Y'know, I forgot to mention the lovely time M and I had at the Maryland Film Festival the Friday before last. And by "lovely," I mean, "kinda just OK."
As my longtime readers (particularly those who know me from the pre-blog, K-World times) know, M and I used to go to the Maryland Film Festival every year, where M would run the box office, and I'd see a bunch of free movies, and one of us would have a great time. Then PrettyGirl came along, and we had to give last year's Film Festival a pass.
But PG is in daycare now, giving us an opportunity to go see one day of movies without having to make any extra effort to score a babysitter. So we both took off work and did just that.
Unfortunately, the movies we saw were, by and large, not all that great.
Well, first of all, there was the fun and frolic in the box office tent. The plan had been to get Friend of The Festival passes, because that allowed us to see as many movies as we wanted on that Friend of The Festival Friday, plus free tickets to Festival showings throughout the year. But, upon arriving at the F0TF table in the tent, we found that M's student discount (she's taking MBA classes, did I ever mention that? News for another time, I guess) would only apply to her pass and not mine. So, after a quick pow-wow, we decided just to get two regular day passes from the regular box office table.
After waiting in line at the regular box office table for about 15 minutes without getting anywhere, because all but one of the cashiers were unable to take credit cards, we went back to the FoTF table and got our Friend passes.
A plus side to the long wait is that I had time to check out this year's shirt, deem it worthy of being seen on my person, and buy it. And if I had waited until after we had changed our minds about the Friend passes and gotten them, I could have gotten 10% off that shirt. Oh well. I guess that's fewer chai teas I could buy with the $2.00 I would have saved.
So, with our Friend passes finally in our possession and little time to spare, we set off to see our first movie. Or, in this case, collection of documentary shorts. The documentary about drive-in movie theaters was interesting, but the rest literally put me to sleep.
Next came the Comedy Shorts, which is usually a good collection. Not so much this year. There were a couple of good ones, particularly one where Pete and Brian both hit on a friend's sister and find themselves somehow saying the exact same thing at the exact same time and unable to stop, even after coming up with out-of-nowhere things to say. And there's one with a couple of guys busting out of things, which gets pretty creative. The other five or six shorts fell flat, though.
With three hours gone, we had time for just one more feature-length movie, so we saw Goliath, about a guy who gets divorced, gets demoted at work, and then his cat runs away. Sounds depressing when I put it like that, and it is, actually, but it was billed as a comedy, and the picture in the program had a still from the movie wherein our hero is walking down the road with a portable battery and a can opener to call his cat back (cats do love the electric can openers.) So we decided to give it a shot.
It had its moments, but it could have used a lot of editing. At one point, our hero and his about-to-be-ex-wife sign divorce papers. For about two or three minutes. Just signing and initialing. No dialogue. No music. Just two people sitting at a table, each paging through a big pile of papers and signing. And then, they switched piles of paper and. did. the. whole. thing. all. over. again. Five minutes (at least it felt like it) of paper signing, and then the scene was done.
It was at that point that I turned to M and said, "This is so much better than Iron Man would have been."
And, after watching our hero drive from his house to another house in real-time, I wondered what exactly the editor had done to make the producer fire him before he was done editing the movie.
So, all in all, I'd say it wasn't one of our better Film Festival experiences, though I would imagine that M would rather watch five hours of paper signing and silent driving rather than have to be in charge of a box office with non-working credit card machines.
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