Official Rejection (2009)

[Edgy MD]

Couple of guys with a camera make a movie, apply to a bunch of festivals, make the rounds, then make a seond movie --- this one --- about applying to festivals, making the rounds, and the politics and backscratching and egos and corporate interests that govern the film festival circuit.

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

My brother, who did the indy circuit, met these guys making their film and thought a lot of their work. Haven't seen it yet.

[Frayed Knot]

Yeah, guys who just got rejected from Sundance tend to be a natural audience for films about how it sucks to be rejected from Sundance.

The flick itself wasn't bad. Got a bit repetitive in spots -- ... and then we did this festival -- to the point where it could probably be 20 minutes or so shorter while losing nothing. It's also, at times anyway, aimed at kind of a limited audience: when submitting your film to festivals, here's what you should do ....
But they did it all with a decent sense of humor and got their point across about how at least some of the system designed to promote true independent films is rigged against true independent films.

It also kind of makes me want to see their original film, 'Ten 'til Noon', which, like this one, is also on 'Netflix' so the work kind of serves double duty.

[Edgy MD]

See, I thought their sense of humor was mean, bitter, un-funny, and self-congratulatory. And so I didn't want to see the film they were shopping at all.

There's a scene where two guys are running around Park City, Utah --- home of Sundance and a half dozen other satellite festivals that run concurrently --- papering information kiosks with posters for their film, and covering up all the posters already there. And when a filmmaker who had a single poster taped up whines at their scorched Earth tactics, they reply with this supposedly realist argument that somebody else is going to come by in 20 minutes and cover all their posters up anyhow. My sympathy was sort of totally supposed to be with them, but it was with the whiney one.

I watched it until the end, because it exposed a lot of hypocrisy and shady dealing --- and the same deck stacking I run up against selling songs --- but man, my main takeaway was that indy filmmakers can be a pack of annoying dorks with inflated egos. And the worst part is, because Kevin Smith is a funny raconteur, these bunch of guys (almost invariaby guys) seem to have arrived at the conclusion that the key to sellig your indy film is being a hip, wry, sniggling, detached dude flinging the insouciance. And almost all of them simply come across as garden-variety jerks.

[Frayed Knot]

Sure, but I'm also trying not to paint all indie-wannabes with the same brush and those kiosk terrorists weren't, at least as far as I can recall, from the same group making this docu or the movie they were trying to promote, they were just fellow travelers along the same path. The main group did, for the most part I felt, have a sense of humor about their film and their struggles and were in-the-ballpark realistic about portraying the idea that there are simply too many films to fit into too few venues even if cronyism and incompetent festival screeners didn't exist. In fact, had they tried to make it seem like all indie film-makers were pure and good and right while it was nothing less than the meanness of those Nazi-infused corporations that kept their wonderful art from reaching an audience I would have been more apt to dismiss the whole thing as silly propaganda.

[Edgy MD]

I certainly am not requesting that they should hve tried to make it seem like all indie film-makers were pure and good and right. I'm suggesting that my sympathies didn't tend to fall where they seem to be steering them towards.

Where do you rate it on the 1-5 scale?

[Frayed Knot]

Probably give it an average-ish grade.
Showed me a thing or two about festivals and without any beat us over the head bias of 'waah none of these scum will bow down to our film'
But also a bit of overkill at times and while I didn't dislike the film makers themselves they did sometimes run with a bunch of douches.