The End of Indie Cinema?

I find this article fascinating, and terribly depressing.
http://gawker.com/5465348/

The state of cinema in general is pretty dire at the moment, with the death of Miramax last week a tragic blow to quality filmmaking. The more i think about Avatar the more i dislike it. Pretty pictures are not what good cinema is about; plot, dialogue, acting, sheer feel-it-in-your-bones emotion, that is good cinema, and that's what the Academy appears to have forgotten.

Every time a film like this is made and gains acclaim, another film is left by the wayside. While everyone in the world is lavishing praise on a mindless piece of fantasy a truly exceptional film, adored by critics and anyone else who braved the cinema without the shield of 3D glasses is not nominated for a single American award. Moon, Duncan Jones's masterpiece, and in my opinion the best made film of the year, and the best sci-fi of the decade, has been ignored by the Academy, as well as the Golden Globes. The studio which produced it, Sony Pictures Classics, spent no money on awards publicity for it, not sending out screeners to academy members or hosting awards fundraisers as they do for other films. On Jones's twitter feed, @ManMadeMoon, he was inviting academy members round to his house to watch it. 

Jones said "[We] wanted to create something which felt comfortable within that canon of those science fiction films from the sort of late seventies to early eighties" and he succeeded. The film has the look and feel of classic 70's sci-fi, as though the station on which the character lives was built by the same people who built the Nostromo. The writing, the editing, the cinematography and the performance are all fantastic, so why did no one see it, and why is it not getting the attention it deserves?

The Academy Awards are supposed to be about celebrating excellence in the art of filmmaking, about showcasing the best and brightest, the most innovative and original. Money should not be a factor. Outstanding films made on a shoestring should be ranked higher than generic crowdpleasers made for billions. If the nominations are not based on quality then the awards lose their meaning, their prestige. If price triumphs over worth, how can the film industry be headed anywhere but the gutter?

For all your hygene needs

Vintage ads are amazing, and so many of them are oddly sinister. Here are some classics.

This one is less sinister than it is factual. Werewolverines really do go for the werewolf who uses Mr. Scarol. Believe me, i know. (click for full image)

Something to make you smile

I have found a fabulous men's style blog. I have found many in my time, but this one stands out as different. All it is is photos of wonderful men and then links to places where you can buy similar things to what they are wearing.

The thing that sets it apart from other style blogs out these is that the clothes aren't ludicrously expensive or on trend, or even particularly nice on their own, but they are worn with such style, and such a sense of humour, that the wearer looks awesome.

While the clothes might not be to everyone's tastes, the photos are definitely enough to raise a smile. Mostly taken from the pre-1970s, they are of men that people love. The photos have charm and charisma, and make you think that if you had the clothes you might be having as much fun as the people in them were, which is exactly the point of the blog.

Oh, and did i mention, it's called "nerd boyfriend". How could i not love it?!

Here are some of my favourite shots of some of my favourite men. Enjoy.

I Wish i knew Dali and Man Ray, they were so hardcore.

Belmondo might be the single sexiest man who ever lived, even though he had a lumpy face and squinty eyes. Its all in the confidence (and the Frenchness)

This one of Steve Martin is now my desktop background. It reminds me of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, though i have no idea when it was actually taken. He just looks so cool, and then you see what he's doing.So basically, everyone wants a nerd boyfriend, preferably from the 1970s, preferably a comedian, definitely one with style.

No one inspires me more

Dave is too wonderful. He's so kind of awkward and cute and brilliant.



The world needs more people like him.

The Empty Pool

Here's the story i wrote for my Art of Short Fiction assessment. please tell me what you think. I originally wanted it to be 10 pages long, so cutting it down meant that i didn't get in everything that i wanted, but i'm still pretty happy with it.

In the cold November noon the garden is almost monochrome. The events of the previous months are evident in only the smallest of details; an abandoned foam ball molding in the grass, a sun-bleached wood and fabric chair laying on its side, with the first green tinge of lichen spreading like embroidery. The changing rooms have been left to fend for themselves, the wood turned grey-black, the bare concrete shower evoking images of the increasingly distant trenches. All the hooks are empty save for one, still bearing the small pair of trunks no one could quite bear to remove. Their colour had faded also, and it now seemed as though they had always been there, and would remain. The walls around the garden are high red brick, held up in one place by iron scaffolding poles, rusted auburn to match. The overgrown trees block out all but the very top of the house, the bell tower, which never rings. One doubts it could any more. There is no way to see in to the place, and once in, no way to see out. The arches with their curlicued iron gates are now always locked.

On summer nights it was the place for the champagne soaked ends of parties, when women in elaborate dresses and their dishevelled escorts would sneak down for a moonlit swim, or to find a shadowed corner in the pavilion. The seclusion was ideal. The faded glamour of the place encouraging stolen kisses and whispered promises. During the day the children played in the smaller pool, whilst the adults sipped tea and nursed their well disguised hangovers. The garden then was full of life. It seemed to be the scene for every intrigue, every proposal, every joy and sorrow which passed through the house during those few warm months.

The hand on the sundial is missing; the metal turned a soft green, almost obscuring the name of “F Barker & Son, scientific instrument makers.” The weak light wouldn’t cast a shadow anyway, instead blanching everything to a dull off colour, like a faded photograph. The larger of the swimming pools turned a bright green, similar to the fashionable colour of that summer, after a young ingénue was seen wearing it to some obscure premier. No leaves floated on the surface, but some half drowned shadows could be seen lurking underneath. The smaller pool was conspicuously empty, and everyone silently acknowledged that it should remain that way, with an absence of sound that would make space seem cacophonous.

That summer had been unusually warm, and seemed to stretch on for eternity. The heat made activity during daylight hours seem almost vulgar, thus most of the action was saved for the evenings. For a week or two, right in the middle of the summer when the heat was at its most oppressive, the house and its inhabitants became almost nocturnal, with sunrise and sunset reversing their roles. It was then, in the distorted world of darkness and light, when everything seemed appropriate because none of it was truly acceptable, that Jessica first really noticed Theo. They had known each other since childhood, grown up together as close as siblings, but it was only in the summer of 1922, that queer and sultry sprawl of lazy days and active nights, that things started to change.

Jessica Ellis was seventeen, and considered herself a woman. The closeness of the summer air brought out some rebelliousness in her, and she used it as an excuse to dress as she desired, something expressly forbidden during the school year, when presided over by far stricter women than her own mother. During the first week of the summer she had ordered Theo to bob her hair with a pair of his scissors, and though the cut was uneven and crude, she thought it suited her very well. The freedom it provided from the heat, the feel of a cool breeze on the back of her neck, was almost too exhilarating to describe, and in a fit of uncharacteristic girlish excitement she had turned and kissed him on the cheek, before skipping off to horrify her mother. Theo stayed where he was, watching her as she sped away, feeling a sensation come over him, different to the stifling heat of the day, but just as intense, before putting away his scissors and retiring to his room.

Theo had known the Ellis family since birth, his father having been a friend of Mr. Ellis since his school days. The men had gone off to war together, from which neither had returned, and the wives decided it would be best for the families to merge, so as to soften the loss, and in the four years since they had merged very little had happened to cause any enmity between the two groups.

The close knit group of children had separated for the first time that year, with Theo and Frazer starting at university, and their return at the beginning of the summer was looked forward to for months. Jessica showed no outward excitement at the boy’s homecoming, but had been counting off the days in her head for weeks, eager for the company of friends nearer to her own age. She loved Tabitha and Edward, but had grown up with Theo and Frazer as playmates, and had no maternal instinct. When James was old enough to play with them, Jessica had handed over the role of damsel in distress to the younger boy, and demanded to be the villain, tying him up to be run over by trains or eaten by lions before being vanquished by the ever-victorious heroes. Her real skill was death scenes, occasionally shrieking and groaning for minutes before finally expiring with a dramatic sigh; sometimes the boys enjoyed whole days figuring out new ways to kill her.

Jessica had grown up as an honorary boy, and was respected by them for her bravery and commitment to their games. She was fearless in those early summers, and often vowed never to change, imagining that through sheer force of will she could remain suspended, Peter Pan-like, as she was in her early teens, without the pressures surrounding all the older women she knew. She came home battered and occasionally bloody from the wicked games of the boy’s imaginations, having suffered numerous horrific deaths, but she came home smiling, arm in arm with her brothers, satisfied that life would always remain so care free.

When the news came of their fathers’ deaths, the households tried to salvage as much normality as they could, but something had fundamentally changed. Jessica stopped being the villain. Her death scenes were taken away. As Frazer was her brother, and James was too young to be wed, Theo and Jessica were married, sometimes as often as ten times in a single week. Their weddings were turbulent affairs, loaded with intrigue and deceit, but they always ended happily enough, the obstacles overcome, their love free to blossom for eternity. Jessica found these games less interesting, her role having reverted to the same damsel in distress role she had shrugged off years ago. Theo kept his opinion of the altered games secret, playing with characteristic earnestness, devoted to the accurate portrayal of his character, but offering neither criticism nor excess enthusiasm. He was content with his given situation as devoted groom to a rather more wayward bride.

The boys returned from university on a Tuesday afternoon more akin to the Riviera than the Home Counties, and caught the household unawares. Finding everyone occupied, they joined Jessica at the edge of the pool, and she slipped out of the water, hugged them both until she was almost dry, then fell into a deck chair and basked in the sun. Theo politely averted his eyes in such a way that it caused her to laugh and slap him on the wrist. False modesty had never been an issue between them, and she felt strangely hurt that he should look away.

Time passed as it does in summers when there is nothing much to do and even less energy to do it. Theo cut Jessica’s hair, secrets were shared, and within a week or two it was as though the boys had never left. In the middle of the summer a party was held. It was when the heat was at its most intense and so the whole thing didn’t get started until almost midnight and continued until dawn. Old family friends were invited and the whole thing had the surreal quality of a dream. Conversation was friendly and light, and mostly centred around what the past year had held for the new students. The question of girlfriends was raised and quickly dismissed by both with a shy smile, a low chuckle from Frazer and a blush from Theo. Glancing across, Jessica caught him looking at her for a split second, before pretending to look past her out onto the terrace, the pink not leaving his cheeks.

At around four, as dawn was approaching, the younger children requested a game, and the group scattered, searching for bad hiding places so that they could be found quickly and the children dispatched to bed. Jessica crept into the walled garden surrounding the pool, intending to hide in the archway under the pavilion. No one else chose to hide in this part of the grounds, and she stood for a long time listening to Tabitha and Edward’s laboured counting. No one found her. She waited longer. She sat on the dusty ground, relishing the look of horror that would surely pass over her mother’s face when she found out. She heard a movement and froze, knowing instinctively not to move if she wanted to remain hidden. The movement stopped. She held her breath.

A whispered “Jessica?” told her it wasn’t her searching siblings lurking in the darkness. “Jess, the game’s over, you won, you can come out now.”

Theo sounded sad, speaking into the darkness, and part of her old rebelliousness tempted her in to staying silent and hidden. She grinned into the dark.

“Jess, the guests are leaving, I’ve been sent to find you, your mother’ll be angry if you don’t come.” She could almost see him in the night, a dark shape in the gloom, one or two sparks reflecting off the buttons on his jacket, a shine in his hair reflecting the moon. She kept quiet.

There was a shuffling sound as he moved closer still, out of the moonlight and into the shadow of the pavilion. He was now only feet away, arms outstretched, feeling for the wall. She stood up. They were almost touching, but neither spoke. The heat of the night and the darkness of the shadow seemed to cast a spell of silence over them. Moments passed while neither moved until Jessica, always the more proactive, blew lightly onto Theo’s nose, causing him to blink and the spell to break. Before she could refill her lungs his mouth was on hers, kissing her with an intensity she hadn’t thought Theo capable of.

Kissing under the pavilion in the walled garden, as so many had done before them and so few would do after, they both felt a change come over them. They were no longer children, no longer innocent or detached from the world of adults. They both saw themselves for the first time as people, individual and alone, on the brink of the unknown. They held each other tighter, their kiss becoming more frantic, more desperate, as though they could banish the onset of their adulthood with the sheer energy of their emotion. So consumed were they both that neither saw the small face in the darkness next to them. Neither heard the gasp, the running of little feet. The quiet cry, the sharp crack of bone on stone and the splash softer than a whisper all went unnoticed by the couple in the dark.

They left the alcove a short time later, breathless and exhilarated, giggling and whispering like the children they were earlier in the evening, both knowing that they could never consider themselves children again. Arm in arm they raced back to the house, hoping they had not been missed, not looking anywhere but at each other’s faces or the dew damp grass beneath their feet.

Jessica discovered Edward a few hours later. Unable to sleep after the night’s events she crept out for a swim before the families awoke and there he was. Her five year old brother was floating; face down, in the smaller swimming pool. A ribbon of blood trailed from a gash on his head like a thought bubble in one of his picture books. He was still wearing the little suit her mother had put on him the night before, but had removed his shoes and socks, and Jessica could see a slight bluish tinge on his tiny toes.

She did not cry out. She felt a strange calm come over her, such as she had not felt in a long time. It was as though she had been moving very fast and suddenly stopped. All the changes of the recent past; her father’s death, the moves of the families, her ascent into womanhood, what had happened between her and Theo last night; the bubble of a life she had created for herself all unravelled in this one moment. Here, by the dead child in the pool, she could be still. Laying her face on the cool stone of the pools edge, she closed her eyes and waited for the dawn.

sorry i've been away for so long, expect more updates soon including film reviews and other cool randomness.

Happy New Decade.

Be Still!

Ok, i know its geting a bit excessive now, but here are just a coupole of really beautiful photos that should get you even more excited about Where The Wild Things Are.

If i wasn't kind of in Love with Spike Jonze already, just photos of him from the making of this film would do it. He's so cute, and so damn talented.



Only 4 days to go!

all is love.

I know you all already know i can't wait for this, but really, I CAN'T WAIT FOR THIS!
(For some very annoying reason my embedding feature isn't working, and neither is copy and paste, so i can't embed videos or paste the code, so you'll just have to follow the link. Enjoy.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V35M2lW5mQ

The soundtrack is amazing, i got it a couple of months ago. The anticipation is almost killing me.

These bitches are hardcore!

OK, so i don't normally do this, but since th emain people who read this are my parents and i think they would be interested, and because i'm proud of myself, i'm posting the essay i just wrote. Its the first one in my degree that actually counts and i got a 1st for it, so go me. Feel free to skip this post if Shakespeare isn't your thing.

“Their wives have sense like them...” An argument for the importance of female characters in Shakespeare’s plays.

Shakespeare’s female characters have a hard time. Vastly outnumbered by male characters, often marginalized in the plot, and originally written to be played by men, it is easy to see why many critics have either focused on their flaws or disregarded them entirely. Shakespeare named no play named solely for a woman; no female name appears except as the second part of a male-female couple. This could be an indication of a dislike of women on the part of the playwright, perhaps an (incorrectly) perceived inability to write women strong enough to carry a play, or simply a sign of the time and culture in which the plays were written. This essay will, I hope, address the question of why Shakespeare’s women are still regarded as inferior to his men, and put to bed the idea that “most [of Shakespeare’s] women have no character at all”.[1]

A.C. Bradley stated that “it is only in the love-tragedies, Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra, that the heroine is as much the centre of the action as the hero. The rest,” as he puts it “are single stars.”[2] By this I assume he is taking the view adopted by many before and since, that the female characters serve more as an impetus for plot progression than as fully formed characters in their own right. The characters can certainly be read that way, Ophelia is simply weak and mad, Lady Macbeth only wants power, Cleopatra only sex, but reading in this way is entirely uneven; why subject the male characters to intense Freudian psychoanalysis and take the women purely on face value? Upon closer reading all of the female characters have emotions, motivations, flaws and strengths equal to their male counterparts, or as Emilia from Othello puts it, “their wives have sense like them: they see and smell,/ and have their palates both for sweet and sour / as husbands have” (4.3.93-95).

For centuries Desdemona has wrongly been considered naive and weak-willed, as a “helplessly passive”[3] girl going to her death without a fight, despite the huge amount of textual evidence to the contrary. The statement that “everyone in the play fails to understand her, and fails her”[4] seems far more apt. The woman described by the men who surround her, the “maiden never bold”[5] (1.3.95) whom every man puts on a pedestal, is banished as soon as Desdemona herself enters the stage. We see before us a woman unafraid to stand up to her father and the heads of state in order to marry the man she chooses, regardless of the consequences. Neither is she the “cunning whore of Venice” (4.2.88) described in the latter half of the play; in fact, Desdemona throughout treats everyone she speaks to exactly the same, honestly, politely and openly. In a play as male dominated and set in such a feminine free environment as this, we are given a heroine who cannot be dismissed as a peripheral character or simply a catalyst for action. She has more lines than anyone excluding Othello and Iago, and shares a dramatic position equal to either of them. The play would quite simply not exist without her. Unlike other tragic heroines she seems to have no great flaw; she is not a shrew, nor maddened by ambition or blinded by love. Desdemona presents to us a fully rounded character, a creature of intense tenderness, but also of wit, humour and courage.

These characteristics are far more common for female characters in Shakespeare’s comedies, where the women are given more scope and are allowed to direct the action in a different way. I think this is summed up best in the introduction to ‘The Woman’s Part’ by stating that “in the comedies women are most often nurturing and powerful; as their values educate the men, mutuality between the sexes may be achieved...In tragedy...their roles are at once more varied, more constricted, and more precarious.”[6] If the values of the tragic heroines, Desdemona’s understanding, Cordelia’s level-headedness, even Lady Macbeth’s guilt, had influenced their male counterparts there is a sense that the outcomes of the plays could have been quite different. In the comedies the heroines bring about the resolution in a way entirely absent from the tragedies. The men of the comedies listen and are influenced by the women, in the tragedies “the men’s murderous fancies are untouched by the women’s affection, wit and shrewdishness”[7] and thus a peaceful resolution is never reached.

The heroine most in control of any Shakespeare play is almost undoubtedly Rosalind from As You Like It. Rosalind’s actions direct the play; it is her choice to hide in the Forest of Arden, her idea to adopt disguises, her agency which brings the four couples together at the end. Shakespeare gives her character all that she needs to do this, “in wit and energy, Rosalind has no male rival”[8]. Even this wit is unlike other Shakespeare heroines. As opposed to Catherine or Beatrice, Rosalind’s wit has no hint of shrewdishness, and is directed solely at lovers and women. Rosalind being both a woman and in love, she makes herself the butt of her jokes as much as anyone else, thus making her seem both self aware and self deprecating in a way that other heroines are not. Orlando’s character pales in comparison, he appears almost one dimensional, and were Rosalind not so persistently in love with him the match would seem dreadfully uneven.

The adoption of disguises, especially men’s clothes, allows the comic heroines a freedom never afforded to their tragic counterparts. These disguises gain a woman entrance to places she would never normally be allowed and let her act in a way which would be unthinkable for a respectable lady. It is by dressing as a man that Viola gets Orsino and that Rosalind gets Orlando. In disguise they are allowed to speak as men, and are spoken to openly, as friends. Orlando looks to Ganymede for advice where he had “Not one [word] to throw at a dog” (1.3.) upon his first meeting with Rosalind. She is free to tell him what she really thinks, rather than being constricted by propriety, “male dress transforms what otherwise could be experienced as aggression into simple high spirits”[9]. The element of disguise is denied to the women of tragedies, and consequently they are never given a platform to discuss their true feelings with the men of the play without fear of retribution. Had Desdemona been able to adopt a disguise and convince Othello of his wife’s fidelity the play might have ended in a different manner. When Emilia stands up to Othello and Iago in the final scene she is threatened and eventually killed for her trouble, despite tempering her outburst with an explanation, “’Tis proper I obey him, but not now” (5.2.195), and speaking nothing but the truth. Had she been a man there is a greater chance she would have been listened to and gone unpunished.

This gender bias on the part of the characters undoubtedly has something to do with the time in which the play was written, where “the employments of women, compared with those of men, [were] few; their condition and of course their manners, admit of less variety”[10]. Men expected their wives to be subservient, and even though Queen Elizabeth’s power and influence are undoubted, the society was still dominantly patriarchal. It is interesting to note that the women of the comedies, with all their wit, charm and influence, are all unmarried, whereas the stifled, thwarted and ultimately destroyed women of the tragedies are parts of couples from which they cannot or will not escape. Being spouses, they are controlled by the will of their lord, which inevitably brings about their downfall.

The question of whether female characters are unimportant in Shakespeare’s plays is, to me, one with a fairly obvious answer, but perhaps I am being obtuse. There is no question that the plays would not be the same if the female characters weren’t there, if Romeo or Antony were plays in their own right. Replacing the female characters with male ones would also entirely change the elements of the drama; undoubtedly Romeo and Julian would find an audience, but the essence of the tale would be altered. I find the accusation that “Shakespeare did not bring forward his female characters into a full and striking light”[11] to be entirely without merit. Working within tighter parameters than the male characters and hampered by the constraints of society, gender and class, these women are still written as complex characters, both gifted and flawed, each of them “capable of passion and pain, growth and decay”[12].

---

[1] William Richardson, Essays on Some of Shakespeare's Dramatic Characters to which is added an Essay on the Faults of Shakespeare (London : J. Murray and S. Highley, 1797), 5th edition, p.361

[2] A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 2^nd Edition (London, The Macmillan Press, 1905) p.7

[3] Bradley, p.179

[4] Philip Edwards, Shakespeare and the confines of Art (London, Methuen, 1968) p.123

[5] William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. E.A.J, Honigmann (London, Arden, 1997). All subsequent quotations are from this same edition.

[6] Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz and Gayle Greene and Carol Thomas Neely, The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1983) p.6

[7] Neely, Carol Thomas, ‘Women and Men in Othello: “What should such a fool/Do with so good a woman?” in The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, p.215

[8] Claiborne Park, Clara, ‘As We Like It: How a Girl can be Smart and Still Popular’, in The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, p.107

[9] Claiborne Park, p.108

[10] Richardson, p.341

[11] Richardson, p.339

[12] Lenz, Greene and Neely, p.5

Aren't i smart?! I promise the fashion, man-boobs and film-geekery will be back very soon.

"You're so buff..."

I mean Really, is this necessary?

New Moon

If you’re expecting a review slating this film you’re going to be sorely disappointed. This film is far from high art or great film making, but it isn’t trying to be. The filmmakers know they’re making a film for horny teenage girls and their equally horny mothers, and they deliver exactly that. This isn’t deep or meaningful, it has no message or moral, but it’s fun, silly, and annoyingly engrossing.

However hard you might be trying to avoid it, you probably know the story. Bella Swan (Stewart) is madly in love with vampire Edward (Pattinson), but he dumps her for her own safety. She becomes severely, pathetically and a little comically depressed until she gets back in touch with Jacob (Lautner), her super hot friend who happens to be a werewolf. It’s hardly Shakespeare.

The film sticks faithfully to the book, adopting its strange pacing (the climax takes place in about 10 minutes right at the end of the film, after an hour and 40 minutes of build up), but sucking out most of the intentional humour. Most of the laughter comes from the copious amount of bare male chests in gratuitous slow motion. Not that I’m against buff men wandering around topless, but after 2 hours all those nipples start to detract from the action. And then there’s the creepy aspect of it. If it makes you more comfortable, try to forget that Jacob Black is supposed to be 16, so every time you let out an involuntary moan at his spectacular chest you could potentially be put on some sort of register. Edward is supposed to be 17, so you’re not allowed any of that either, sorry to disappoint.

There are some nice shots, but all in all the cinematography is un-dynamic, and the same goes for the soundtrack. The film is not supposed to rattle any cages, it’s for the fans, and it knows what the fans want. Clocking in at just over 2 hours, it takes time to cover every aspect of the book, but does so without losing momentum. If you hate the books, it stands to reason that you’ll dislike the film, but if you are a Cullen fan then you won’t be disappointed. If you’re ambivalent then you could do worse than spending a rainy afternoon staring at R-Pattz man-boobs, who knows, you might even enjoy it.

"The house is called Dionysus...and they're not kidding"

Cine-city, the Brighton Film Festival, is in full swing, and i'm getting press tickets to as much as possible. I just watched Humpday and i advise you to do the same, it was utterly charming.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMr_LQDlYH8&feature=fvw


The first thing that strikes you about Humpday is how homemade it feels. The aesthetics, the dialogue, the acting, all of it, make it feel like a movie you and your friends could have made, only a hundred times funnier, more tender and quite simply better than you could ever hope to achieve. From the first shot you feel for the characters. Each of them are written and acted with such subtle perfection that it feels like you're watching some kind of absurdly funny docu-drama.

The basic story follows two college friends who have grown up and taken very different paths, one settling down with a wife and prospective children, and one travelling the world trying to be an artist. Over the course of a drunken night they decide to enter "humpfest", and amateur porn festival, with a film pushing the boundaries of art, namely two straight men having sex.

The premise might sound like a Will Ferrell vehicle, but stick it out. The natural-ness of the actors and the low-key beauty of the cinematography make this one of the most human films i've seen in a long time, as well as one of the funniest.