo (dot) com
The positive and negative impact of a simple tool in the lives of three people.

"Locked Out"
15 minutes, 2007, Canada
Directed by Tovah Paglaro
Contact: tovahp (at) mac (dot) com
A woman locks herself out of her flat on a very important day.

"Deacon's Mondays"
19 minutes, 2007, Student
Directed by Lowell Frank
Contact: www (dot) flagpop (dot) com
An eccentric landscaper begins an unusual friendship. Student Academy Award finalist.



Tough Choices:

The Box"
7 minutes, 2007, Student
Directed by Eddi Uehara
Contact: www (dot) eddieuehara (dot) com
A mysterious box is delivered. A woman must decide what to do when it acts oddly.

"Spare Change"
4 minutes, 2007
Directed by Nicola Collins
A elderly man has a strange conversation with a woman on a park bench.

"Hardest Fight"
9 minutes, 2005
Directed by Jamison Derfler
Contact: jpderfler (at) yahoo (dot) com
A boxer must decide between his career and the woman he loves.

"The Art of Movement"
11 minutes, 2007
Directed by Jeremy Helal
Contact: jeremyhelal (at) yahoo (dot) com
A martial arts expert, on the run from a dark past, seeks out his master.

"Wedding Day"
23 minutes, 2007
Directed by David Schmoeller
Contact: schmoeller (at) cox (dot) net
A parable about three woman and their struggle with love and marriage.

There will be Blood - movie

Last night we went to see There Will be Blood. A movie that has been nominated for best picture and the main character, Daniel Day-Lewis for best actor.

There Will Be Blood is a movie " loosely " adapted from the 1927 novel OIL! by Upton Sinclair. The movie centers on a character Daniel Plainview, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, who starts out as a simple silver miner that happens upon oil in his silver efforts. Fast forward a few years and he's made himself a pretty rich man; a wise and shrewd business/oil man, that gets to the point to where he'll step over anyone to get what he wants. Plainview goes from town to town, convincing the locals to give him the rights to search for oil on their land. Helping to make the thoroughly cold-hearted Plainview seem more like a stand-up fella is the fact that he travels with his young son, who in reality is the offspring of a fellow worker who died at a previous well site. Acting on a tip, Plainview and his son travel to a Godforsaken patch of dust called Little Boston, where they win the trust of the local "hicks" and set up a major drilling operation. The one fly in the ointment is Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), a charismatic preacher who resents Plainview’s presence and enters into an ongoing volley for power that will escalate over the decades. Both talk a good game about taking care of their families and the people around them, but it’s wealth, not love, they’re after.

The movie has a lot of twists and turns. I thought it was a long movie at 158 minutes. Some parts were really slow and drawn out. I think Daniel Day-Lewis deserves "best actor" in this movie. He goes through so many ups and down and displays many emotions. I will be surprised if it wins best picture. I still think No Country for Old Men is better and should win best picture at the Academy Awards.

UPDATE - No Country for Old Men

On 11-28-07 I wrote about seeing the movie, No Country For Old Men. It was just reported on MSNBC:

NEW YORK - “No Country for Old Men,” the Coen brothers’ searing take on crime and carnage along the Rio Grande, is the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures’ pick for the best film of 2007.

Starring Tommy Lee Jones and Josh Brolin, with an indelibly villainous turn by Javier Bardem, “No Country” is a harshly beautiful, faithful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel about the aftermath of a drug deal gone bad. It also earned honors for brothers Joel and Ethan Coen in the adapted-screenplay category and for best ensemble cast. Roger Deakins, the Coens’ longtime cinematographer, will receive a career achievement award from the group.

“No Country for Old Men” was the top choice “because of the direction of the Coen brothers. I think it is one of the purest adaptations of a book, Cormac McCarthy’s book,” board President Annie Schulhof said Wednesday. “The ensemble performances were absolutely extraordinary and it really talks about what happens when evil overrides good.”

No Country for Old Men - Movie

Last night Tim and I went to see, No Country for Old Men. It was a movie that Ben and Kelly saw before Thanksgiving. They thought it was so good they told us to go see it. I have to tell you, usually Tim and I don't like the same movies that Kelly likes. One of his majors in college was film so he took a number of classes. He knows the ins and outs of what makes a good movie. Sometimes what he thinks are classics we think, ho hum. This movie was different. Kelly warned me that it was violent and bloody but to get past it. The movie is written, produced, directed, and edited by the Coen brothers.

This is the review from the New York Times

“No Country for Old Men,” adapted by Joel and Ethan Coen from Cormac McCarthy’s novel, is bleak, scary and relentlessly violent. At its center is a figure of evil so calm, so extreme, so implacable that to hear his voice is to feel the temperature in the theater drop.

But while that chilly sensation is a sign of terror, it may equally be a symptom of delight. The specter of Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a deadpan sociopath with a funny haircut, will feed many a nightmare, but the most lasting impression left by this film is likely to be the deep satisfaction that comes from witnessing the nearly perfect execution of a difficult task. “No Country for Old Men” is purgatory for the squeamish and the easily spooked. For formalists — those moviegoers sent into raptures by tight editing, nimble camera work and faultless sound design — it’s pure heaven.

The script follows Mr. McCarthy’s novel almost scene for scene, and what the camera discloses is pretty much what the book describes: a parched, empty landscape; pickup trucks and taciturn men; and lots of killing. But the pacing, the mood and the attention to detail are breathtaking, sometimes literally.

In one scene a man sits in a dark hotel room as his pursuer walks down the corridor outside. You hear the creak of floorboards and the beeping of a transponder, and see the shadows of the hunter’s feet in the sliver of light under the door. The footsteps move away, and the next sound is the faint squeak of the light bulb in the hall being unscrewed. The silence and the slowness awaken your senses and quiet your breathing, as by the simplest cinematic means — Look! Listen! Hush! — your attention is completely and ecstatically absorbed. You won’t believe what happens next, even though you know it’s coming.

By the time this moment arrives, though, you have already been pulled into a seamlessly imagined and self-sufficient reality. The Coens have always used familiar elements of American pop culture and features of particular American landscapes to create elaborate and hermetic worlds. Mr. McCarthy, especially in the western phase of his career, has frequently done the same. The surprise of “No Country for Old Men,” the first literary adaptation these filmmakers have attempted, is how well matched their methods turn out to be with the novelist’s.

The three lead actors — Tommy Lee Jones and Josh Brolin along with Mr. Bardem — are adept at displaying their natural wit even when their characters find themselves in serious trouble. The three are locked in a swerving, round-robin chase that takes them through the empty ranges and lonely motels of the West Texas border country in 1980. The three men occupy the screen one at a time, almost never appearing in the frame together, even as their fates become ever more intimately entwined.

Mr. Jones plays Ed Tom Bell, a world weary third-generation sheriff whose stoicism can barely mask his dismay at the tide of evil seeping into the world. Whether Chigurh is a magnetic force moving that tide or just a particularly nasty specimen carried in on it is one of the questions the film occasionally poses. The man who knows him best, a dandyish bounty-hunter played by Woody Harrelson, describes Chigurh as lacking a sense of humor. But the smile that rides up one side of Chigurh’s mouth as he speaks suggests a diabolical kind of mirth — just as the haircut suggests a lost Beatle from hell — and his conversation has a teasing, riddling quality. The punch line comes when he blows a hole in your head with the pneumatic device he prefers to a conventional firearm.

And the butt of his longest joke is Llewelyn Moss (Mr. Brolin), a welder who lives in a trailer with his wife, Carla Jean (Kelly MacDonald) and is dumb enough to think he’s smart enough to get away with taking the $2 million he finds at the scene of a drug deal gone bad. Chigurh is charged with recovering the cash (by whom is neither clear nor especially relevant), and poor Sheriff Bell trails behind, surveying scenes of mayhem and trying to figure out where the next one will be.

Still, if “No Country for Old Men” were a simple face-off between the sheriff’s goodness and Chigurh’s undiluted evil, it would be a far stiffer, less entertaining picture. Llewelyn is the wild card — a good old boy who lives on the borderline between good luck and bad, between outlaw and solid citizen — and Mr. Brolin is the human center of the movie, the guy you root for and identify with even as the odds against him grow steeper by the minute.

And the minutes fly by, leaving behind some unsettling notions about the bloody, absurd intransigence of fate and the noble futility of human efforts to master it. Mostly, though, “No Country for Old Men” leaves behind the jangled, stunned sensation of having witnessed a ruthless application of craft.

“No Country for Old Men” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). A lot of killin

This is a great fast pace, scary, bloody movie. Be warned it is violent and some of the scenes will cause you to jump in your seat. I have to agree with some of the the reviewer of this movie, the three main actors will be nominated for academy awards and this pictures will see a best movie nomination and will probably win.

Tim and I were still talking about this movie hours after seeing it. There is a lot of symbolisms in the movie and some scenes in which you have to figure out; who got the money? Did the wife die etc... See this before it comes out on video. The big picture and quality of sounds is something that you will not find sitting at home watching it on DVD. But, I'm looking forward to this coming on DVD so I can watch it a second time.

Go to this site to see a trailer of the movie:
http://www.apple.com/trailers/miramax/nocountryforoldmen/hd/