SIFF the Conclusion, No Really

[tiggymalvern]

So, last Friday and Saturday nights we experienced the so-called Best of SIFF (otherwise known as the prints they could keep for longer), and topped up on Humpday and Black Dynamite.


Humpday takes as its premise Seattle's Stranger-organised amateur porn film contest HUMP! that will be familiar to long term readers of this LJ. Ben is happily married and planning a family when his old friend Andrew breezes back into town from a long series of international travels. Andrew brings to Ben's life some of the excitement he feels he is missing out on, and the two drunkenly concoct a plan to make a gay porn film for Hump.

Humpday is a film that almost goes a little too far in its plot device, but also becomes a lot more serious than you would expect a light comedy to be. I wasn't sure I was too fond of the mix, but the SO enjoyed it more than he'd expected to because of the extra depth. The three leads of the two friends and Ben's wife do a good job with their characters, as all three find some unsettling revelations about each other. Humpday is a film filled with long awkward silences and excruciating social situations that leave you to cringe in anticipation of just how bad this is going to get. Fans of The Office style humour apply here.




Black Dynamite - I'm guessing more than a few people on my flist have already seen the trailers for this one. A spoof of 70s Blaxploitation films, it appeared on the SO's radar via his geek friends many months ago....

Blaxploitation was never my thing, and I went along to see this film with rather low expectations. I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would, and laughed a lot more than I thought I would. A great deal of thought went into this script; there's so much humour just in the little details as well as the big obvious spoof points. Yes, it's tasteless and crude and obnoxious in places, but it's also great trash entertainment. I suspect it's also exponentially funnier the more people you watch it with - if you can't manage a packed cinema, get some friends over and have a few drinks. The film just escalates and escalates and leaves you wondering where the heck it's going to draw the line - and the answer is, it really doesn't! Definitely not the best film in the SIFF festival, whatever its audiences voted at 2am, but good for a laugh.


And now all those who don't love obscure films will be able to safely read this journal again for a while!

Comments

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

Man, Humpday sounds excruciating. I can barely take half an hour of The Office. But it is an interesting premise.

[tiggymalvern.livejournal.com]

It kind of was. It's funny, the SO is usually more sensitive to that kind of embarrathy than I am (he can't watch The Office either), but he enjoyed this film more than me.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

I'll probably just end up reading the plot summary on Wikipedia like I do with most of the movies I'm not sure about. I'm such a pussy. Though that does reduce the number of movies I delete from my DVR halfway through, or end up sitting on the couch with my eyes closed, my glasses off, and my hands over my face. (Mysterious Skin is a great movie but holy damn.)