When a loved one dies, all you want is for things to be normal. I have a co-worker whose mother passed away on the same day as another co-worker had a birthday party in the office. He apologized profusely, he didn't mean to put a damper on things. That's how it feels, desperately wanting things to be normal, but it can't be normal. 

And that, in a nutshell, is Casey Wilson's wonderful short film Daddio.

First off, let me say this - Michael McKean is a North American treasure! Here, he plays Paul, the father of Abby (Cassie Wilson), and the husband of a recently-deceased wife. He takes it both hard, and weird. He gets a perm, but also tries to be the normal Paul. 

But he can't be the normal Paul. 

Abby is now forced to deal with her world, and her Father's world as well, all while hoping for normality in a world that, again, CAN NOT BE NORMAL! Wilson plays her role so damn perfectly. It's a wonderfully intelligent performance, and while Paul is the focus, and amazing, she is the drive, the wall required to send her father's quack back to the viewer. As the sounding board, she has to walk a line between completely understandable and on the edge of complete collapse.

You know, like when you're actually dealing with a death in the family. 

Wilson, who wrote and directed the short, based largely on her own personal experience losing her mother, and her father going all wacky and starting a Twitter (which is still around!) I've been a big fan of Wilson's for ages, and she's one of the big reasons why I loved the show Happy Endings. Here, she shows she's got serious chops all over the creative process, and with a tool like McKean, she's able to create a fine short film that is both funny and emotional, beautifully real, and absolutely out-of-the-real. But it's only out of the real for those of us not dealing with a death within the range of our personal Instamatics. 

You can see Daddio as a part of our Comedy Favorites program - https://payments.cinequest.org/websales/pages/info.aspx?evtinfo=114204~78899376-35a9-4153-8303-e1557be2dc32&epguid=c5191bc9-d5f7-4fab-87e1-de8dcbff688d&#.XjGyFEdKiUk
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There are very few names in advertising I've heard of... other than Don Draper. One is Leo Burnett. Another is Carol H. Williams. She was a trailblazing ad exec, and one of the best. Being a black woman working creative in the 1960s was a strange role for the time. She was the first African-American Creative Director. She was the first woman to be Creative Director at Leo Burnett Company. You know, the company that created the Jolly Green Giant, the Marlboro Man, and Tony the Tiger. If you love cereal characters, the odds are good the primary object of your affection in the realm was created in an office at Leo Burnett. 

And that's where Carol H. Williams cut her teeth. 

The amazingly wonderful animated documentary Carol H. Williams & The Rejected Script is a super-short piece of work that examines how chance encounters can make a huge difference. 

Carol's latest script for Hungry Man Biscuits was rejected, and she was dejected by the experience. She entered into the elevator where she runs into, who else, but Leo Burnett. He asks her what's wrong, and tells him, and that's the origin story for so very much. 

There's a lot here, from the elements of the campaign she had rejected, one based on her much-loved Uncle, to the way that she carried herself, and her work, into that elevator. There's also Leo Burnett, whose story is legendary and here, he's shown as something different than you see him portrayed as in the rest of his appearances. 

This is Carol's story, but it is illustrator So A Ryu's work that is so incredible. Along with animators Brian Steckle and Michael McAfee, this is a short that gives us powerfully imprecise visuals, inspired by the likes of Ralph Steadman, that are so very non-60s advertising. It's that counter-point, I think, that had me so deeply drawn in. You would never have seen an image like the one above coming out of Burnett in 1969, and when it's presented alongside the exceptionally good narration, it brings us to a new place. This elevator meeting, it seems, was the edge of a zipper; one side was the 60s being spoken of, while the other was a new future. This visual contrast played in my head. 

As a whole, there's a WHOLE lot of greatness in less than four minutes!

You can see Carol H. Williams and the Rejected Script as a part of Animated Worlds at Cinequest! Do yourself a favor and take this one in; it may well be the best survey of animation I've ever been a part of programming! 

​https://payments.cinequest.org/websales/pages/info.aspx?evtinfo=114201~78899376-35a9-4153-8303-e1557be2dc32&epguid=c5191bc9-d5f7-4fab-87e1-de8dcbff688d&#.XisUOEdKiUk

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I am, in my own way, a conspiracy theorist. JFK was killed by Giancana, Jack the Ripper was a Masonic rite gone wrong, and Sirhan Sirhan was under mind-control, and yeah, Epstein didn't kill himself. No, 911 was not an inside job, there are almost certainly not aliens in Area 51, and David Icke is an idiot. OK? So, I guess you can see that a film with a central pivot around conspiracy is going to end up programmed in a fest I work with, right? 

Well, only if it's got the strong sealegs of Brad Abraham's Conspiracy Cruise. 

The story is gorgeously simple - Gordon Pike, rock star turned conspiracy theory guru, is headlining a cruise for conspiracy followers. He's not the raving lunatic you would expect. In fact, he's far more like Tom Cruise's character from Magnolia than anything else. He's got polish, and then show he puts on is so smart. The cruise isn't what he expected, but then things get weird. 

Pike is played by Henry Zebrowski of Last Podcast on the Left. If you read my issue of Claims Department about podcasts, you'll know why this is a perfect choice. He actually softplays him for most of the way, which he's REALLY good at. I mean, he's stupid good at it. He draws out everything you can get from a character who is supposed to be the US version of David Icke... without the rampant anti-semetism. When he has to go all Out There, he manages it perfectly. If you've heard him on Last Podcast, you'll know how he ramps up. It's a great performance, and it makes the movement of the picture so impressive. The rest of the cast isn't outclassed either! No one has the focus on them as much as Gordon, but the pieces we get are so perfect for the story. In specific, there's the guy who's more Liberatarian than Conspiracy Theorist who I totally recognise as an archetype. 

Then again, it's also gorgeous. I mean it's so precisely shot and cut, it looks like a big budget picture. Director Brad Abrahams is so good, and his hand feels like it's all over this in the best possible way. The lighting, the set design, the editing, it all creates a sensation that is at once sinister and silly. This is EXACTLY what a short like this should give off - a sensation of something not right, but not necessarily malevolent. It is a weird world, and weird can take on many forms. 

I love this film. It's a great watch, and every second of it feels important. It's the kind of Mindbender that I love to see in Cinequest, and it's just so much fucking fun! You can find more info on the film, and the rest of Brad Abrahams' work at http://www.bradabrahams.net/, and you can get tickets to Shorts Program 5 - Mindbenders, at https://payments.cinequest.org/websales/pages/info.aspx?evtinfo=114202~78899376-35a9-4153-8303-e1557be2dc32&epguid=c5191bc9-d5f7-4fab-87e1-de8dcbff688d&#.XinAFUdKiUk

Also, I am now using Coincidence Theorist in my everyday life. 

Eventually, we're going to meet someone. Eventually, we're going to lose someone. Eventually the relationships we create are going to break down. Eventually, the systems we design are going to break down... or be broken down. 

This is the idea behind Contact, that moments of joy will eventually break down when exterior forces exert themselves. In this case, a couple are having a lovely day out in the gently rolling hills, well in a simulcrum of gorgeous gently rolling hills, and then one blinks out of scene. This is the beginning of a cataclysm, it appears. A cataclysm that is befalling the group of pods that are heading out to a new world. 

Let's not beat around the bush, this is a science fiction story about first contact. It's a science fiction story about first contact where the contact is only a tiny part of the story. The real story is what matters in those moments, what we want to know, how we process the existential threats and the little things that we need to know, what to discover, wish we could have more of. That's Contact, a film about the end of the world, for varying values of the World, that deals with the immediate, the small, the emotional, the moment of watching a massive disaster that we never see, that we don't need to see. 

The script here is ideal for the kind of acting we get. There's the couple, loving men who manage to make us care about them with so little time together, who have a layered interaction which makes the rest of the short that much more painful. There's the computer voice, and it's incredible voice-acting. She manages to infuse the film with a sort of painfully cold, calculation that makes the emotional responses, nuanced and at times perfectly measured, all the more impressive. 

A wonderful film, one with so much power in all the details, as well as the absolute chutzpah it takes to make a film about first contact where we never see the contact, but we realise that this sort of event is not merely the massive effect on the pods, but on those who live, love, and lose along the path. 

You can see Contact as a part of the Mindbenders showing at 3Below on FRI 3/2; 11:30PM and FRI 3/9; 9:00PM, and at the Century Redwood City on  MON 3/5; 5:30PM and SAT 3/10; 10:20PM (RWC 10)

I have an issue - housing. Growing up in the Bay Area, and living here nearly my entire life, I have seen it go from a place where low-income families could own a home, to where even well-employed workers have a hard time affording rent. I've seen prices skyrocket, families that have been here for generations forced out, and the quality of life for those that have remained decrease. 

And the wonderfully stylish and well-acted With Children let me know that it is nothing new, and in fact, may have been far worse the year I was born. 

The story is Cecelia and her work towards buying a house in San Francisco in 1974. She's had a kid, is unmarried, and her job, and an ex, are jerking her around. She's determined to make herself a home-owner She works hard, so very very hard, and she fights for that dream of giving her daughter a better future away from the shelter she's in.

Lissette Feliciano is fantastic, and this film seems to sing in her voice. Her performance as Cecilia is precise, intelligent, heart-felt, and moving. Her script is so strong, with nearly perfect pacing and a strong sense of purpose to every interaction between characters. The direction is wonderful. Combined with strong shooting and editing, and a very smart use of music that never feels over-powering and it not used, as it is so often, to set the period of the film. Instead, the music is an accent, and one that is applied to the character and emotional status of the film, not to the setting or timeframe, which I found refreshing. The acting over-all is wonderful, but I also have to give a shout-out to what always catches my attention in a film - title design. The opening and closing credits are wonderful, and they set the tone, the timeframe, and the closing credits, an attachment to the time period that is heart-warming. This is a film that is constructed to bring us closer to our main character and her struggle, and to the problematic world of housing law and the realities of housing practices. I love the way that this feels as if we are able to connect with a character who is both of her time, and of our time simultaneously, dealing with issues that we saw, see, and will certainly continue to see. 

This is a film that addresses the issues of the present using the issues of the past, issues that are still present and with us in different levels, different directions. The story is the same; there are those who can get the dream, and those who can not. The struggle to live in this area, in San Francisco, in Silicon Valley, in many if not most of the major cities of the US, is real, and there are always stumbling blocks placed in front of those of us who are seen as outside the desirable categories.  It is a story that I can say I witnessed first-hand in the 1980s with my aunts, uncles, and cousins, in the 1990s with my friends. In With Children, it is a single Latina mother who throws herself into a life of near all-day work who is kept from her dream of home ownership. Today, it is pretty much anyone who is not a tech worker making 100K+ a year, and even more difficult for minority populations to achieve any sort of housing in these parts. Then, it was the desire to have families filling housing, today it is the desire for rich-kid tech-worker singles who toil in the office 15 hours-a-day. The song is the same; the chorus and the verse simply seem to have traded places. 

I love this film's message, and more importantly, I love this film. 

With Children shows with The Listen Project at the Hammer Theatre in Downtown SJ on Wed, Mar 8 7:15 PM, and at Century 20 Redwood City - Screen 3 Fri, Mar 10 4:15 PM, Sat, Mar 11 1:15 PM, and Sun, Mar 12 3:40 PM

Stunningly beauty. Those are words I found more than once in my research into Tiphany Adams. Having seen the film Tiphany several times before I started researching this preview piece, I can not at all disagree. I can also say that the shooting of this documentary on Tiphany meets that beauty and provides a remarkable setting for her to inhabit. 

Tiphany was involved in a car accident in 2000 at the age of 17, and after many surgeries, required the use of a wheelchair. This did not stop her at all, it seems, as she became a fitness model and actress in the years following the accident. We see her shoot with photographer Kai York, who is an amazing photographer of both fashion and fitness. The work with Tiphany shown here is phenomenal, but the lensing is the fluid version of York's shooting. Precise, detailed, at points utterly compacted and at other points, so very expansive it feels as if it will lift off the screen. Director Justin Ferrato, along with producer York, have crafted a film with the power and detail of one of York's compositions, while erasing the distance that so much model photography imposes on the viewer. This is one of the things that most impressed me on my first viewing - there is both elevation and invitation, which is a difficult two-fer to manage. 

This film rewards each viewing. It is lovely, it is powerful, it is inspirational, and it is sexy, something that goes against the frequently presented idea that those with spinal cord injuries who use wheelchairs are not desirable. Inspirational is allowed, of course, but here both her story and her absolutely stunning beauty and her work with York are put on equal footing, which makes it feel neither manipulative nor opportunistic, a curse held by many docs of this style. I love this movie, and am so glad we get to show it at Cinequest! 

Tiphany screens as a part of DocuNation  on March 1st at 415, March 5th at 615, and March 12 at 415 at the Century Theatres in Redwood City, and on March 7th at 345 at the Hammer Theatre in Downtown San Jose.

Kate Nichols knows she's innocent. She knows she's only in for a limited time before they realise the mistake they made. She didn't murder her husband. She couldn't have. She has agreed to be a part of an annual video diary as a part of her incarceration, and she talks directly to the camera. We see her evolve over the course of the interviews, and that is all we are given. 

This is a bottle picture: entirely in one location, one single camera position, one actor, talking directly to the camera. Played by director.writer Nicole Fairbrother, Kate is many things, beginning with scared, and ending with... well, not scared. Her performance here is inspired. She gives so much to the screen, to the lens directly, and then we are hit full force with her. It is an amazing trick of acting, and one that rewards even after you know the road this all takes. 

The film is tough and powerful, and smart. It is as if she is speaking directly to you, and you're asking  entire way through. There's a central metaphor at play; are we our demons? The answer to that question is what Fairbrother is answering here, and she does an amazing job at it. 

Monster shows as a part of Program 5 - Mindbenders  at Century 20 Redwood City Fri, Mar 3 9:45 PM Tue, Mar 7 6:00 PM and Fri, Mar 10 4:45 PM and at the Hammer Theatre in Downtown San Jose Sun, Mar 5 9:15 PM and Thu, Mar 9 3:45 PM