Refested

I wrote a big spiel about Resfest about a week ago but have subsequently managed to lose the piece of paper with my rants scrawled on it. So, in lieu of a real write up, here’s the abridged version and some rambling about music videos.

The Videos

We caught the Wednesday showing of Shorts One, a collection of short films from around the world. Absolute stand out of the bunch was The Raftman’s Razor, a funny and thought-provoking short about two kids obsessing about a comic. Winner Take Steve was hilarious and clever (I had no idea it was actually shot for Nike as part of their “You’re faster than you think” campaign.) I enjoyed What Goes Up Must Come Down much more than I think it deserved, but its Dizzee Rascal stylee beats (is that still called grime hop?) really hit the spot. Nothing else stunned me, Rehearsal was technically well done, Over Time had some very nice 3d and City Paradise felt like it should be a Cibo Matto video clip.

The rest were pretty forgettable. To tell the truth I was quite surprised at the general low quality of entries this year. I’ve seen previous Resfest DVDs and the shorts seemed to be of a generally higher quality that what we saw. I guess they hand-pick the best of the bunch for the discs and, admittedly, we only saw one of the four possible shorts programs.

The Music

Next was an entire reel of music videos from the last couple of years. I knew about three quarters of the songs being played but had only seen one of all the videos previously. The most immediately striking thing was that the two songs I like the most, The Shin’s Pink Bullets and Bloc Party’s Pioneers both had videos I thought were complete and utter trash.

My fave of the bunch was Carpark North’s Human, shot with a bunch of children in the ultra glossy style of alchohol and luxury car commercials. The whole clip looked like a spread from a high-class glamour magazine. The company, Duckling, also did a great Royksopp video (QT, big) and check their showreel for some other neat stuff. Other notable mentions were Interpol’s Evil with a frighteningly emotive muppet, Lemon Jelly’s Shouty Track in a style far removed from most of Airside’s stuff and finally LCD Soundsystem’s Daft Punk Are Playing At My House with an excellent pisstake on Michel Gondry’s classic video for Around the World.

Posted in Silverscreen on Thursday December 8, 2005.