SFist Watches: Evil Aliens
There's only one show to see this weekend, and it's playing tonight at 10:30 at the Roxie.
We wrote about seeing Evil Aliens last Saturday at the (Yet) Another Hole in the Head festival, and we f**cking loved it. IndieFest patron Mike Skurko raves about it on the IndieBlog, IMDB commenters are going nuts about it, and we promise you will too. This is how serious we are about this: we are going to the show tonight, and we are paying -- with money -- to see it again.
Now, this is the part where, if we were actually good journalists, we would tell you about the great interview we had with Evil Aliens director Jake West. Bruce Fletcher, IndieFest programming director and friend of SFist offered to get us together after Sunday's screenings for an interview. But after talking to Jake for five minutes, we were having so much fun that we were doing a crap job of it, because ake is so fun and cool and just loves movies so much that we were actually just having a really great conversation with him, instead of being a good film writer.
We had a crisis of conscience at this point, and wondered "What Would Jackson Do?", and with that, we got Jake and ourselves more beer. Way more beer.
We can tell you this: Jake is a visionary director with the sense of practicality few other artists of his level have managed to adopt. With a background in editing and production, he doesn't fall prey to the errors less seasoned auteurs are so prone to, such as falling in love with your own work so much you can't cut it, or losing yourself in a work that's inaccessable to an audience (to name some failings we saw in other works this Festival). With an encyclopedic knowledge of film (he owns over 3000 movies, he told us, which makes us eager to either rob or housesit for him), he has honed an ability to fuse homage and reference in a way that avoids rip-off territory for new school allusive synthesis.
Pretty soon other folks from the Fest came up to join us: Holt Boggs, star of The Prodigy; Jeremy Kasten, director of All Souls Day; Mark Altman, writer and producer of All Souls Day; and William Kaufman, writer and director of The Prodigy. There was no point even pretending to be a professional, so we proceeded to hop pubs so we could talk a little more.
On the way over, we got to talk with IndieFest founder Jeff Ross, who was exactly how we'd imagined he'd be, and we love him for it, despite what some folks (Bruce) might say.
After more drinking, a lot of OTR gossip, and Holt's politically incorrect but very funny impressions, we found ourselves at Baghdad Cafe for whatever you call the meal you eat when you have to get up for work in three hours. We may not be at all professional, but we had a really, really good time. In the cab on the way home, we reflected on this and realized that while not something we can do every night, "WWJD?" is a question we need to ask ourselves more often.
Thanks to all these guys for hanging out with us and answering all our questions, Bruce Fletcher for introducing us, Jeremy Kasten for the photos, and Jeff Ross for being a pal.