Last Night
Northwest Film Forum Winner, Bummer Summer, Showing This Week
Last night, I went to the Northwest Film Forum to see Bummer Summer
, a low-budget film by a first-time filmmaker from Olympia (via NYU film school), Zach Weintraub. (The film won the Northwest Film Forum's Local Sightings festival last year, their annual local film contest.)
It's a minimalist movie in the mumblecore vein (filmed along the summery, beautiful Washington coast and in the streets of suburban Olympia), where the small scenes, like a book of short poems, hit the big issues the characters are scared to actually talk about. In this instance, two brothers—an older, self-assured recent college grad and a shy, mop-topped high school moper—meander around the same girl, a happy-go-lucky hippie who's a little lost herself.
The humidity is palpable in both the black and white shots of late-night kitchens and back-seat makeout sessions—and in the coming-of-age dialogue.
The film is screening at NWFF all week.
It's a minimalist movie in the mumblecore vein (filmed along the summery, beautiful Washington coast and in the streets of suburban Olympia), where the small scenes, like a book of short poems, hit the big issues the characters are scared to actually talk about. In this instance, two brothers—an older, self-assured recent college grad and a shy, mop-topped high school moper—meander around the same girl, a happy-go-lucky hippie who's a little lost herself.
The humidity is palpable in both the black and white shots of late-night kitchens and back-seat makeout sessions—and in the coming-of-age dialogue.
The film is screening at NWFF all week.
