Movies into Film

(Previewing) 1 Reel,

the film festival at Bumbershoot,

September 3-6, 2004

Michael Chamoun in The Meter Maid (photo courtesy of 1 Reel)

The first image you see in The Meter Maid, a short film by Justin Warias, is a shirt collar being smoothed into place. Then a police badge pinned above a shirt pocket. Then a tight close-up of a face that appears to be a woman's, yet it belongs to a young man, one with soft, feminine features and sensuous lips, a young man employed (unhappily) in a work role traditionally associated with women.

Against sun drenched urban backstreets, Warias and his lead actor Michael Chamoun capture the anguish of a small existence--parking meter enforcement--in a life clearly meant for better things. That their portrayal is as comic as it is harrowing makes The Meter Maid a must-experience. And more exciting yet, the film is almost silent, save for a single word of dialogue, the silence as it were speaking for the ineffectual, the voiceless, trapped by definitions not of their own.

The Meter Maid is just one of perhaps 157 shorts (and counting?) to be screened at the upcoming 1 Reel Film Festival, Labor Day weekend in Seattle, as part of the 34th annual, 4-day Bacchanalian arts revel known as Bumbershoot. Approximately 24 shorts are by Seattle area filmmakers, 35 are animated films, and the chosen few (from more than 1600 submissions) explore subjects, tones, and styles too varied to enumerate.

A photo album floats down Lake Washington in Serge Gregory’s Foster Island

Film advocate Warren Etheredge--you may be familiar with his side project: the free-floating, year-round "festival" he dubs The Warren Report--produces the 1 Reel Film Festival, now in its 9th year. He's grouped the films into loosely fitting thematic categories, such as "Hardly Globetrotters," "Lechers & Lotharios," or "Life, Liberty, Whatever..." that will run in one-hour blocks from noon until 10:00 pm Friday through Sunday, ending at 8:00 pm Monday. In the current spirit of politically engaged cinema, at least a half-dozen 1 Reel shorts feature George W. Bush, "always," Etheredge notes, "in the most flattering light." All screenings take place in the Intiman Playhouse at Seattle Center, with the exception of Dane Picard's video installations Portraits and Portraits of L.A., two experiments in morphing to be shown in loops at the EMP Sky Church. I saw an excerpt from Portraits, and for Frida Kahlo admirers, it delivers a little bit of heaven.

The "Career Day" category (scheduled for Saturday, September 4 from 3:30 to 4:30 pm) includes the aforementioned Meter Maid as well as two shorts that are bona-fide masterpieces: Kurt Kuenne's Rent-a-Person and Tim McCarthy's The Rick.

Rent-a-Person is a musical about a lonely, lovelorn men's room attendant, pining away while he supplies towels, mints, and talcum powder to wealthy gents. A male chorus sings in various positions around the washroom, even in the act of relieving themselves. Toilets flush, posh patrons croon, and our hero, James, a gawky, morose fellow clad in a bowtie, warbles, "It's too late to find a mate/I watch old men defecate." Yes, this sounds vulgar and tasteless; Kuenne's mise-en-scène, however, is light and satirical, closer to Ernst Lubitsch meets Second City than to Ben Stiller, and the results are uproariously funny. I can't often say of a film that it made me laugh until I wept. Rent-a-Person did.

Kuenne's camera work and compositions are outstanding, especially the gliding motion past open stalls, and a giddy scene near an on-ramp where two commuters play tug of war over a potential carpool buddy. Rent-a-Person is splendidly filmed in black and white.

Ian McConnel plays the title role in The Rick (photo courtesy of 1 Reel)

Also hilarious (and much darker), Tim McCarthy's The Rick begins with its eponymous character, a pot-bellied, overbearing, bullying oaf, doing chin-ups against an arid vista of desert earth and distant mountains. "I got but two words for the skeptics in this world who would keep a man in his place—bring it on!” Well, right off the bat, we know that Rick can count.

Rick washes dishes for a living, yet craves a position of greater authority. He terrorizes his mentally handicapped kitchen mates and forever leans on the manager to promote him to a kind of kitchen overlord, as an outlet for his inclination to domineer. Rick lives in a trailer park with Sheila, a waitress from another hicksville diner somewhere in the dusty southwest. When Sheila cheats on Rick, she brings home not one but two fat, greasy lumps who are amusingly similar to Rick, only younger.

Roberta Bassin, as Sheila, fantastically conveys world-weariness; her Sheila comes from the same cloth as the lower class working women whom Judith Ivey and Mary Kay Place have sometimes portrayed, but Bassin emerges as her own woman. There’s a brilliantly edited cut from shots of a security guard hauling Rick through a kitchen to Sheila, at home, laughing with a glass of wine in hand, saying, “You are so funny,” to someone off-screen. I thought at first that Sheila was laughing at Rick, as he relates the story from work, but McCarthy has other notions, chiefly a dazzling set of humiliations for Rick: the sinister creep degrades himself further in trying to one-up the poor souls around him. As the title character, Ian McConnel is a white trash tour-de-force.

James Haven stars and sings in Rent-a-Person (Photo: 1 Reel)

Light years away from The Rick, yet no less superb, there’s Seattle filmmaker Serge Gregory’s Foster Island. This austere montage of aquatic imagery played at the Seattle International Film Festival back in June. As I wrote then, Gregory creates moods of wonder and unease through the dark, undulating surfaces of Lake Washington. The marriage of Gregory’s stark black and white images and composer Jeff Greinke’s hypnotic score for piano and synthesizer posits nature as a force indifferent to mankind. The only place for us, it appears, is at the mercy of the elements. In Gregory’s most inspired bit of bleakness, a photo album floats downstream, and the camera hovers over submerged snapshots of persons either oblivious to their fate or openly miserable. Foster Island screens at 1 Reel in the noon hour on Labor Day Monday; it’s part of the “Wild Kingdom” series of shorts, and justly so.

Opening day of the festival brings “The Fly Films Showcase,” a selected half dozen shorts, each riffing on a particular neighborhood in Seattle, from this year’s SIFF Fly Filmmaking Challenge. Their inclusion at 1 Reel offers another chance to see two of the best films from the original dozen: Brian McDonald’s Belltown, a poignant ode to both a demolished movie theatre and a deceased friend; and also Fremont aka Monsruang, Wes Kim’s beautifully lensed skewering of nouveau riche pretensions. Regrettably, this sampling includes the worst of the bunch, too: David Russo’s painfully self-indulgent West Seattle, a Charlie Kaufmanesque meta-film about having to make a movie in which the filmmaker has no interest. Hipster deadpan shtick masquerades as inventiveness, a la Adaptation. Russo once made the exhilarating, stop-motion animated short Pan With Us (a Best of the Fest winner in 2003), and his muse, I hope, returns in time for this Labor Day Weekend. Bumbershoot has commissioned Russo to film I Am Van Gogh, a work-in-progress to be shot on festival grounds over all four days of the event, which sounds almost like a Robert Altman premise. Masterwork or not, I Am Van Gogh debuts next year at the 2005 1 Reel Film Festival. – NPT

August 20, 2004

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