Someone needs to give the boys at the Lake County Film Festival a pat on the bum for busting out the funk over on their website. No, really. Go give them a pat. A firm caress, even.
The Lake County Festival is a little affair hosted just outside Chicago and though the full schedule hasn't turned up online yet, they gave us an advance peek. The shorts are definitely the reason to hit this one with the big find, for me anyway, being Lift - a half hour, multi award winning short starring Jean Pierre Jeunet regular Dominique Pinon. Pinon is pure gold in anything he's in - with the possible exception of Alien Resurrection which I like to pretend never happened - and judging from the trailer this one looks to be no exception.For those who can't make it out to Lake County word is that Lift will be screening at the Cinematheque in LA on April 1st with Pinon himself in attendance.
And just because I'm a generous soul who is despairing of Jeunet's short films ever hitting DVD, here's an MPG version of Foutaises (AKA Things I Like, Things I Don't Like), a Jeunet / Pinon short film that is an obvious pre-cursor to the introduction scene in Amelie ... go easy spreading the word on this one. It's a big enough file to kill our bandwidth fast. If any of you tech geeks out there know how to re-encode this thing into a better (i.e. smaller) format, I wouldn't say no ...