Pothole Pictures

Pothole Pictures hosted a film festival Saturday in the picture-book downtown of Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts. The festival was a pilot, if you will. Organizers hope to make of it an annual event.

The films shown Saturday were a mixed assortment. The old classification of fiction/non-fiction rather breaks down when one is confronted, for example, with a claymation take on the Battle of Trafalgar. There was only one movie bearing the label "documentary," -- it was an awful piece of tripe about why co-operation is good, so competitive sports are bad because somebody loses. Or something like that.

There was also a movie on "tomboys": the concept, some of the girls it's used to describe, and the women they've become. This one wasn't labelled a documentary, but I suppose it could have been. At any rate, the anti-competition movie and the tomboys movie might have made an appropriate pairing had they been played back-to-back. If there's anything that can fairly be said about the girls/women it described, it is that they were/are intensely competitive.

Backing up, though.

The very first film shown had a neat conceit at its core -- a young man who has evidently just suffered romantic disappointment enters a coffee shop and encounters there the ghosts of Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. The filmmakers obviously wanted us to see this as a scene in which those deceased poets provided him with encouragement and advice. It doesn't work out, though, because the lines of recited poetry sound too much like recited poetry. The conceit of the film demands that they be delivered in a more conversational style than these actresses could deliver.

Still, there was much better stuff than this. There was an original take on the Mad Hatter's tea party, and a hilarious send-up of "The Da Vinci Code" set in New England and called (of course) The Norman Rockwell Code.

Now that was a conceit that really came off in the execution.