Campus Movie Fest 2008 Tufts Premiere
April 18, 2008
On Monday, April 14 at around 7:00 p.m., Pearson 104 looked a lot different than it did at 10:30 earlier that morning. Mysterious “CMF” logos were everywhere. A long line of students waited anxiously outside the doorway. This has never happened before my Biological Anthropology lecture in the same room. I’d say Pearson 104 fits around 300 people, and it was pretty packed for CMF.
Campus Movie Fest is the world’s largest student film festival. It provides teams with a laptop, a camcorder, and a week to create a short film. Forty-one teams at Tufts participated this year, and 16 films were shown at the premiere. Awards were given for the Best Comedy, Best Drama, Best Picture, and CV Showcase. Also, an Audience Choice award was given in the style of American Idol: everyone sent a text message with the number of their favorite film, and the movie with the most votes won.
The CV Showcase award went to Dream Big and Red Like a Book. Dream Big was about a guy with a guitar who did cool things on an animated chalkboard (which the makers did a really neat job with; want to teach me how to do that?). Red Like a Book was one of two Tisch Library romances (the other, Hello, was also noteworthy). It told the story, without spoken dialogue, of a boy pursuing a library crush in that cutesy, middle school way to which everyone can relate (there was even a note with yes/no checkboxes aww!).
Best Drama was awarded to The Usual, about a very methodical guy who just wanted to be able to go to a restaurant and order the usual (which, for him, was pretty unusual: an onion bagel with strawberry cream cheese and a slice of American cheese melted on top. God, I hope I didn’t screw that up). In the end of the film, he got what he wanted. Again, aww.
Best Comedy was taken by Jenkem Gangster, a not-really-that-absurd-I-guess-because-we’re-in-college-and-anything-can-be-a-drug movie about a guy who discovers that he can peddle human feces (“butt hash”) as a drug. The music fit the trippy scenes perfectly, and there were definitely a good number of funny moments (although some of them were admittedly a bit on the gross side). Aww?
And finally, the moment when that week of strenuous filmmaking finally paid off for one lucky team came when Best Picture was awarded. There were five nominees for this award so that we could pretend we were at the Oscars. Aww.
The nominees included Dream Big, Jenkem Gangster, and The Usual, as well as two other films, Patron Addicted and Two Cock Thieves. Patron Addicted was a tale filmed in the posterized style of A Scanner Darkly, with rhyming narrations that reminded me of The Grinch. It featured a man whose greatest fear was the mall; however, once he began going there every day in hopes of overcoming his fear, he became addicted to consumerismÃs allure. When the film reverts to an unanimated style, the protagonist realizes that he has been neglecting the more important aspects of his life.
Two Cock Thieves was the whimsical, animated tale of two, well, cocks. (Not chicken, but the kind that people have attached to their bodies.) The two penises rob a bank, take “natural male enhancer” to become Godzilla-esque and fight off police, and more. The film ends with a montage of penis drawings reminiscent of Superbad.
The Best Picture Award went to Patron Addicted. However, all of the films featured in the premiere (and others that were submitted as well, I’m sure) were worthy of the recognition that they received by being played. Highlights that didn’t receive awards included Rafmiri: Cold War Hip Hop (about a Russian rapper whose downfall involved Flavor-Ice as a drug), Coda (about the typical Tufts party, you know, the kind where you end up running off with a crazy guy in a top hat), Please Don’t Laugh (which made canned laughter terrifying), Bokko-chan (in Japanese and about a robotic girl), The Thin White Line (involving badass action and massive bags of cocaine), and Release (a seamlessly-put-together drama about dying babies).
The best films move on to a citywide competition between numerous Boston colleges, including MIT, BU, BC, Northeastern, and Emerson, that will take place at the Colonial Theater at 8:00 p.m. on April 26.
To see the all of the movies made, visit www.campusmoviefest.com.