Gorilla Cinema Success—The 1st Annual (hopefully) Gorilla Tango Film Festival went smoothly this last weekend. The festival featured three blocks of short film from filmmakers around the state. When the voting settled, Ryan Denmark's “Date 1.0”came out in first place, followed by Cyndi Trissel's “Phone Friends” in second place. Matt Page's “Shootin' for Love” and Jason Witter's “One Hour Conspiracy” tied for third. Matt Page's “Dial the Devil” locked down fourth place, while Phillip Hughes' “Yellowville” rounded out the top five. Congratulations to all the filmmakers who participated. Thanks to all the folks at Gorilla Tango for supporting local film. And a big “muchas gracias” to all the audience membes who came to check out the local talent.
Reel World
Midnight Movies Go Online—If you're a fan of Alibi's Midnight Movie Madness screenings (and you damn well should be), you can now log onto the brand new Midnight Movie forums at burningparadise.net. Burning Paradise, Albuquerque's coolest cult video store, has greatly expanded its presence on the Web, and now features all sorts of entertaining Internet thingamajigs. (Like, for example, the “Ask Gamera!” advice column.) Since Burning Paradise has been the prize sponsor for Midnight Movies since the dawn of creation, it's only natural to locate our new and improved message boards on Burning Paradise's forum. Simply log on to burningparadise.net and click on “The Boards.” From there, you can find out what Midnight Movies are coming up, see trailers for the films, chat about past screenings with other Midnight fans and even suggest movies you'd like the Alibi to bring to the Guild Cinema. The more input, the better.
Reel World
And the Oscar Goes To …—Oscar nominations are still a ways off, but we already know what films will be competing for the Best Animated Feature. This year, 10 feature-length animated films were released in America: Chicken Little, Gulliver's Travel, Hookwinked, Howl's Moving Castle, Madagascar, Robots Steamboy, Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, Valiant and Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit. According to Academy rules, three films can be nominated for the top honors in a year in which at least eight but fewer than 16 animated films were released. Hookwinked will hit theaters in December and apparently no one has ever heard of Gulliver's Travel (it's not even listed on the IMDB), but based on the films that I have seen this year, I've got to be rooting for Hayao Miyazaki's underrated epic, Howl's Moving Castle. The 78th Annual Academy Awards will be officially announced on Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2006. The Awards ceremony will take place on Sunday, March 5.
