Judgemental

I did something a little out of the ordinary last week- I served as a judge for best musical "score" as part of the 11th Annual Rhode Island International Flm Festival - a total of over 275 films from 70 countries over six days, according to the official RIIFF poster. I keep thinking that there should be a variation of the Groucho Marx joke about "...any festival that has me as a judge is not a festival I want to be part of..." or something along those lines, but the fact is that it was a privilege to be involved in such a high quality event.

I watched five different films. Based on BSRR's avowed musical orientation, the one that most closely fit the type of tunes typically profiled here was "The Front Runner", an animated story of a Southwestern showdown, a 2007 festival world premiere film directed by John Macdowell. The Ennio Morricone themed soundtrack (You remember those Sergio Leone/ Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns - where Clint, Lee Van Cleef and others would stand, hands poised over their pistols as those stirring, echoey guitar chords thundered through the theater speakers!) documents the revenge of a young motorhead after his idol dies in an abortive drag race, played out in comic strip frames with a desolate desert background. The prelude of tentative strumming eventually devolves into the Hollies' "Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress" underscoring the fact that the only woman in the film - the one who waves the checkered flag - is, in fact, a blond in a black dress.

"Salim Baba" , 2007, directed by Tim Sternberg, is a documentary about an Indian vendor who drives a "cinema cart" through the streets of North Kolkata, showing scraps of film strung together and powered by a projector hooked up to bicycle pedals. Although the score does feature some mindless, high energy Bollywood pop, it is secondary to Salim's commentary. The same could be said of "Quincy and Althea" , 2006, directed by Doug Lenox, the story of a feisty African American couple basically bitching each other out , stuck in the remnants of Katrina ravaged New Orleans. You are privy to some good old fashioned Dixieland, but it seems needlessly discordant and irrelevant.

"Secondhand Pepe", 2006 world premiere, directed by Hannah Shell and Vanessa Bertozzi, is an innovative portrait of the underside of the global economy, answering the question of exactly what happens to the clothes Americans routinely discard. Using Haitian talk radio as a thread of commentary mixed with excerpts from the diary of an early Twentieth Century Jewish immigrant, the film expertly parallels the evolution of "secondhand pepe" (term for clothes in Haitian patois) from the castoffs plucked from the streets of the lower East Side in Manhattan to the modern day equivalent in the sidewalk markets of Haiti. The music cleverly mixes the frenetic violins and tempo of Eastern European dance tunes with the "junkanoo" percussion of the Caribbean basin, making a musical bridge between the two disparate worlds.

But the winner (The envelope, please!) hands down for best score - in my exceedingly humble opinion - was an animated 2007 world premiere film called "Voodoo Bayou", directed by Javier Gutierrez. This lushly but funky detailed short is told entirely without dialogue, the story of a swamp mosquito struck by lightening in a ghostly bayou. The bug wanders into the eerie shack of a voodoo "shaman" , its' electrified bite bringing a doll to life whose antics lead to a fiery confrontation with the cigar-smoking witch doctor. The music combines the classic Hollywood horror elements of guttering violins and heart pounding percussion with the essence of voodoo incantations and hair-raising chants to create a unique ambiance, the dark side of Walt Disney.

Congratulations to RIIFF Executive Director George T. Marshall and his hardworking team for making the Ocean State the ninth wave for the best in independent films, and don't forget to start making your plans for next year's event - you won't be disappointed.