Las Vegas Weekly

Dam Short but satisfying

Wrapping up this year’s Dam Short Film Festival

Psyche on Melrose

It's heartening to walk into Boulder City's Boulder Theatre at 3:30 on a Thursday afternoon and see the place at least two-thirds full of people, there to catch a program of documentary short films. This year's sixth edition of the Dam Short Film Festival featured the usual range of genres and subject matter, with more than 100 short films from around the world. As always, there was a program highlighting local films, and awards were handed out based on audience votes.

That documentary block on the first day featured the modest, charming Walla Walla Wiffle, an artful piece about an annual wiffle-ball tournament in Washington state—infinitely superior to the sloppy, misguided advocacy documentary Side Effects, which won the festival's documentary prize.

Friday's comedy program was almost universally strong, with both hilariously deadpan mockumentary Cabbie and meta-Shakespeare movie Hamlet, But You Didn't Hear It From Me ending up with awards at the end of the festival (the former for best comedy, and the latter for the overall audience award). I also liked the goofy My Boyfriend Is a Blimp, which made good use of the ubiquitous Southern California presence of the Goodyear blimp.

The local showcase later that night proved that Nevada filmmakers are becoming increasingly sophisticated when it comes to the technical side of moviemaking, but most of the offerings were still disappointingly muddled from a narrative perspective. The only one that actually grabbed me was Ezekiel Zabrowski and Frank Ippolito's creepy The Growth, a simple one-gag horror piece with excellent makeup effects. The other entries, including prize-winner Kill Order, were either nice-looking duds, or, in the case of the pedantic, interminable Whatever It Takes, complete failures.

Local filmmaker Eddie Deirmenjian's amusingly bizarre Direct to Your Door played the later "Underground" program, but would have been a good companion to The Growth. Later festival highlights included Trolls, with sweetly vulgar kids trying to parse adult sexual habits; Psyche on Melrose, combining therapy with dining in a sitcom-ish idea that the director was already trying to sell to Comedy Central; Whose Dog Is It Anyway?, starring the appealing Sarah Paulson as a reluctant dog owner; and True Beauty This Night, a neat (if obvious) bit of misdirected romance.

At the final screening of award-winners, I marveled at the appeal of the horrifically corny Best Drama winner Slice of Pie, perhaps the mostly insipidly folksy movie I've ever seen, as people chuckled at each of its awful jokes, but I also found even greater appreciation for the dry humor of Cabbie. The festival really did have something for all tastes.