Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

Sunday was just a miserable day. Philadelphia was hit by a Nor'easter, and it rained all day long, an especially soaking rain that came and went. It wasn't the best day to be out and about, but we had tickets to attend several films as part of the Philadelphia Film Festival, so we made the best of it.

The first film we attended was at the National Constitution Center at 2:15, a documentary called Judy Toll: The Funniest Woman You've Never Heard Of.

Produced by her brother, Gary Toll, the film told the story of Judy, a comedian, writer and actress who grew up in the Philadelphia area and then left to make her name in California.

While she experienced a lot of success, including being selected for the prestigious improv troop the Groundlings and writing for Sex & The City, she lost her fatal battle with melanoma before achieving the widespread acclaim she sought.

The movie takes an affectionate look at her life and her career, tracing it back to home videos and then into performances on-stage and on screen, punctuated with interviews with people who knew her well. Gary Toll did a great job. You find yourself loving this smart, energetic comedian who often strayed into blue territory, reminding me of Margaret Cho.

He broke the film into different segments to talk about different aspects of her life, which was a good way to organize the material. I didn't know a thing about her at the beginning of the movie but went away feeling as if I knew her and mourning her death.

The filmmaker was there to answer questions afterwards, and his mom sat in the front row. The auditorium was filled with people who had known her or known the family. In fact, sitting next to me was a woman who I believe worked with her on-stage in Philly. To her right sat a woman who'd gone to camp with Judy.

Gary showed that he had a sense of humor, much like his sister, and he made some wry jokes during the Q&A. He was very humble about the project, insisting that he really just wanted to share her personality and her humor with the world. Turns out his family had a long history of encouraging creativity, and he was frequently the camera person in all the home movies shown in the film.

We were very impressed with this film and gave it the highest rating.

As we were leaving the Constitution Center, an interesting thing happened. A young guy who was an employee at the center stopped me and asked if I was a poetry instructor. I told him that yes, I used to teach at Penn State when I was a grad student. At this point, I was racking my brain, training to remember him, assuming he must have been a student in my class.

Turns out he recognized me from the Philcon panels I'd been on, which he really enjoyed. He saw both the geek dating panel at 2006 and the mythology panel in 2005. We chatted for a little while, and I gave him one of my cards and told him to check out Wild Violet.

When the Gryphon and I walked down to the Mexican Post to get an early dinner, the rain seemed to be slowing down. We even put our umbrellas away temporarily. For dinner, I ordered the Cancun chicken, and The Gryphon and I each had a margarita. This was a good time to eat there, because it wasn't yet crowded.

Since we had a lot of time to kill before our next showing at Ritz East at 7:15, we walked down to South Street to do some window shopping. The rain was starting to get more earnest, but we thought that's about as bad as it would get.

I looked at clothes in Retrospect but didn't find anything. They mostly seem to have tacky '80s clothes right now, which just aren't what I'm looking for. I was hoping to find something classic.

We also browsed a used CD store, Repo Records, where I got a Joan Jett CD and The Gryphon got a Pixies CD. At that point we started to head back. That's when the squall hit us. This absolutely vicious wall of water soaked us head to toe, like being assaulted with a super soaker. I kept hoping it would ease up, but it only seemed to get worse and worse.

Earlier in the day, we only had a little dampness at the hem of our pants, but now my entire leg was soaked from the bottom to halfway up my thigh, where my coat ended. Fortunately, they were humane enough at Ritz East to allow ticket holders to wait inside. And they were just beginning to let people in when we arrived.

We saw American Fork, by the creators of Napoleon Dynamite. This movie follows an obese grocery store clerk, Tracy Orbison (Hubbel Palmer), on his quest to find a higher purpose in life. Just as in Napoleon Dynamite, the movie was filled with nonsequiturs, but they approached much darker subject matter at times. The movie also has more of a plot than the previous film, as Tracy finds a way to defeat the naysayers and those who are out to get him.

Some moments were very sad, such as when Tracy tries, again and again, to eat more moderately and then, overwhelmed by emotions, binges secretly.

The movie is filled with some great character actors, such as Kathleen Quinlan (Family Law) as Tracy's mother and Mary Lynn Rajskub (The Larry Sanders Show) as his sister, Peggy. Overall, a great ensemble cast, especially William Baldwin as a smug, slightly sleazy acting teacher.

We took a cab to our last showing, at the International House on the University of Pennsylvania campus. Our pants were still in the process of drying out, a process which wasn't completed until a day later when I finally placed them on the radiator.

Our final showing was a collection of animated shorts called "Out of this World", featuring shorts which take place in an unusual, inventive or fantasy type space.

The films were listed alphabetically in the program, so this list is definitely out of order. We began with an extra film, "Golden Age" by Aaron Augenblick, who had produced a series of shorts for Comedy Central, behind-the-scenes looks at fictitious cartoon characters. So you have everything from silent film cartoons to characters who happened to look like famous dictators and found themselves jobless after World War II ended. One of my favorites was a Japanese robot gorilla who finds a higher calling as a wine connoisseur and owner of a vineyard. The audience loved the piece, laughing along with all the satirical humor.

Augenblick himself attended along with a good number of family members. They left as soon as their film was shown, but you can't really blame them. They'd expected their film to be over a lot earlier, since it was originally supposed to air as part of the program "Cartoons for Big Kids" at the Prince. Due to a problem with the power, however, the film couldn't be shown at the original time.

"Bubble Bubble" by Cal Arts student Won Jeong (Leah) Chung is a visual poem exploring inner organisms. Using a pop art visual style, the film is set to trance music which serves as perfect accompaniment for the flow of imagery.

"C'est La Vie" by Cal Arts student Ant Ward was a computer animated film about a hapless construction worker painting a wooden roller coaster who encounters disaster after trying to befriend a crow.

I fully enjoyed "Digitopia" by Miwa Matreyek, a Cal Arts grad student. She used her own arms, hands, face and body, layering in movement loops to create objects and animals, such as dinosaurs and birds. Meanwhile, scientists earnestly studied the body's systems on a very pop art sort of background. A different film by her, "Grater City", can be viewed at MySpace.

"Disconnected" by Cal Arts student Eric Favela, who also had a film in last years festival, featured two aliens who have monkey-like heads on elongated necks. They have devices that can come out of their heads to interact with the machines around them, and they enjoy making random phone calls. They speak one-syllable words in their alien language until the callers hang up.

"Doppelganger" by Ki Peum Lee is a film reminiscent of some anime films, though in muted colors like a watercolor. A girl is haunted by the idea that she's being pursued by her doppelganger who means to kill her, a cruel prank that backfires.

"Fog (Niebla)" by Emilio Ramos is a fanciful piece about an old man telling a tall tale about how flying sheep once made a temporary home in his village, brought by the fog. He describes how people tied them on strings like balloons, and how the sheep eventually sought their freedom. This short has a very painterly look to it, though it appears to be computer animation.

"Honeymoon" by Cal Arts student Edward Juan had the look of a hand drawn but looks like it was animated by computer. It's a playful musical journey to the moon where a '60s looking astronaut encounters a green-faced alien woman and falls in love.

"Icarus and the Tree Herder" by Cal Arts student Ian Worrel is a creative tale set in a land where a goat-headed tree herder tends a grove of apple trees that are inextricably linked to a huge stone formation shaped like a man. The tree herder must protect the apples from an interloping aviator. This short featured hand drawn characters against a luscious background.

"In Search of a Puppeteer" by Cal Arts student Chih-Ming Chang is a computer animated piece about a character in a stop motion film who escapes, runs down the road into a ghost town and encounters a theater full of disembodied hands looking for puppets. He escapes onto the set of the film: or was that, in fact, the film he was in?

"It Snowed" by Karen Knighton is a quiet, meditative piece about a little girl nursing a boo-boo on her head, sitting in an apparently empty house in a deserted, snowy neighborhood. Her only friend is a snowman she creates.

"Loom" by Scott Kravitz is a stop motion animated piece starting with the title card "Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me," mistakenly attributed to Emily "Dickenson". An old woman works at a loom, but is she waiting for her own death or something else?

"The Man Who Waited" by Bulgarian animator Theodor Ushev is hand drawn, based on something written by Kafka, where he mused about a man who kept waiting for truth. Every time he asked politely to be let through the doors to see his truth, he was denied. Eventually, at the end of the life, he's informed the doors are closing. A stark, cyclical meditation on the nature of truth.

"Mirage" by Youngwood Jang is a computer animated short, following a bio-mechanic robot who struggles to sustain his life in an industrial setting. Ultimately, his struggles cause troubles for another fish, so he finds a unique solution, allowing the fish to live inside his suit.

The film "Monster Farm 5 Circus Caravan" by Goh Fujita is a highly stylized videogame promo. The animator shows off a myriad of impressive effects using textures and backgrounds, as the game's characters journey through an ever-changing psychedelic world.

"Le Petit Heros" by Cal Arts student Dimitri Frazao is the colorful, beautifully drawn story, told in French, about a unique boy, boy with a unicorn's horn on his head, who finally wins the town's approval when he defeats an invading monster.

"Revisionist History of Southern California" by Dominic Bisignano is a crudely done computer animated piece retelling the history of Southern California from primordial days to today's businessman, who is basically a cheeseburger eating caveman, as retold here.

Master independent animator Bill Plympton's "Shut-Eye Hotel" is a bit of a darker short, as a detective tries to solve a string of mysterious decapitation murders at the Shut-Eye Hotel, finally tangling with the unlikely culprit. Hand drawn with effective use of wry humor, the story is told through visuals alone.

"Solomon Grundy" by Chris Myers and Ken Seward retells the nursery rhyme of the same name, where an unfortunate man sees his life flying by incredibly fast. The 3-D computer animated piece takes place on a stage, with a clockwork feel.

Judd Konigsberg's "Super Racing Raton" combines live settings with computer animation for an entertaining short about a mouse striving to obtain a cheesy delicacy under the nose of a vigilant cat.

The mesmerizing, dreamlike "Tyger" by Guilherme Marcondes is inspired by the William Blake poem, combines incredible puppetry on a 3-D model of a city with hand drawn and computer animations of a city that discovers its inner jungle.

"Watambi" by Joel Crawford combines hand drawn animation with a north Indian classic music score to tell the story of an obese squirrel who strives to save an eagle's nest from a band of rival squirrels.

Despite the rain, we enjoyed ourselves immensely. This program, which combined humor, introspection, and beauty was a perfect cap to our 2007 film festival experience.

More Musings on the 2007 Philadelphia Film Fest:

April 10, 2007 - All Singing, all Dancing

April 13, 2007 - Short Stories

April 16, 2007 - Getting Animated

Musings on the 2006 Philadelphia Film Fest:

April 4, 2006 - Sweet Masterpieces

Musings on the 2005 Philadelphia Film Fest:

April 11, 2005 - Film Style 5+

Musings on the 2004 Philadelphia Film Fest:

April 12, 2004 - Indulging in Film

Copyright 2006 by Alyce Wilson

April 2007 Index

Musings Index

What do you think? Share your thoughts
at Alyce's message board (left button):