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June 27, 2006

Unburying Hot Chicks

This already ran on MCN as part of my weekend review of the Los Angeles Film Fest, but the other stuff I covered seems to be getting a lot of attention and this doesn't. It's not the best film at the fest, but it is a wonderful project and Chick Tracts (I just bought the entire current collection for under 20 bucks and am looking forward to it arriving on my doorstep) are a great part of Americana. So....

Luke Y Thompson, New Times' tallest, most tattooed, most multi-color haired critic and he told me about the film he was most anticipating on the entire schedule… Hot Chicks.

Somehow, as I was jamming through the online catalog for the festival, I just went right past Hot Chicks. But had I been paying closer attention, I would have been almost as enthusiastic as Luke. The screening was of 9 short films, each based on one of what are known as Chick Tracts. They are those little cartoon booklets that you have probably had handed to you on the streets of some part of town where souls are in need of saving. These mini-comics were all written and drawn by Jack T. Chick. According to his website, over 500 million of these things have been sold to groups and distributed across the globe. 500 million!

My memory is of getting these from Jews For Jesus followers. Others remember other religious groups handing them out. The clever thing is, they are so cheap to purchase (15 cents) that they make an impressive handout. And they are all stories of salvation that end with an admonition to accept Jesus into your life.

So I settled into my seat at The Crest to see the films and quickly found out that the folks who made the films were all friends and had all spurred each other on to make these films over the last 5 or 6 years. Each film has a distinctly different style, including two of the films that were made by the same team. One of these films by Rodney & Syd recreated the Chick Tract "Titanic" using the Jim Cameron film, Titanic. Their second film, based on the tract, Somebody Goofed, was one of my favorite of the nine. They essentially take the drawn images in the Chick Tract and bring them to life in very clever animation.

The films that stuck closest to the tracts were probably my favorites. All of the films adhered to the idea that Chick's words would be the script and that the tracts would serve, to some degree, as storyboards. But styles varied widely. What was fascinating was how each filmmaker (many are first time filmmakers) decided to do their interpretation. For instance, the first film, Bewitched? (by Tim Kirk - Chick Tract), used puppets to tell its story of how television infects the culture. One of the films, Wounded Children (by Todd Hughes - Chick Tract), is based on a tract that has been taken off the market because the morays around child abuse have changed. In that film, the victimized child is played by a mannequin while everyone around him is played by adults. Angels? (by Tommy! - Chick Tract), the story of a rock-n-roll dream attained and then destroying the dreamers, is done in a style best described as post-modern Super 8 by way of Kenneth Anger.

Cleo (by Bryce Ingman - Chick Tract) is a story about a lost dog who narrowly escapes a dog pound needle and somehow, amazingly, its owners see this as God's intervention and it moves them to being born again. Doom Town (by P. David Ebersole - Chick Tract) tells the story of Sodom & Gomorrah. And La Princesita (by Jamie Tolbert Franklin - Chick Tract) tells the story of a sick young girl who desperately wants to go trick-or-treating on Halloween and does and has her soul saved when one of the neighbors drops a Chick Tract into her candy bag.

My favorite of the films, probably because it is most precisely a Chick Tract come to life, was Party Girl, directed by Anonymous. Why anonymous? Because there is some fear that Jack Chick, who is still alive at 82, might get all litigious on their collective asses.

The filmmaker actually gave me permission - after some pleasant harassment - to publish her name. But after seeing how often the Chick Publications sends out cease and desists, I have decided to keep it to myself. She is an actress, remarkably beautiful, very sharp, surprisingly unflinching about the truth, terribly well married and, by amazing coincidence, did a guest spot on a Sunday night primetime TV show that I Tivo'd.

(In another odd showbiz small world coincidence, a guy playing in an old friend's charity poker tourney on Sunday was pitching a local stage show starring this woman's husband. And almost more oddly, I had dinner with this woman's ex-husband just a week ago - and I had never before met this woman or had any social conversation with this man until these two meetings. High school with money indeed!)

I don't know if she has a future as a director based on this short, satirical film but, like I said before… concept is everything on these and, to me, she got the inherent joke of Chick Tracts best of all, so much so that the film could really be seen as a positive and believing take on a Chick Tract if your beliefs went that way.

The bottom line is, this group has no interest in distributing their films for any revenue. (Fact is, very few of them could get clearances on their pre-recorded music or images from other media.) They aren't even posting their films to their website. They screened at LAFF and will show again at Outfest at midnight on July 8. From there, who knows.

Anyway… I am going to go out on a limb and post a short clip from Anonymous' film, Party Girl. It is four pieces from her work, slapped together shoddily via QT Pro. But it'll give you some idea… and it makes me smile like crazy. Here is the 3mg QT file…

Posted by poland at June 27, 2006 10:33 AM

Comments

Posted by: Jeffrey Boam's Doctor at June 27, 2006 02:04 PM

Posted by: David Poland at June 27, 2006 02:07 PM

Posted by: Jeffrey Boam's Doctor at June 27, 2006 02:30 PM

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