I heard she likes to hit the chocolate... HAAAAAARD!

Monday morning I woke up hazily, unhappily staggering toward a realization that I must return to real life after my nine-day vacation of standing (which sometimes turned into sitting) in long lines, driving between venues, listening to filmmakers and actors, eating a ridiculously insane amount of cranberry raisinets, and, yes, watching movies.

And the movies, on the whole, were superb.  As a group, this was among the strongest roster of films I've seen in my nearly decade of attending the Florida Film Festival.  The quality, neither, did focus itself in one area.  Some years the shorts are great, while the narrative features lack.  Other years, the documentaries clearly outshine the shorts.  But this year, I could have easily picked favorites among shorts, narratives, documentaries, domestic, and international.

So here I go with some recommendations.  Most may never get released at a theater near you.  Some may not even get a DVD release.  But these are among my favorites, so try your best to seek some of them out.

It's not a new thing in movies, especially documentaries, to explore the depths of the artistic process--either the overly romanticized version of it or the bludgeoning and frustrating side of it. But two wildly different documentaries do so in both refreshing and entertaining ways.

Troll 2 is considered by many to be the worst movie ever, to the point where actors who appeared in the 1992 film prefer to leave it off their resume.  But nearly two decades later, the film has become a cult phenomenon, garnering an earnest and devoted following.  The child star of the film, Michael Stephenson, has documented this phenomenon in Best Worst Movie.  To be certain, Troll 2 (which I also screened during the fest) is an absolutely terrible movie.  But, as a critic says in the movie, it isn't at all cynical in its motives.  Like director Ed Wood, who the critic also compares this too, the filmmakers and actors are sincerely trying to make a good movie; they just fail miserably.  And that's exactly the way Best Worst Movie treats its subjects.  The stars here are not a source of ridicule and the cult status of the film isn't treated with backhanded irony.  It has a genuine affection for the tiny nuggets of joy that can be found in such things as a truly awful piece of art.

The other standout doc at this year's fest was Kerthy Fix and Gail O'Hara's Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields.  Daniel Handler, author of the Lemony Snicket series and friend to Stephin Merritt, mentions in a talking head that most (post-) modern pop music assumes the aesthetic of personal expression--that the idea of a singular voice behind a song as a result of some sort of reflexive psychoanalysis is the default mode for songwriting.  But Stephin Merritt, lead singer of the Magnetic Fields, is the complete opposite of this standard.  (I should admit up front that I knew nothing of Merritt or the Fields, outside of having heard the name, though now I look forward to exploring the catalog.) His songs reveal little if any about the songwriter.  And in that same manner, the film reveals little if any about the person.  But it's precisely that level of obliqueness that gives the film its fascination.  Thus, the movie is more of a biography of an artist's career than of an artist's life and the sometimes overrated worth of psychology is stripped away in preference for the work itself.

The shorts programs were at times both satisfying and disappointing.  The Florida Shorts Program, highlighting works from local filmmakers primarily from FSU, UCF, and the Ringling College, was a huge disappointment.  The animated works from the Ringling College of Arts and Design were the clear standouts, while most of the others (with an exception or two) either fell flat or were flat-out ridiculous.  The International Animated Shorts Program, on the other hand, was nearly across-the-board superb.  The range of intellect, whimsy, and creative invention made it maybe the best shorts program I've ever seen at the festival period.

The two best narrative features, in kind of the same way the two great docs of the fest do, also find a way to mix both the old and the new, to draw out of familiar modes of movie storytelling a fresh and entertaining story.

Homewrecker (which won the festival's Special Jury Award; directed by Todd and Brad Barnes) is the odd romantic pairing between Mike, on work release as a locksmith, and Margo, a dizzying blonde who hires him to open the door to her boyfriend's apartment in the attempt to find out if he's cheating on her.  Mike, of course, is upset when he finds out that the place is not exactly hers, if for nothing else that it may land him back in jail.  But somehow, in that simultaneously scary and magical way a woman can wrap her way around a man, Margo convinces Mike to engage in an undercover operation that has him befriending her boyfriend.  Despite its modern and thankfully unacknowledged multiracial setting, Homewrecker is a bit of a throwback to the old screwball comedies of the late thirties/early forties.  Margo is the classic outspoken and unfiltered female driving the story, while Mike is the male simply trying to keep his head on straight, attempting to do nothing but go about his own business in the whirlwind that sweeps him up.  Anslem Richardson and Anna Reeder are a great onscreen couple who are worthy of such a comparison.

If I had to select a favorite, or the film for which I had the most affection, it would be Diane Bell's Obselidia.  George is a librarian.  Well, he works in a library, though I'm not sure he's a librarian (and, believe me, there's a difference).  In any case, George (Michael Piccirilli) is creating an encyclopedia comprised of obsolete or soon-to-be obsolete items.  When he meets Sophie (Gaynor Howe), a film projectionist who too imagines her own profession to be eventually obsolete, they go on a trek to Death Valley in search of a reclusive scientist who believes the human race will be virtually extinct within a hundred years.  In the same way that Homewrecker is a descendant of the screwball comedy, Obselidia has some of its roots in the classic road movie.

After a very abbreviated getting-to-know-you period--precipitated again by the aggressive female character--George and Sophie seem to be fairly compatible in their views on life.  But when they hit the road and visit the fatalistic scientist, the two are confronted by their conflicting philosophies.

"The moment you're born, you begin dying," as the saying goes and would be an appropriate adage for the way George feels about the world today.  He merely wishes things wouldn't become obsolete almost as soon as they're created.  He merely wants life to slow down.  The movie perfectly mirrors that philosophy, in its easy and languid pace.  That's not to say the film is listless or even nihilistic.  It's decidedly not.  Being alive means something to George and Sophie and the steady disappearance of everything that will be documented in the Obselidia reaffirms that.

Sadly, I missed two separate appearances by Gena Rowlands--one for a women in film forum (for which I was too tired to wake up at 11 a.m.) and the other for a special screening of Faces (which was sold out).  But that minor tragedy aside, it was another terrific festival and I'm already counting down to next year.

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Final tally: 14 features and 89 shorts, nearly 34 hours of movie watching; countless tiny bags of cranberry raisinets.