West Chester Film Festival in Review.

You might have noticed, if you spend anytime downtown, that this weekend was the West Chester Film Festival. Signs posted in store windows, banners hanging across High Street, obnoxious Hollywood types walking around yaking on their cell phones, not paying attention to traffic, ordering their fu-fu Soy Decaf no foam lattes...oh wait, that one is probably one of us. Seriously, unless you are not the observant type, you might have missed it. And based on the attendance I saw, a lot of us did, and for that, for shame!

Listen I'm not trying to lay a guilt trip, don't feel bad, I get it. That's the one thing about living here, the plethora of things to occupy our time. We've got to shop, and feed ourselves and work out, and get the job done generally, and heck we simply do not have a shortage of things to do.

Heck, me and Lana took the bikes out on a trail, so we missed some of the movies...

Perhaps though, maybe we need to look at things from the perspectives of "wants to" and "needs to". When it comes time to support the arts, maybe that should be something we "need to" do. We manage to be athletic supporters, (I've always loved that joke) as there is no shortage of decal Eagle's heads or giant red letter "P"'s on the backs of cars around here, and Political Supporters, as there is no shortage of Obama/Palin stickers on the backs of cars around here. (Did you ever think you'd see those two names separated by a slash in the same sentence in your life? Yea me neither...) And you know you won't find argument in me that we are all supporters of our kids. Especially the ones that are on the honor roll, although God help me I can't find any bumper stickers that say "My kid is just your average kid, and he's great anyway!"

So we, Americans, and West Chesterarians, specifically, (I think that's right) at the beginning of the 3rd Millennium, do we have time for patronage of the arts? Now I know we are not all DiMedici's or Rockefellars, around here, and we can't pay out of our own pockets to commission works of art, be they sculptures or paintings or arias or amphitheaters, but we really should find some time in our busy schedule and treat ourselves to something like independent films, right? I mean if for nothing else but purely selfish reasons, why not entertain ourselves? The beauty of it is though, is through the act of entertaining yourselves for a couple of hours, you support people who are involved in telling stories through the medium of film. Through that, ideas are communicated, alternates points of view are shared, minds are changed, and can't this only be a good thing?

I managed to catch 3 different blocks of the Film Festival and enjoyed each one. There were on average 7 or so small films within the block of films running anywhere from 3 minutes to 15 minutes in length. The diversity was definitely there, Polish, Jewish, Israeli, Women, African American, Dutch, Chinese and of course French subtitled films made appearances. (You can't have a pretentious film festival without something French in there!) Honestly though, "Alter Ego" and "Le Hobby" both excellent movie shorts and hardly pretentious.

Oh did I mention we even got to vote for our favorite movie in the block that we watched? Thing of it is though, I felt a bit like Homer Simpson in the episode where Springfield has a film festival, and he votes for the movie, "Man gets hit in groin by football" in so much that I pretty much went for the obviously funny (but with heart) movies.

Heck and where else, after watching a movie, can you turn around in your seat and ask the director or the producer of one of the films you just watched a question as to how they made it?

I think maybe, and here's my two scents, both smelling good of course, is that a way to involve the West Chester community more is to, well, involve the West Chester community more? If Sundance has it's Slamdance, than why couldn't we have a Slam Chester film festival tie in? How about we grab our home movie cameras and make a few, few minute shorts? Invite the college kids to enter, keep them from drinking for more than 20 minutes anyway, (if you believe some of the people around here that that's what they are all about) Test our talents and entertain our neighbors, why not? Everyone a star or a writer/director for a day.

I'm sure there's probably some issue about releases and Unions and such that I'm not aware of that would play into this thing, but still, if you don't want to make a movie, can't you at least watch one?