Well, the biggest part of the Phoenix Film Festival is officially over. The entire festival isn’t over yet, as there are still movies to be shown throughout this week. But the weekend is by far the biggest event, and most of the filmmakers tend to go home after the awards on Sunday night. The rest of the week features a few new films, but most are award winners or festival choice that are repeat showings from the weekend.

As expected, it was a big weekend. Friday night I managed to catch three films: SOS: Save Our Skins, Teddy Bears, and God’s Pocket. Even though it had some problems, I think Teddy Bears was my favorite of the evening. It had some talented (and well-known) actors and featured interesting interaction among the characters. I also enjoyed God’s Pocket, one of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman’s last films. You can check out my review of it here.

Saturday was a full day of movies. I made it to the theater in time to catch The Shower, Little Hope Was Arson, The Joe Show, and The Sacrament. I was glad to have a gap of free time after The Shower and stayed for the Q&A session. (I missed all of these on Friday because my showtimes were so close together!) Not only was The Shower a fun movie, but I got the opportunity to talk to the director and cast for quite a while this weekend. They were such a fun crew, and it was interesting to hear all of their stories of filmmaking (including how they used a $1200 DSLR to shoot the film and how the director’s wife went into labor while in the makeup chair!). I enjoyed spending some time with them over the weekend. Check out my review of The Shower and go see this movie if you get the opportunity. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens with it in the future. Here’s a photo of me with the guys from the film:

Somehow I managed to make it out of bed on Sunday morning to head back to the theater for Jake Squared. Honestly, this was the only movie so far out of the festival that I didn’t really like. I think the lead actor did a great job, seeing as he had some challenging roles in the film. But ultimately, what seemed meant to be existential just played out as kind of a narcissistic mess, in my opinion. The title character wasn’t all that likable, and the movie seemed almost pointless and hard to understand at first. It got better, but still didn’t quite make me care enough by the end.

Sunday afternoon I headed over to the party pavilion to check out Geek Day. I enjoyed networking there, talking to people from Gangplank, Phoenix Comicon, and The Transporter Room. The latter is a really cool idea that I’d actually heard about previously on reddit. The plan is to have a geek-themed bar, in short. And since I’m a geek that loves craft beer, of course I love this concept. These guys have great ideas, and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens with them.

I finished out my movie watching on Sunday with Billy Club and then Dom Hemingway. Billy Club was a great horror flick with a baseball setting. You can read my full review of it here. By the time I got to Dom Hemingway (with an expectedly great performance by Jude Law), I was starting to crash from such a busy weekend of movies and networking, but I made it through and even stuck around for the Copper Wing awards ceremony. Once again, I ran into the guys from The Shower and grabbed a beer with them. We watched the awards ceremony and by the time it was over, I was ready to crash.

Thank you, Phoenix Film Festival, for a wonderful weekend of networking and great films! I’m looking forward to checking out a few more this week, and then I can’t wait to see what is in store for next year.

Batter up! Ok, I just keep using that phrase because it’s baseball-related, and I don’t necessarily know all that much about baseball. Probably just enough to be dangerous. But, apparently that’s all it takes in this movie.

Billy Club is about a group of now adults that grew up together playing baseball in Little League. Their Little League experience turned traumatic after one of the players winds up in a mental hospital after killing two other players and the coach. Years later, four players meet back up in the town they’re all from and decide to have a memorial on the fifteenth anniversary. They visit their old coach’s cabin, and tragedy strikes as they learn that the past is not necessarily all in the past.

This was a good classic horror film. It takes the Friday the 13th style killer and places him (or her? you never know until you know for sure!) into a baseball setting. The characters are well-developed, especially for a horror movie, and I hope it isn’t giving too much away to say that you even somewhat start to sympathize with the killer, which is unusual for a horror flick.

I wasn’t sure if I’d like this one, but I did. It’s worth checking out at Movies 123 if you’re a horror buff. Good entertainment, and definitely adds to the variety of films I’m catching this weekend. I’m hoping some of these films will win awards tonight so I can point you to some to see next week. If you can, try to make it to at least one or two films before the Phoenix Film Festival closes on Thursday!

Ok, so it’s possible that I am already a bit biased about this movie, since I started tweeting with the cast and director before I even saw it! In my defense, however, it was on my list of movies to see this weekend even before that.

After ending the night with two deep drama films last night, it was nice to see something a bit lighter first thing today. Well, light as far as comedy… but definitely not one for kids! The Shower is about a group of unemployed, underemployed, and former members of show business, all with hopes of someday making it in Hollywood. But, well, life happens and that climb to stardom can be slow.

The movie takes place at a baby shower (hence the title) where this group is experiencing a pretty normal day… until something happens. They find out that some sort of virus has been unleashed in the area, and one by one members of their group start exhibiting some very strange behavior. They lock themselves in the house and try to wait it out, but that proves to be more difficult than they think. The members of the group fight hard to protect themselves from what is going on outside, until it gets in.

The Shower takes on the horror-comedy genre as a film with great cinematography, and a large but well-developed cast of characters. Horror movies tend to have characters that you either don’t understand or don’t like, just because by nature of the genre you don’t know how long they will live, but this movie gives you a glimpse into a group that you will get attached to. Too bad you don’t know which will be the first or last to go!

One of the reasons I like attending the Phoenix Film Festival is because they know how to pick good, entertaining movies and this one is no exception. I definitely enjoyed this flick, and if you’re ok with a little (ok, a lot) of blood and some laughs, I recommend catching it when it comes to the nearest film festival (or hopefully theater) near you.