This weekend’s Las Vegas Film Festival is a wrap, and it has easily topped last year’s fest. The entire weekend was teeming with events, whether it was Michael Madsen’s Q&A panel, a pool party gone topless at the Artisan, or the fact that many of the films’ casts made the trip to celebrate and participate. I moved here at the tail end of 2009 so I never experienced CineVegas, but it appears the LVFF has worked out any kinks to become the premier event.  The Hilton seemed a bit more accommodating this year as well. I saw too many films to remember, but here are some standouts:

The Roe Effect
Teenage girls Dawn and Sam are in love with each other, and are the kind of cool looking kids that most of us never were. Dawn is being eyed-up by another classmate, but she’s being raped by her father. A pregnancy results, and Dawn can’t proceed at the clinic without the signature of the father. She hooks up with her unknowing boy-admirer at a party, in order to provide this legitimate authorization, but it’s at the cost of losing Sam (who witnesses the act). The cold wintery cinematography only reenforces the sadness. Director Kiel Adrian Scott won the HBO Short Film Competition with this brutal gem.

Vice
Filmed with a budget of around 4 million, this was a full feature-length. The aesthetic was dark & dirty, shot by Andrzej Seku?a (of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction fame). Speaking of RD, Michael Madsen plays a drunkish cop that channels the same sort of trigger-happiness that he did while playing Mr Blonde. After a wired-drug deal gone bad, he accidentally shoots and kills a hooker while chasing a fleeing dealer and gets his partner (Daryl Hannah) to plant a gun on the body. During the ensuing bust, 40 kilos of heroin is stolen from the crime scene. The escaped gangsters are not too happy about this, and begin picking-off cops one-by-one until they turn against each other. The culprit is the least likely and suffice to say, there is no happy ending.

Small Change
A Chavvy Irish single mom is working a dead-end job, and plays slots out of boredom. They soon become a daily activity for her, and her buckets of coins are soon enough recycled by the machines instead of happily collected. Things come to a head when school is abruptly cancelled for the day, and her gambling is interrupted by babysitting. There’s only one thing to do in this situation: take the kids to a run-down Brightonesque amusement park and abandon them while you ka-ching! It doesn’t work out too well when she loses her Christmas budget to the one-armed-bandit, and her payout is a (soon to be angry) neighbor’s kid who’s just pissed herself.

$50K in 5 Days
A crew of Gainesville college students decide to ditch a formal education in favor of learning the ropes online, playing Full Tilt Poker. They turn the living area of their apt into a full-on situation control center, with makeshift desks,computers, and monitors filling every square foot. In order to prove to themselves (and more likely, their parents) that Poker requires more strategic skill than luck, they make a pact to pool together and raise 50K in 5 days of marathon tournament sessions. They loose early, but rebound to almost double their goal, coming in at 97K in the end. Director Bryan Shay met one of the players while touring the country’s baseball stadiums, and planned and shot the Documentary in a few short months. The insight into these guys’ intellect, witty humor, and insider poker language (which is decoded and explained throughout the film) holds the real value. The entire cast was at the premiere, and since online poker has been shut down by Uncle Sam (for now) they’ve found themselves living in Vegas, taking the online experience to real tables.

$lowdown
Rainy night. Driving. A businessman recieves a text-message saying that his company has failed. Accident. Someone Dies. A homeless man (Ali Saam) shows up to a bank every morning to admire a kind and attractive worker named Angela (Sidney Hunt). A co-worker looses his job due to bank “restructuring”. He comes back. With a gun. The homeless man takes the bullet for Angela, and his life’s flashback reveals the deep connection he has with her. He’s the former businessman, and she (literally – in a transplant) has his wife’s heart. As a designer, I must point out that the titles and credits had nicely designed typography to boot.

Let’s hope that the LVFF continues to raise the bar for next year. I think that moving it forward to July helped a bit, having little competition with the beginning-of-summer bacchanal parties that occupy much of late May and June. Props also go out to the casts that showed-up in full to do Q&A’s (50K guys) and just looked damn good doing it (I’m talking to you, cast of $lowdown).

FIN.

The Cast and Director of $lowdown

The Cast and Director of $50K in 5 Days

$50K in 50 days, $lowdown, Film, Las Vegas, las Vegas film festival, Las Vegas Hilton, michael madsen, small change, the roe effect, vice Culture, Entertainment