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Indiespace Event Review...January 2001
Indiespace "First Monday Films" (excerpt)
by John Patterson
http://laweekly.com/film/film_special_events.shtml

"For Valentine's Day, Indiespace founder Jeannie Novak has assembled a program of student and independent shorts celebrating "quirky love," and the results should titillate both membranes and gray cells. Black-and-white or color, live-action or animated, gay or straight, slick or primitive, cheap or expensive, the films play a series of chucklesome changes on some familiar themes: miscommunication, sexual anxiety and fear of solitude. Special mention goes to Cool Girls, about a boy running a talent contest to choose which of his two girlfriends he'll go out with, because its director, Pace Paulsen, is a mere 11 years old. Abigail Severance's Pump is a sardonic lesbian chamber piece about a scorned woman who pawns her own heart ("I don't need this anymore!"). Gretchen Somerfeld's sly and amusing Cafe consists of two caffeine reveries a young woman has while deciding whether she should approach a guy at another table: First she imagines a warm, sexy idyll of handholding and gentle lovemaking, then an alternative nightmare of hairy-shouldered sexism, vigorous crotch scratching and much farting in bed. Don Hertzfeldt's animated Lily and Jim outlines one disastrous blind date in which everything is lost because of a massive failure to communicate. And the show climaxes with Joe Nussbaum's crowd-pleasing short George Lucas in Love, which imagines a young Lucas at USC in 1967, wooing a cute campus rebel leader with a remarkably familiar hairdo as he tries to nail down his hopeless "space-agriculture" script. If movies be the food of love, then roll 'em!"

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