Eugene International Film Festival
On Friday the 9th through Sunday the 11th Eugene will be host to an international film festival (who knew?) showcasing over eighty films: features, shorts, and documentaries made by independent up-and-comings and Hollywood hotshots. The festival will be held at the Valley River Center Regal Cinemas. A detailed schedule of the festival and information on the films can be found here.
Admission:
$8 for an hour and a half
$75 for a weekend pass.
Or, for aspiring filmmakers, $100 gets you a pass to the festival and enrollment in a three-day screenplay-writing retreat taught by Tom Sawyer (sadly not Huck’s companion, but writer for Murder, She Wrote) and Ken Sherman (Hollywood literary agent). More info at the EIFF site.
Yesterday I attended a sneak peak showing of All’s Faire in Love, a romantic comedy advertised as a centerpiece of the festival. Owen Benjamin plays Will, a star college quarterback, who is forced by his grudging professor (Cedric the Entertainer) to work at a Renaissance Fair in exchange for a passing grade. Will, who has the sensibilities of a bro, is troubled to find himself surrounded by intensely passionate theater people in Elizabethan garb. (Subtext: Renaissance Fairs and the people who attend them are completely absurd.) Within the hierarchy of the fair, Will is cast as a lowly “fetch boy,” and is required to obey the commands of the nobility. Chris Wylde comically portrays one of these nobles, Prince Rank, a despicable and overzealous Renaissance player. Will’s luck improves when he befriends Crocket (Matthew Lillard), and wins the admiration of a young actress named Kate (Christina Ricci). Every scene is pervaded by bouts of slapstick and punch lines, some of it witty though most of it uninspired. The soundtrack is the film’s great weakness. Made up of tacky selections such as “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)”, the soundtrack gives the film a distastefully cliché air. Despite some corny jokes and poor song choices, All’s Faire in Love is worth seeing for its moments of well-written and brilliantly performed humor, if not simply to support Eugene’s own film fest.
Rated: A slightly mealy Red Delicious out of a juicy Honey Crisp.
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This is going to be a good time. Thanks for diggin’ it up and spreading the word.