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On Nov. 15, nearly 100 students chose to attend the fall 2001 Student Film Festival in Donald P. Corbett Hall. At 6:30 p.m., the lights clicked off.
Show time, baby.
Meet Paul Ezzy: blue T-shirt, smile, sneakers and glasses. Watch on left hand. Mastermind. Leaning over a podium, he smiles repeatedly, inviting all to the Student Film Festival.
“Excuse me, hi…hello everyone. Good evening and welcome to the film festival; nice to see all of you.”
A four-minute video (with everyone’s “favorite Whitesnake song” playing in the background) was then served up to a more than willing crowd. Feeling intimate with the heavy metal, Ezzy jammed it all out on the guitar, always in vogue with a tie around his head and a bandanna tied tight around his right arm. Strum, strum, strumming away while also providing vocals, Ezzy gave the audience a small taste of his talent, a perfect mix of ingredients and presentation.
Next, Brandon Jones presented his three-minute video poem entitled “4 U.” As described in the program, it was indeed a “video poem with some somber overtones.” Reciting his poem while visuals were stylistically absent for an initial 30 seconds, the audience was drawn in by the power of his voice. Then film shot back and forth from Jones walking among nature’s splendor toward a girl, the inspirational centerfold of the piece. Ending with tears of “blood” falling on a letter he wrote to this femme fatal, he recited his last lines of promise, “I close my aching heart and finally smile.”
“The Sickness,” a song by the band Disturbed, raged in the background of Amber Callahan’s short film “The ADD Killer.” Ben, a character in the piece, was visited by his flavorful cousin Isaac, a fellow who is half ADD-stricken, half marijuana-addicted. Even though Ben realized his cousin was a tad bit sketchy (Isaac chose to sleep outside in a tent rather than inside), it was Amber, Ben’s roommate, who pieced it all together, running to the phone to call the police, and announcing to Ben, “The phone doesn’t work!”
“Oh yeah, I forgot to pay the bill,” Ben replies. As Amber left, we heard her scream. Isaac then walked in with a long and bloody knife. And the rest, they say, is history. Good-bye Amber, good-bye Ben-the ADD Killer has struck again!
“Wide Awake: The Movie” was next, chugging right along for a ripe 20 minutes. Created and directed by three friends, Jacob Cirell, Christopher Norbus and Arthur Raynes, this comedy documented their road trip to Alaska. Most of the piece was on the road, with The Doors in full stereo in the background. At times the camera angles were upside-down and sideways but always appropriate and well done.
Outside the Palomino Club in Winnipeg, some Tuesday at 2 a.m., away from the black lights and blurred-out camera shots, there was a close-to-heart competition of Yankee vs. Canadian. Obviously not camera-shy, two men repeatedly flexed in front of the camera.
And from here the trio landed in a grass field, jumping around and doing cartwheels. They all found their inner Emerson, and in Tom Green voices harmonized, “Frolicking in the grass! Frolicking!” The fun continued through college dinners (a mix of Spam, noodles and brown gravy), a dramatic stabbing of a carrot (“Die, carrot, die!”) and free song.
Not only was the direction fantastic, but the dialogue was as well.
“I like to masturbate, but since a lot of people are here, I’m going to sing a song,” announced one member.
“What’s your song about?” asked another.
“Masturbation,” he said matter-of-factly.
Upon approaching the Yukon, they raced for the Alaskan border.
“They can’t stop us now because we’re American,” they announced triumphantly. As one gave a traditional middle finger out the car window he said again, “We’re American!”
“The ‘Wide Awake’ movie was awesome. Especially the part when they were flipping the Canadians,” Pete Benziger, an economics major, said.
Bangor Daily News