“Future Imperfect” at the Boston Underground Film Festival
My brother's movie 'Robotic Panic' was accepted into the "Future Imperfect" short film collection showing today and tomorrow at the Kendall Theater as part of the Boston Underground Film Festival. That was reason enough for me to go see the collection but I also wanted to see what the future looks like in 2011.
In short: grainy, grimy and grim.
I'd say the three most impressive pieces of films not filmed by my brother were 'Get with the Program,' 'Spark' and 'The Third Letter.' These were the most fully realized and in the case of the latter two easy to imagine as much longer works. Nearly all of the works have some moment of interest, but these are the three to see if you have 86 minutes and $10 to spare tomorrow (3:30 pm @ the Kendall).
Jennifer Deutrom's 'Get with the Program' was the shortest of the three, an animated satire of our hyper-connected and consumerist present, with cybernetic bacterial Ren and Stimpys going about their monitored lives in oblivious isolation.
'Spark,' filmed by Bridget Palardy was "Children of Men" as filmed by Richard Linklater. The plot was somewhat meandering but full of vivid nadsat, pseudo-philosophical chatter and rich veins of the most inexhaustible natural resource: teenage angst.
The conclusion of the program has Grzegorz Jonkajtys's 'The Third Letter,' which attempts an interesting project, mixing the murky noir of Dark City with the body horror of David Croenenberg. Not for every taste certainly, but of all the films, this was the one with most fully realized vision of a dystopian future. The protagonist, Jeffrey Brief, is backed into a truly appalling dilemma when his life-extension wetware stops working. Lacking the appropriate insurance to replace his pace-maker he is left with a final phone-call and a heart-wrenching choice: his life or an innocent's.
Robotic Panic was well-received at the showing I attended. It's a bit more upbeat and comical than the other offerings but the premise, what if our technology winds up as self-serving and needy as us, is pure science fiction.
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