One of the great things about music sampling is the loops and repetitions, the creative use of recognizable bits of information. In that spirit, I'm really curious about the second annual Stockstock Film Festival (Sun June 1 at the Seattle Art Museum). Each entrant in the festival was given the same 30 minutes of stock footage and used that to make a three-minute movie. Though I have no idea how it turned out, I like the idea. More than anything else it's an exercise in editing, but a fun one--judging by the press release, the guys putting it on have a good sense of humor, which only helps me believe this will be one big, entertaining event.
Speaking of festivals, there's this other film festival going on about town. You knew that. What you might not know is that there's a sidebar to the festival called Exploding Cinema, which is a fancy way of talking about experimental films or movies that play in less-traditional venues. These events often take place in conjunction with some sort of music, like the one called Eurosexy (Sun June 1 at Barça), which'll have a collage of super-stylized '60s-era European "erotic films" playing on three different screens while DJ Sureshot provides the soundscape for all your Eurotrash fantasies.
Speaking of sex, the Sex on Screen series (Fri-Sun May 30-June 1 at Consolidated Works) continues with a package of short films from around the globe, and includes one with the provocative title The Girl Who Would Do Anything. Or maybe we were speaking of music, which leads me to the movie Citizen Fish (Fri May 30 at the Independent Media Center), which has a hippie title but is actually about a London punk rock band, and there's also going to be a screening of a couple of rare Rolling Stones movies (Mon June 2 at Sunset Tavern) in honor of Charlie Watts' birthday.
Of course, there are other ways to have fun with movies. The Jet City Improv troupe have been doing live dialog-replacement of old B-movies for years now, so they're probably pretty good at it. I've never seen them myself, mainly because I don't like theater and have a natural and totally sane aversion to improv groups. The movie they're working off of this month is the great The Amazing Colossal Man (Thurs-Sat May 29-31 at the Historic University Theater), which is about a guy who gets exposed to radiation and starts growing 10 feet a day. It features the biggest hypodermic needle you'll ever see, and gets really fun when he goes crazy and decides to hit the Las Vegas strip... literally.
Performance is teaming up with video over at the Rendezvous, too, with an event called Kook on the Rocks (Sat May 31). Apparently there's this cable-access TV show called KOOKtv, and they will not only be showing clips from the show, but also singing, dancing, and otherwise performing. This scares me more than improv, so you'll have to tell me how this one was because I'm not going to be there.
