Barely Legal Film Festival

A lot of young talent, some raw and some very well done indeed, will be on display this weekend when the Trenton Film Society screens this year’s Not Quite Legal Film Festival. The juried festival showcases shorts by filmmakers between the ages of 14 and 21 who live in or go to school in Jersey. “We have filmmakers from South Orange, Princeton, Lawrence, Pennington, and many of the Monmouth County coastal towns (Manalapan, Manasquan, Red Bank, etc.),” says Cynthia Vandenberg, executive director of the film society. Most of the entrants are 17 or 18 years old, but a few are younger or older.

The eight shorts I saw, about a third of this year’s 23 entries, cover a gamut of adolescent concerns and frustrations. Most combine a vivid point of view with a sly sense of humor, but there’s nothing lighthearted about A Sedated Seat, a three-and-a-half-minute polemic from the past delivered in emphatic present tense by Zoe Pulley, Anni Epstein and Ethan Oberman. The film consists of an unseen DJ P-Cutta, sounding a lot like Amiri Baraka himself, reading Baraka’s 1979 poem Black Art to the soundtrack of J. Cole’s “Grown Simba.” The bleating sax and black-and-white images manipulated almost to the point of abstraction, many of them faded, scratched, and/or superimposed on one another, flicker an edgy accompaniment to the assertive reading of Baraka’s provocative words. (“We want poems that kill. Assassin poems. Poems that shoot guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys and take their weapons, leaving them dead, with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland.”) The film ends about halfway through the poem, leaving us to ponder its startlingly contemporary sneer at “slick half-white politicians.”

The Tiger Beat Monologues is a well-written, well acted, nicely shot spoof of our voracious star-making machinery and the fame-starved wannabes who provide so much of its fodder. After a wry voiceover setting up the situation, the camera adopts the point of view of the unseen interviewer, watching former child star Freddy Gallo make a desperate bid to get back a little piece of the spotlight. Director Travis Maiuro, who plays Gallo, has something of the young Michael Keaton about him, getting steadily more outrageous as he ingests ever more inappropriate substances in a trendy restaurant (he winds up inhaling a nostrilful of Elmer’s Glue) while talking fatuously about his climb to semi-non-obscurity and back. Maiuro, a Bordentown Township native who told the Times of Trenton that his confidence as a filmmaker was boosted when he had a short accepted in the 2009 Not Quite Legal festival, had an entry in last year’s as well, which won the Best Cinematography award. His cinematography is handsome and intelligently done here too, the film’s bright, soft light and blown-out backgrounds highlighting Gallo’s purple shirt and childishly wide blue eyes.

Meghan Kaltenbach, another of last year’s Not Quite Legal winners (she got the Best Short Narrative Comedy award) is back with a confidently witty commentary on the hipster trend that has migrated from the bars of Brooklyn to the high schools of New Jersey. In a droll series of short takes, “Under the Undercuts” captures students as they talk about how you can tell who’s a hipster and why no hipster would ever be so unhip as to admit to being one.

”Simple Life Decisions” is the story of a new girl in school who tries to fit in by following the twisted lead of a bullying mean girl (played by writer-director Hope MacKenzie). The dialogue is too on-the-nose, the acting too stiff, and the sets too lifeless (there’s never anyone in the background, even in scenes shot in what is supposed to be the middle of a school day) for the realism MacKenzie seems to be aiming for. But the appealing Carly Deeter, who plays the new girl, pulls us in and earns her happy ending.

Andrea Massaro’s “What’s Your Fortune” is a nicely told joke that, like the fortune cookie of its title, contains a pointed little message. Kira DiSomma’s “We Used To Be Friends” and “Dark of the Night” by Alexander Winchell, who won the Best Documentary award in last year’s festival, feel more like music videos than narrative shorts. But both create and capture distinctive shards of time and space despite being virtually plotless and wordless, and that’s not as easy as it may look.

Written for TimeOFF