Here’s how it went down:
The Drive
14½ hours there, 13 hours back. Time difference was due to hitting Washington D.C. at pretty much exactly 5:00 on Friday night – which was a bad idea. The ensuing crawl from D.C. to Richmond was pretty much hell on wheels. Otherwise? The drive couldn’t have gone better. It’s a surprisingly easy slog, and 13 hours screams by pretty effectively. Matthew and I took 2-hour shifts on the way down but found 4-hour shifts entirely digestible on the way back. Driving through the Alleghenies, which were fog-bound and rainy on Friday and sun-baked and gorgeous on Saturday, was definitely the visual highlight of the trip. There’s some really beautiful country in the land to the south.
We got to Chapel Hill — which is kind of like Kingston surrounded by St. Catharines — at 11:20, with forty minutes to spare before the screening. Checked into a Days Inn where the staff could not have been more courteous and friendly.
The Festival
I had very little information about the venue going in, but cruising along Franklin Street at 11:30 on a Friday night pretty much sealed my suspicion that this college town was about to treat us to a night of film-watching in one of the local bars. This concerned me, but needlessly. Yeah, the screening was at a bar that was either called Bub’s, Hell, or The Wetlands, depending on who you asked, and yes, it was populated entirely by college students… but as soon as the movies started at midnight, they shut right the hell up and were one of the most attentive and enthusiastic audiences I’ve ever seen. A really, really cool crowd.
I walked in the door and introduced myself to the festival staff – and got a “You’re that guy?! I have to shake your hand” when I told them that I’d made Cobra Commander is Gonna Buttfuck Homer Simpson. Matthew and I were given courtesy passes to the entire festival, and it’s a damn shame we weren’t able to use them, because based on what we saw at Midnight Madness, Hi Mom! is running a pretty tight show down there. Oh well; bad scheduling. Next time, I’ll do the whole weekend.
The show was pretty much astonishingly well-programmed. There were only a couple of clunkers in the whole lot; I’d say at least 70-80% of the films were a “good” or a “great,” and a couple of them were flat-out fantastic. Onur Tukel’s The Tozer Show was my personal favourite; it kind of played like “Violet Incredible: The College Years,” only with lotsa sex. There was also Down Home Cookin’ by Aaron Yonda, a comic concept so simple yet so effective that, frankly, I became upset that Mark and I hadn’t come up with it years ago.
Cobra Commander went over pretty well; we followed a Bigfoot anal rape movie that went over like wet cement, so the lead-in was pretty good… the DJ came on the mic and said “If that’s not your kind of buttfucking, the next film is called Cobra Commander is Gonna Buttfuck Homer Simpson.” And the crowd went proverbially wild. Then completely silent as they realized just how foolish this flick really is, and then a little crazy again once CC actually jumped on Homer’s ass and made with the bum-play. Very satisfying.
That’s one last thing: extraordinarily high butt-sex content at this particular programme. Wanted to make a pro-anal-play pitch if I was asked to say anything, but the opportunity never arose. Flicks ended at 1:30; drove immediately back to the hotel and wrestled with sleep.
The Americans
Oh, those wacky Americans.
No, actually, the Yanks distinguished themselves pretty well. On the way home we stopped in a town called Petersburg, which looked absolutely sketch from the gas station we started at, but our search for coffee lead us into a pretty nifty slice of Civil War-era buildings and houses, and as we were slapping together some sandwiches on the hood of the car and chatting with the locals, Matthew and I both agreed that this was pretty much the nicest place we’d been in the whole trip. Incomprehensible old men, hot baristas, plenty of sunshine, old buildings, and friendly folk. What more could you ask?
As a post-script: everything you’ve heard about American kids getting fatter? Not wrong. You don’t really notice it in the boys — probably because Canadian boys are getting to be just as Playstation-fed blubbery as their American counterparts. The girls, on the other hand, just floor you – what used to be a bit of natural baby-fat on an 8-year-old is now becoming the beginnings of a lifetime of Bob Evans-sponsored obesity. This whole thing about precocious puberty could even potentially be a partial misapprehension — them’s titty-fat, not tits. Stopping for dinner was like walking into a 3-dimensional growth chart, where as the kids age, they don’t just grow up, but out. It’s appallingly sad to see.
The End
Good trip — shoulda been longer. Can’t believe I might do it again in 8 weeks…