2008 Woodie Awards
JHU film festival stretches boundaries
Issue date: 4/24/08
Every year the Johns Hopkins Film Festival is still the best thing this campus has to offer by way of culture.
Talks by government leaders, readings by visiting big names, CultureFest and Everclear shows are included in that grouping.
The independent film festival has sold out. Four years ago Napoleon Dynamite showed at the Sundance Film Festival just a few days after Ashton Kutcher's The Butterfly Effect (a movie that was already set to open in theaters around the same time as the festival).
This year the Tribeca Film Festival is sponsored by American Express, Delta and Bloomberg.
The spirit of independent film is being snubbed out by the big movie companies who like to make easy money.
Every street corner of every town has hosted a film festival at some point or other. If you don't believe me then hit up the Oxnard Independent Film Festival in Oxnard, Calif., the lima bean capital of the United States, where the total population is under 200,000.
So what separates the Hopkins Film Festival from all the other independent film festivals? Why is the Film Festival culturally relevant on a campus that many would complain is dead?
For starters, the movies presented aren't necessarily new. Most of them have been made within the past 10 years which has given the movies enough time to drum up a solid reputation while still remaining relatively unknown.
This way the group of films being shown is widely diverse in the areas of topics, trends and styles.
The organizers aren't playing to the masses - they're playing what they know and like, and the community should listen because they've got some pretty good taste.
On Friday night The Tears of the Black Tiger (2000) was shown on that beautiful Shriver Hall screen. Normally, the words "Thai" and "western" should never be used to describe one movie, but Black Tiger is no normal movie. In fact, it's the best movie I've seen all year.
In it, an immaculate Rumpoey (Stella Malucchi) pines for her rough-riding, incredibly sharp-shooting, lower-class lover Black Tiger (Chartchai Ngamsan) in the Thai-speaking equivalent of Blazing Saddles meets Top Secret.
Talks by government leaders, readings by visiting big names, CultureFest and Everclear shows are included in that grouping.
The independent film festival has sold out. Four years ago Napoleon Dynamite showed at the Sundance Film Festival just a few days after Ashton Kutcher's The Butterfly Effect (a movie that was already set to open in theaters around the same time as the festival).
This year the Tribeca Film Festival is sponsored by American Express, Delta and Bloomberg.
The spirit of independent film is being snubbed out by the big movie companies who like to make easy money.
Every street corner of every town has hosted a film festival at some point or other. If you don't believe me then hit up the Oxnard Independent Film Festival in Oxnard, Calif., the lima bean capital of the United States, where the total population is under 200,000.
So what separates the Hopkins Film Festival from all the other independent film festivals? Why is the Film Festival culturally relevant on a campus that many would complain is dead?
For starters, the movies presented aren't necessarily new. Most of them have been made within the past 10 years which has given the movies enough time to drum up a solid reputation while still remaining relatively unknown.
This way the group of films being shown is widely diverse in the areas of topics, trends and styles.
The organizers aren't playing to the masses - they're playing what they know and like, and the community should listen because they've got some pretty good taste.
On Friday night The Tears of the Black Tiger (2000) was shown on that beautiful Shriver Hall screen. Normally, the words "Thai" and "western" should never be used to describe one movie, but Black Tiger is no normal movie. In fact, it's the best movie I've seen all year.
In it, an immaculate Rumpoey (Stella Malucchi) pines for her rough-riding, incredibly sharp-shooting, lower-class lover Black Tiger (Chartchai Ngamsan) in the Thai-speaking equivalent of Blazing Saddles meets Top Secret.
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