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Repost: CineVegas Recap

Last weekend GlitterFish attended the CineVegas film festival. The fest ran all week and will end today. Here’s some pictures and my thoughts on the on the festival.

CineVegas is held at the Palms Casino and Resort. I was pleasantly surprised to discover a Vegas Casino that lacked plastic monuments, novelty buildings, and a fake sky painted on the ceiling. It’s a little far away from the Strip but that’s a positive in my book. The Palms is also affiliated with Playboy which assures attractive cocktail waitresses as opposed to the aging ex-stripper/chubby single mom that describes your average Vegas cocktail waitress.

One cool thing was the swanky CineVegasHQ press center. Decked out with free Vitamin Water, Red Bull, and Stella Artois, you could check your email at the bank of iMacs available and pick up as many free sharpies as you wanted. If you were really ballsy you could chat up the celebrities and filmmakers walking around but mainly I just scooped up free swag.

Speaking of celebrities we spotted Bobcat Goldthwait, Dennis Hopper, Marguerite Moreau, Ben Foster, and that dude from road trip.

As far as the films go they all screened at the Brenden Theater at the Palms. The first show we saw was the Shorts Program #1. I was really impressed and a little intimated by how good the films were. I could be nit picky (a lot of the films ran a little long) but the fact was they were all well done and entertaining. Interestingly enough, and something that should be encouraging to poor young filmmakers, between the four of us our two favorites also featured the lowest production value. My top pick was What the Captive Ate directed by Matt Lemche, a hilarious video diary about an image-conscious man trapped in his bedroom when his roommate’s guests stay longer than expected. Our other favorite was The Smoking Section directed by Chris Pozzebon. We also saw Shorts Program #2 and you can read Nate’s review of that here.

I want to quickly mention one of the features we saw, The Puffy Chair. This movie showed up on the blogosphere last year after it got some great press at Sundance. Since then it’s been all over the festival circuit and just started playing in select markets. The movie has no stars, was shot for $20,000, and its written and directed by two brothers you’ve never heard of. All it has going for it is terrific acting, a great script, and the enthusiasm of everybody who has ever seen it. I briefly talked with director Jay Duplass who explained their unfortunate lack of marketing money. They do have a MySpace page but I asked him if had done anything to engage bloggers directly and he said they hadn’t! If your going write, direct, and star in a guerrilla feature you might as well do some guerrilla marketing. It’s a great film so do yourself a favor and see if its playing in your area (it opens in LA July 7th).

As good—and bad—as the films were its cineVEGAS. Any fest that bills itself as the most dangerous film festival has got to be all about the parties. We managed to hit up the Foundation Room at the Mandalay Bay and had a really good time. There were playmates, a snotty director, and lots of suits pecking at their Crackberries. There was as also a view.

You can check more pictures over at Flickr.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 20th, 2006 at 5:07 pm and is filed under soiree, reviews, marketing, industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Repost: CineVegas Recap”

glitterfish.com » Interview with Festival Programmer Mike Plante Says:
June 30th, 2006 at 9:14 pm
[…] I want to thank Mike for answering our questions and also for putting on such a great festival. […]

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Repost: CineVegas Recap

One Response to “Repost: CineVegas Recap”

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