Once in a while, hard work and sheer luck manage to help each other out for a change, and we might just find ourselves on the verge of realizing a long-hoped for dream. Of course, this happens about as often as a total solar eclipse, so if you ever find yourself in this position do your best to seize your dream with both hands and try not to gloat too much as you’re scampering gleefully away. In the short film Real Artists, Sophia (Tiffany Hines) is in exactly this enviable position, having earned an interview for her dream job at Semaphore Studios. She longs to be an animator, and for that this is THE studio to work for. And right now they’re developing Return to Mythos, sequel to their huge hit Mythos, so this is the perfect time to join the team.
Sophia’s interviewer is Anne Palladon (Tamlyn Tomita), whose work Sophia has always admired. Even better, Anne is impressed by Sophia’s work and is anxious to get another woman on board. This couldn’t be a more promising start, and you can almost see Sophia telling herself not to mess this up. But there’s a lot hiding behind that non-disclosure agreement she had to sign, and the job may not be quite the sort of dream she thinks it is.
Hines is perfectly cast as the hopeful, idealistic Sophia getting her first look behind the curtain, while Tomita shines as the successful woman in a man’s world. (Your MCND fact of the day: women hold only about 20% of animation industry jobs.) But where the movie really hits home is in its predictions for the not too distant future of animation and movie-making, where it may just be frighteningly accurate. The film quietly puts some unsettling notions into your mind, notions that will haunt you long after the film ends. The real artists behind everything aren’t at all who you expect them to be.
Butterfly kisses are an affectionate little gesture that involves fluttering your eyelashes against someone else’s skin, the idea being to mimic the quick, gentle movements of a butterfly’s wings. I always thought the phrase referred to a series of tiny little actual kisses, so I learned something from the movie Butterfly Kisses. Of course, I have now also learned to associate the phrase with ghostly stalking, torture, and gruesome death, so it will never again make me think of anything even remotely affectionate, but hey, at least I know the dictionary definition. I guess that counts as a win, right?
When you stare into the abyss…
Back in 2004, film student Sophia Crane (Rachel Armiger) is working on her senior project with cameraman Feldman (Reed Delisle), who seems to have no first name. They’ve chosen to do a documentary on local urban legend Peeping Tom, aka Mr. Blink. As with any good supernatural antagonist, there’s a ritual to summon him, and it’s a doozy: you have to go to the old Ilchester Railway bridge and stare down through the neighboring tunnel for exactly one hour, from midnight to one am. And they mean stare, without blinking. There are a couple of people out there who hold records for not blinking for an hour or so (though none of these are Guinness records), but you have to be some sort of staring prodigy to pull this off. Considering this feat is almost certainly most often attempted by teenagers with nothing to do on a Friday night, you would think that just not getting bored and wandering off would be enough of a challenge, but apparently not.
Our intrepid filmmakers can’t find anyone who can manage the staring, but they’re determined to tempt fate for the sake of their art. Reasoning that a camera lens is analogous to the human eye, they set up Feldman’s camera on the bridge at midnight and let it do the staring for them. But it’s only when they review the footage later that they realize they’ve caught something eerie.
Meanwhile, in 2015, struggling filmmaker Gavin York (Seth Adam Kallick) is supporting his family as a wedding videographer until his mother-in-law (Janise Whelan) finds a shoebox full of Sophia and Feldman’s old tapes and gives them to Gavin. The box is clearly labeled “Don’t Watch”, and whoever wrote that clearly knows nothing of human psychology because that’s the surest way to get anyone to watch, and Gavin is no exception. In fact, he quickly becomes compelled to edit them and show them to the world, and prove that everything on the tapes is absolutely real while he’s at it. But no one else seems nearly as fascinated with the discovery, and Gavin becomes increasingly frustrated and angry. He’s spent almost his last dime on a film crew (led by writer/director Erik Kristopher Myers as himself) to track his progress on the editing as well as his attempts to discover the fate of the student filmmakers, and he can’t fathom why the world isn’t falling at his feet over the project.
So this is a film within a film about the making of a film, though despite this potentially confusing premise it’s not hard to keep the storylines straight. Where it really turns meta and strange is when you try to work out whether or not Feldman and Sophia were making a documentary or a narrative film disguised as a documentary. Further complicating this issue is the inclusion of various paranormal experts as themselves, like Matt Lake, author of several books in the Weird U.S. series, Andy Wardlaw of Finding Bigfoot, and Eduardo Sanchez of Blair Witch Project fame.
Then there’s Gavin himself — he’s clearly fixated, but is he truly delusional or just desperate to make a name for himself? Kallick is thoroughly convincing as a man who’s barely holding himself together for much of the movie, though in many ways it’s also his performance that holds the movie itself together. There are strong hints of a overarching conspiracy to cover up any proof of Peeping Tom’s existence, though it seems far more vast than it needs to be considering that all the photographic proof was lost in some random basement for a decade. And at one point, Peeping Tom seems to break his own rules to keep the plot going. But overall the film expertly manages its sometimes convoluted premise and keeps the viewer riveted. From jump scares to expert debunking of the tapes, Butterfly Kisses weaves a delicate, teasing web of creepy suspense that would do Mr. Blink proud. Watch it, and you just might be afraid to close your eyes again.
Even if your teen years weren’t especially rough, they were probably still pretty awkward. High school kids have to make decisions that can effect the rest of their lives, because those are the kinds of decisions everyone is equipped to make at seventeen. College is expensive and not necessarily for everyone in the first place, yet everyone tells you that you have to have some higher education. And then there are other, equally pressing problems, like being one of the cool kids — or, as in the short film Beauty Queen, being one of the pretty kids.
The camera never lies. Or does it?
Christina (Christina Goursky) isn’t not pretty, if you’ll pardon the double negative, but neither does she look like a model the way all the other girls in her class seem to, and this bothers her. In a truly spectacular backfire, her gender studies class seems to have made her much more conscious of her looks after nearly every other student in the class says they’d rather be called pretty than smart. Even one of the guys agrees, though the teacher (Sally Eidman) promptly scolds him. I’m not sure this particular teacher really gets the point of a gender studies class.
Anyway, Christina has decided that she’d rather be called pretty than smart, too, and throws herself into the deep end by trying out for modeling jobs, which is rather like trying to take up jogging by entering a marathon. Her dad David (Timothy J. Cox) couldn’t be more proud of her, or more encouraging, but dads generally tend to think their daughters are both pretty and smart no matter what, and Christina is searching for something more objective — and searching in all the wrong places.
One way or another we can all relate to Christina’s quest — everyone needs reassurance about themselves sometimes — and the movie is quietly convincing, not to mention sweet and touching. David is the dad every girl wants, but now it’s nearly time for Christina to head off to college and out into the world, and it’s only natural for her to have some last-minute nerves. There’s a delightful father-daughter bond between the two that helps keep Christina grounded, and Goursky creates a realistic character that pulls the viewer into her story. It’s a satisfying slice of life that might need to be required viewing in your next gender studies class.
