there were only dan and elias for game day today. i arrived with my mannequin dvd which we played in the background. 
after seeing it again with other people, i think mannequin is a bad movie but i still love it, it's my cinematic sacred cow. we played tikal, this mayan archaelogically themed game, followed by that art betting game and that castle building game (i'm bad with game names). that castle game (torres?) had a very sophisticated scoring method where you multiplied the square footage of your castle with how many floors it has. in practice it wasn't so bad, but i'd be lying if i said my eyes didn't glaze over when i first heard about how things were scored. numbers seem to be a big part of all board games i think. my favorite games are the ones without too many numbers or complex mathmetical computations.
 tikal (2nd place) |
 art betting game (2nd place) |
 castle building game (last place) |
john was running errands all day, and when he came back to the apartment after 6pm, i drove everyone to the coolidge corner for the second and last night of the found footage film festival. eliza called to inform us she's be able to make the 8pm showing only, while eric beacom would come for the 10pm show. like yesterday, we got our own tickets and also tickets for the missing party members, and then had dinner at zaftigs again. i had the challah french toast because from the description it looked pretty delicious, but after i finished eating it (thick in sweet maple syrup with strips of bacon) i felt pretty lethargic and full. after dinner we returned to the theatre, where we went into the video screening room to stake out the best seats, which turned out to be the same seats we sat in last night.
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eliza arrived (as advertised!) and we began watching the first showing, american sentiment curated by sid varma, a collection of educational films and television commercials from the 40's-60's. technically the most well done found footage we've seen, with good editing, but i found the subject matter to be the least interesting. 
that kind of stuff is kind of fun in that it's like seeing this alien america that in no shape or form resembles america today, but it's hard to relate to because it seems like such a distant period. a lot of sexism, the role of women is basically to be housewives, and a lot of televised cigarette commercials, which we don't see anymore. thank god, because all those commercials seem so sleazy. "thinking man's filter, smoking man's taste." advertisement those days were shameless, i think at least now ads are so much better in terms of being sensitive to everyone (non-offensive, at least to some degree, printed cigarette and alcohol ads are still big offenders in my book) and ads today also seem more honest. so yeah, parts of it were humorous, but it wasn't a stomping your feet on the floor kind of hilarity. i figured eliza, her first time at the found footage film festival, but not be too impressed with the selection and call it an evening. so i was surprised when she opted to stay for the next showing at 10pm, amateur night.
amateur night was curated by clinton mcclung, who we now realized from last night's moments with dora is a video exhibitionist, finding pleasure in exposing audiences to long snippets of footage of an inappropriately frank and sexually explicit nature. if we thought that tonight couldn't be any worse than last night's showing in terms of videos of a sick and twisted nature, then we thought wrong. tonight, multiple tasteless homeruns flew out of the coolidge corner ballpark, my friends! eric beacom showed up (as advertised!) and four of elias' friends (ex-gf, ex-gf's bf, two other ri friends, none of which he formally introduced us to) came as well, sitting in the the row directly in front of us. also in the audience i saw kim (forgot her last name), this girl i went to high school with (i didn't say hi to her, she probably wouldn't recognize me), and yun pang, this intern that worked at my first post-graduation job (he might've recognized me and i tried to get his attention but he was too cool to look, so i'm not sure if he knew who i was and just didn't want to recognize).
the itinerary of amateur night in super-abbreviated format (btw, the theme of these footages are edited versions of bad movies and their trailers, plus a few surprises thrown in here and there):
| the car trailer; toy town "cop killin'"; the slow-paced movie amateur night featuring 80's impersonators of prince, boy george, stevie wonder, and michael jackson plus some hypnotic background music; fabio: a time for romance (who knew chess was such an aphrodisiac! who knew pirate fabio could write, let alone play chess! i've never seen so much manboobs by the way); naked playboy centerfolds (twins no less) meet a satyr in sorceress; the sybian - a sexual aid device for women that looks like a dildofied pummel horse (comes with its own wooden cabinet for easy storage); arnold schwarzenegger fights a bear and receive a happy wide eyed look from a lady friend when he removes his shirt in hercules in new york; horror movie trailers; the kitten and the ducks; santa claus meets the ice cream bunny featuring an early montage of kids engaging in dangerous activities but freeze framing it right before we see the payoff and cutting to another dangerous scene; captive planet; abbreviated star crash featuring a scantily clad interstellar warrior woman (she's the only one who can save the galaxy, did you know?), her sassy phallic headed robot sidekick "L", and david hasselhoff wearing mascara; the venus 2 - electric penis pump with actual full frontal demonstrations (yes, more than one demonstration) of how it works and how you clean it up afterwards; rock n roll nightmare, big hair rocker lures satan through his song lyrics and gives el diablo a severe beat down |
amateur night was definitely stomping your feet kind of funny although bits of it were really gross (um...sybian...um...venus 2). i'm not sure eliza knew what she was getting herself into when she agreed to check out the festival. i don't think any of us knew what we were ourselves getting into. she didn't stay for the third and last showing (4 hours of found footage was already a lot for her), the best of a/v geeks part 2. the actual film footages (as opposed to the videos) were the best that tonight had to offer. 
this included an lsd case study, oscar meyer movie equating working in the hot dog factory with being part of a high school marching band, vd attack plan created by disney, little girls who love fur coats (one of my favorites!) and finally the abc of sex eduation for trainables, trainable being an euphemism for mentally handicapped people. not only was that last film stomp your feet funny, but i was also crying from laughing so hard. narrated by a man who beared a slight resemblance to george costanza's father, the camera would zoom in on his face until it completely filled the screen. the audience got interactive when we all repeated the various other names for the word "penis" in sync with the movie instructor. crammed with various examples of how an untrained trainable might manifest himself/herself sexually at the wrong place and the wrong time. a mother walks into a mentally handicapped boy masturbating in bed, another trainable strokes the man next to him at the urinal, and yet another woman repeatedly touches herself during art class. plus a lot more! you just had to be there! i will never forget these films! i have enough material to keep on laughing until the next found footage film festival!