Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Intoxicating Sauce

Moviesauce Film Festival
Gotta love the pinked out site that is moviesauce.org.

Click through then try to halt your flip flops from flapping to Robinson Film Center this Friday and Saturday.

Hunter Carter and Evan Falbaum created the film festival in 2005. To chart its evolution just frisk this blog. Tickets remain affordable. $7 a program or $30 for the entire affair (5 whole programs).

Guest Editor's note: Since I'm at the helm while Trudeau sculls along on a delicate internal adventure, I will add how super modern SB Land would be if everyone upgraded their texting plans so festival goers could twitter.com their way through. Interactive film goers? Watch out SXSW. On the other hand this opens for discussion -- is it rude to text during a flick?

9 comments:

ltlrat said...

Moviesauce officially thinks it's rude to text during films.

Look for the 5 different "movie theater etiquette" spots before each film on annoying things not to do during movies.

Anonymous said...

Haul not halt? Halt would mean we're not going :(

Katee Blayne said...

Anonymous, I think that the word "try" was meant as a challenge rather than, say, a direction. If you re-read the sentence and put "try" in italics, it will probably make more sense. :)

"Click through, then try to halt your flip-flops from flapping to Robinson Film Center this Friday and Saturday."

Unknown said...

Evan - all this has me researching the onset of texting in movies. I feel a post coming on over at my home blog. It's an interesting move in social media. I see where Sundance Film Festival 08 used the ChaCha text service.

anonymous and Katee Blayne - Sorry if I wasn't clear. I think Katee Blayne covered it.

Anonymous said...

What's up with Trudeau?

Jon Schleuss said...

People will embrace technology that benefits them. While I feel it is rather rude to text during a movie, I am appalled at how rude it is to pay for a crappy film sans post-refund. I'm not saying any of the movies will be bad, rather that it's a little uppity to "enforce" a rule on paying customers.

But then again, I love the french! Silence! the show is starting!

ltlrat said...

@Schleuss: Well, what's "bad" is completely subjective. Certainly the Moviesauce staff don't think any of the films are bad, so hypothetically it would be a very difficult argument for a refund. If people could get refunds for "bad" movies, then anyone could suggest a film was bad just so that they could see it for free (and believe me most people would). There are plenty of bad films I've seen at mega-plexes that I wish I could have gotten my money back for.

And rules are always being enforced on paid customers. Just because you pay for a service or entertainment doesn't mean you can act however you want. If you pay to go to an Opera and you run around screaming, expect to be kicked out...even though you paid.

That being said we don't "enforce" any rules. The etiquette "rules" are suggested and are in comical tone (as will become evident when you see the spots before the films). Just like how pretty much all theaters now say to silence your cell phones but most people don't. It's about being respectful to the other members of the audience and in the case of a fest where each film is shown once and none of them are likely to hit DVD (and if so not likely to be at Best Buy or on Neflix), I think it's even more important to be respectful of the viewing experience.

And if that's not enough some of the filmmakers will be present. So you will potentially be offending the people who are really providing your entertainment and that's just bad manners.

@Kathryn: Services like ChaCha make a lot of sense at massive fests like Sundance where a lot of work is put into helping people find their way (literally with bus schedules, which you have to live by at sundance) because the fest is spread all over Park City (and even outside of it) and with everything that goes on at Sundance going on, people need help figuring things out. There's a lot of overlap too with film screenings so a lot is always going on at any given time.

What you end up seeing as far as people communicating about the films that show there are a lot of people hanging out in dedicated "filmmaker lounges". When the whole city is taken over by a fest, you're surrounded by people to talk to about movies (great bus conversations) and texting (outside of personal messaging) then usually becomes dedicated to figuring out logistics about how to do things.

But even with ChaCha, they were an official sponsor of the fest (I have a free hat) and wouldn't have gotten any use had they not been able to advertise on festival materials or be "connected" and be able to have up to date movie info and everything. That kind of thing could have potential with Moviesauce if it's incorporated earlier, but as a last minute endeavor relies solely on the audience adopting it for themselves.

Plus, Moviesauce is certainly a small fest right now and everything happens in one place and even in only one theater at that one place. And the RFC is a perfect venue for after movie discussion and everything so I guess I really don't see a texting service taking off at our fest. It's kind of flattering when looking at Sundance and other big fests and thinking it might could work, but in reality I think we're too small for it to make much of an impact this year.

I'm really not trying to disuade it, even though I know it sounds like it, it's just that from what I've seen I don't think much will happen with it at MSFF.

Tour de Shreveport said...

anynomous - Thank you for asking. See the new post for information how Trudeau is doing.

Schleuss and Evan - my daughter went to see Lost night at RFC. She admits to texting her friend who was just one row away. That's mind boggling. I'd never thought of texting someone in the same room...

And yes as a small artist or organization if you/we can figure out how to contact your customers directly in a low cost no cost way won't that translate to more sales?

Unknown said...

Meant to make that last comment under this account. Our ghost hunting tours open this weekend and I'm crazy with multi-tasking. Sorry.