cinequest

[jfb]

For the record, and since I did spend all that time watching movies at Cinequest, here are notes on a few of my favorites (in no special order):

• The Third Monday in October, a wonderful documentary about the 2004 campaign for president... of the student council, at four middle schools across the United States. People are so great.
  
• We Are the Strange, like nothing I've ever seen, with its mix of stop-motion animation, anime action, and old-school 8-bit video games, all animated over three years by one guy from San Jose in his bedroom.
  
• Outsourced, the most conventionally enjoyable movie I saw at the festival, a sweet comedy about a salesman who goes to India to train a replacement to head his company's order fulfillment department.
  

Also of note:

• Everyone Stares: The Police Inside Out, a first-person documentary compiled by Stewart Copeland from miles of Super 8 footage he took while touring with the Police. Plus a fascinating appearance by Copeland himself, which unfortunately I had to leave early, so I don't know how it ended.
  
• Blood Car, a mildly horror-ish comedy about a vegan schoolteacher who, while trying to invent a wheatgrass-powered automobile, accidentally creates instead an engine that runs on human blood. Over the top as a movie, yet nicely understated in its politics. lithiumnature, rent this DVD when it comes out.