seattle queer film festival

so i just attended my first film at the seattle queer film festival - local produce: shorts.

it was horrible. not just bad in the way that many shorts have a tendency to be, nooooo, teeth gnashingly boring sliding into really fucked-up.

so i went to the wrong theatre at first and missed the first one, travel queeries, which was done by someone that i know. i was bummed 'cause it was the main film i wanted to see but you can get the idea by watching the trailer. in the 8 minutes it played (it's a work-in-progress), it was probably more radical and entertaining than all of the other films combined.

as for the shorts i suffered through, let's start with taken.

the plot was decent. two women reunite after 10? years apart. they were both prostitutes together and friends. later it is revealed that they also shared unrequited love. one is black, the other white. their friendship ended when they were both arrested and the white woman used her privilege to get away with only 2 years in prison while ratting on her friend who got 10 years. the black woman reveals that she has AIDS and they discuss that. so fairly interesting plot right? problem is the whole 20 minutes of the film take place in a moving car. just back and forth dialogue for 20 minutes. it was like eavesdropping on an intense confrontation that's interesting at first but then gets boring, but you can't leave! after the first 10 minutes i (and i think most of the audience) couldn't wait for it to end.

it gets progressively worse from there.

next was grizzley men (which is not even spelled correctly!). what could have been a funny and clever mockumentary of bear culture was stupid and in the end offensive. some dude that is a parody of a rural, working class resident of puyallup spends every summer in the wilds of capitol hill, protecting and documenting the "bears" in their natural habitat (read: the cuff, the eagle, etc.). in the end the dude is captured by the bears and the only thing left behind is a tape of his last words. he is saying "no, no, don't take my pants off, no, stop" then a spanking sound and cries of pain which become cries of pleasure. the audience is laughing the whole time.
now i fear coming across as someone on a high horse, judging bdsm culture and whining about my offended sensibilities. but i actually have no problem with consensual violence (though in my mind that's an oxymoron b/c violence implies lack of consent, so maybe i should say consensual simulated violence), in fact i enjoy it myself from time to time. ;D my annoyance with the film becomes ire when bdsm culture is misrepresented as the coercion of consent. fucked up.

next was we are...glbtq. not bad...for a mainstream straight audience who need to be educated about issues around queer youth. which i'm not saying is not okay for this festival. just boring for me. it's about the child welfare (foster) system and how queer youth are overrepresented because they are often kicked out of their homes. i overheard that it was actually made for dshs as a guide for better understanding of "lgbtq" youth. just lotsa stuff i've heard before and annoying yet typical attempts at "mainstreaming," i.e. we're just like you, we're normal, it's important to come out because hiding things about your identity is destructive psychologically (instead of challenging the heterosexist assumptions that construct the closet in the first place, blarg). so maybe i'm just jaded. it was definitely the least bad of all the films.

the description of the next film, too big for this town, says it all: " Billy Bob fought the battle of the bulge, and won!" but i'm gonna say more...wtf is up with a glorified infomercial rife with fat phobia and the obsession with image that saturates mainstream "gay" culture. but, like the others, it starts innocuously enough. this guy starts telling his story, with images from his childhood, about how fat he was and how he always got ridiculed (and put in the attic at school!?) for it. he goes on to say how disgusting he was and then instead of healing and challenging the bullshit messages in our culture he discovers the stomach clamp (or something). it is like a gastric bypass but less invasive and just clamps your stomach down. then with the help of his buddies that also had the procedure done, he lost a bunch of weight and now "looks great" and is oh so happy! it ends with a nice little disclaimer about his "testimonial" and how they are not liable for the product. meh? why the hell is this at the queer film fest?

ok so so far it's been bad, weird, and mildly offensive. (did i tell you it gets worse?)

[warning: disturbing violence and rape described below]

the grand finale is rock zombie, which i was hoping would be a funny and bad zombie short complete with the expected gratuitous violence and bad acting. but from the first scene i was deliberating whether or not to walk out (which i eventually did). it starts with a woman being dragged into a room by a guy (if you can judge gender by clothes, which was kinda implied by the genre). she is screaming and struggling then killed and turned into a zombie. i'm like "ick" but i know it's a zombie flick so it's kinda inevitable. then there's this goth-ish rock band of three guys with pretty make-up. one of them sees the zombie woman outside and thinks she's a prostitute. he chases after her with a ten-dollar bill saying "come on baby" until she turns on him and growls. he sees she's a zombie and runs back to the band. other folks get turned into zombies and there's chasing and eating and blood flying. like i said, expected. another guy in the band gets a gun and shoots the heads off of some of the zombies. but one of the zombies kills the first guy (the one who chased the "prostitute") and he turns into a zombie. then he smiles menacingly and chases after the same zombie (cause now he's dead so it's not gross to want to fuck a dead woman), while she runs from him. he somehow gets his hands on the gun, shoots off her legs, grins at his success, jumps on top of her and proceeds to rape her. people in the audience were actually laughing at the point. here is where i left. and fuck you if you think i'm being oversensitive 'cause it's just a b-movie and that's part of the genre. really.

now i don't know if seattle just has some really shitty filmmakers or if the queer film fest folks just suck at picking films, but i was sorely disappointed. at the worst i expected boring and sappy shorts, but never this.

::sigh::

oh and mercury is in retrograde again. arg.