October 11-18, 2007
Atlanta, Georgia

• Attendance
• Opening Night
• The Films
• Projection Problems
• Closing Night
• Awards

by Jay Blodgett

 Closing Night - RuPaul

It was closing night for Out On Film, IMAGE Film and Video's annual LGBT film festival here in Atlanta. Executive Director, Gabe Wardell launched the evening by recognizing the sponsors and then introducing the staff of IMAGE, which it is sort of surprising to find out, that only FIVE people pull these festivals together! After taking care of 'the housekeeping', Wardell (whose introduction clocked in at a pithy four minutes, as opposed to his record breaking nine minutes on Wednesday night!) then introduced the special guests of the evening: Starrbooty director Mike Ruiz and it's STAR, RuPaul. RuPaul was stunningly dressed, as would be expected, and took over the evening from there on out, as would ALSO be expected! After a few exceptionally brief comments about how offended we were about to be. (Heh! Go ahead and shock me!)

STARRBOOTY (dir. Mike Ruiz, US, 2007, 83 mins.) RuPaul says: "The goal here was to make an exploitation film that was part Russ Meyer, John Waters and "The Naked Gun" and we succeeded." Well, the creation of exploitation or as I affectionately refer to as "schlock" is as delicate an art as intentionally creating "camp." The greatest pieces of 'camp' were created by magnificent accident.

I believe the same thing holds true for "schlock", for the most part. Russ Meyer and John Waters produced some of the best examples of exploitation and schlock by taking the 'art' seriously. They did not walk on to the set with the intention of goofing around and making fun of the cinematic form they work in.

That slight difference in attitude is what keeps Starrbooty from being an 'instant cult classic'. Don't get me wrong here. I had a good number of laughs and recognized the homages and caught most (if not all) the inside cinematic jokes and references. However, it is a pastiche to a form that is itself a mock-up of cinematic form and style. That concept-on-top-of-a-concept is what trips the film up.

All of this is in reference to the screenplay and the direction of Mike Ruiz. Ruiz has established himself as an accomplished fashion photographer, given that his claim to 'gay film fame' is the evil boyfriend in the nearly exploitive Latin Boys Go To Hell. He and editor Spencer Schilly (whose excellent drama, The Houseboy was featured at OOF earlier this week) have cut together an excellently paced and, at times, visually spectacular piece in Starrbooty. There might be a couple of segments that could have been whittled down, if not deleted entirely (i.e., the 'fashion show'), although even they were executed quite competently.

What is nearly flawless is the performance of RuPaul, as well as a few of his supporting cast.

RuPaul and Ruiz's Q&A after the film was amusing without being overly informative, but that was most likely the fault of the questions. The DVD was on sale at the theater for an autograph session after the screening.

From there, the evening progressed to WETBar for a fairly simple reception and a chance to compare notes with other festgoers and bask in the glam-glory of RuPaul and Company.

 Awards

Out on Film has no juried competitions; however, there are audience awards for feature and short. From the 2,900 attendees, the audience award for Best Feature went to Whirlwind (dir. Richard Lemay) and the Best Short went to Dandelion Falls (dir. Lauren Wolkstein).

Personally, the short, Getting Lucky, blew me away, though Dandelion Falls was perhaps the most beautifully shot and edited of the entries at the fest! Of the features, I was not necessarily blown away by any of them, but Whirlwind punched a lot of personal 'buttons', so it gets credit for that!

NOTE: As a matter of record, personal or otherwise, and to give a more complete picture of what was programmed for this year's Out On Film, I recap in detail all the features and shorts I screened at "Life with Movies and Maxxxxx."