Melvin van Peebles' Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-Itchyfooted Mutha brought the 2008 Maryland Film festival to a raucous close Sunday evening. The 75-year-old independent film and African-American film pioneer brought the crowd to its feet with a semi-autobiographical, blues-influenced, stream-of-consciousness extravaganza that packed in enough joy and inventiveness to make movie-making seem like the most fun anyone could ever have.

With brio, humor and self-effacing candor, van Peebles' film, which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival last weekend and was getting its second public showing here in Baltimore, celebrated a life of equal parts confusion, obstinance and perseverance. Employing everything from from slow-motion to animation, from rotoscoping to a guy in a gorilla suit, Confessionsofa was the work of a mind that will never grow either old or content.

Thanks, Mr. van Peebles, for reminding us all how much fun creativity and passion can be.

See a clip from the film here:

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Baltimore native Liz Miller, Bryn Mawr Class of 1985, was at the festival to show her documentary, The Water Front, a story of class struggle, water rights and the need for common-sense urban planning. The film centers on the plight of Highland Park, Mich., a city neighboring Detroit whose predominantly low-income African-American population suddenly found its water bills increasing exponentially after a corporate accountant brought in from the outside tried to balance the city's budget by upping the price its residents paid for water by 60 percent, and by implementing severe collection practices on past-due balances some residents never knew they had.

How did you find this story?

I was going to international conferences, and I went to a conference in Miami on water, specifically on water privatization. I heard Maureen Taylor, of Michigan Welfare Rights, talking about the 52,000 water shutoffs in Detroit alone. She's a very compelling speaker, and she moved me to want to make a movie. So I went to Highland Park, and I found that she was way too busy to be a subject of a film. But she put me in touch with some people who had had their water cut off, and I found that almost half the people in the city had had their water cut off. The irony of this city being close to the largest body of fresh water in the world was too drastic to be ignored.

How has the public reacted? The people in Highland Park?

I've shown it internationally, and I've shown it in Highland Park. The reaction to the film has been shock, in some cases indignation. Because it's had these international screenings, people are very intrigued to know that this sort of city and water problem is happening in the United States.

We screened it in Highland Park before we had finished the final cut. It was a full house, and there was heated debate. We actually recut the piece based on some of the feedback that we got. Some of the residents felt that we were showing Highland Park to be a broken city. There are residents who have lived there their whole lives, who work on a regular basis to keep their block of the city beautiful. So that was an incredibly important screening.

It was important for the film to serve as a catalyst for dialogue.

You admitted that one of the film's shortcomings is that it didn't always explain the complex issues involved adequately. Do you feel you could have done better?

The issue is, how do you balance telling a good story and informing the public? I was nervous that the water affordability plan (favored by Highland Park residents), would be more technical than audiences would be interested in. But I think people are interested in this alternative. And so, instead of lamenting, what we've done is put the entire plan on the Internet.

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A few thoughts on this morning's screening of Josef von Sternberg's 1927 Underworld, complete with musical accompaniment by the three-piece Alloy Orchestra.

This marks at least the fifth time Alloy has come to the festival and played its scores for a classic silent (past films have included Harold Lloyd in Speedy, Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail and F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu). If the festival did nothing more than bring the Alloy to Baltimore every year, it would earn movie lovers' undying gratitude. Alloy's jazz-heavy score for Underworld was a delight, and a perfect way to experience the early days of what has become the world's most dominant art form. Thanks, MFF.

Who says you need sound for snappy dialogue? Underworld, though silent, included some great, gritty language and turns of phrase, no less magnificent for having to be read rather than heard. Two samples: When tough guy Buck decides to impress flapper Feathers (Evelyn Brent), he tosses a $10 bill in a dog food dish.  "Watch me show that dame what I think of money," he scowls. And when Feathers decides to impress her newfound mark, the decidedly disintersted Rolls Royce (Clive Brook), she purrs, "How long since you had that body washed and polished?"

Even this early in his career, von Sternberg displayed an impressive feel for lighting his stars' faces to best advantage, a talent that would be showcased even more once he became the director of choice for Marlene Dietrich. 

Sun photo of the screening of "Underworld" by Amy Davis.

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Marilyn Monroe can still draw a crowd.

Hundreds of people lined up to peer through a magnifying glass Billy Pappas' drawing of Monroe after the screening of Waiting for Hockney at the Maryland Institute College of the Art this afternoon. 

The film documents Pappas' eight-and-a-half year saga to make an extremely detailed drawing based on a classic Monroe photograph. 

"From far away, it looks like a standard drawing," said Stephen Doolittle, a MICA grad student who lives in the city and saw the film. "Close up, it's almost breathtaking. The details are amazing. There was a moment where I said, 'Oh my God.'"

Left: The photo by Richard Avedon that inspired Billy Pappas' work.

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The award for Most Out of Place Vendor goes to Honest Beverages.

I mean, you had your anarchist book seller, your quirky pop culture/video sellers, food vendors and ... the tea tent.

A couple folks from the organic tea and ale company gave out free samples all afternoon. 

As the day wore on and the ice in their coolers started melting, they started giving away whole bottles of the stuff.

"People were drinking tea," said tea rep Matt O'Brien. "People were excited about it!"

Well, as excited as people could be about tea at a film festival.

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Thoughts on a trio of films from the festival's Potpourri Shorts program:

Pei-Shih Tu's Another Beautiful Day, a rumination on water rights and global capitalism using cut-out puppets, certainly doesn't represent every film-lover's cup of tea. But as a plea for global understanding (or at least attempted global understanding), it struck a chord.

Albert Birney, Nicholas Gurewitch and Jon Moses' Dying Is Fine, a reflection on life, death and rebirth, was visually both inventive and beautiful, with vibrant colors and a great beat, courtesy of tunes from Ra Ra Riot.

Phil Davis' Exercise, a contemplation of the fine line between exercise and self-abuse, with a guy hurling himself repeatedly against a wall, was an example of 21st-century slapstick, the sort of thing the Keystone Cops would be doing if they were around today. 

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Ran into filmmaker Ryan Graham at Zodiac earlier this afternoon, just before he was about to give a seminar on special effects.

Graham brought some ingredients to make fake blood splatters with him, which he planned to give to the audience after the seminar.

"I'm hoping people are going to start putting them in odd places," he said.

I reminded him that fake blood splatters aren't that uncommon in Baltimore, and might not freak people out that much.

"Who knows?" he said. "Fake blood splatters are great." 

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Without a doubt, this year's best film-festival spin-off is Videopolis at the Metro Gallery.

Last night, people packed the art gallery/live music space to see the Protomen, a Nashville-based group that performs theatrical concerts inspired by the video game Mega Man. 

A bunch of wide-eyed county kids rolled into the gallery to see the band, said gallery owner Sarah M. Williams. 

"They came in terrified but left OK," she said. 

Today and tomorrow, the gallery is screening experimental shorts and documentaries. In preparation for Videopolis, Williams and a handful of curators picked about 70 films from a pool of 120 submissions. They cut it close, too -- they were up late Thursday night finalizing the mini-festival.

"We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into," she said. "Today is the first day we've been able to relax."

Above: Screen shot from a Mega Man game.

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For the seventh year running, I got to host the festival's annual Saturday morning 3-D screening. This year's offering, 1953's Miss Sadie Thompson, was a rare treat. Only shown in 3-D for about a week upon its original release, it offered one of Hollywood's enduring sex symbols, Rita Hayworth, in a film that suggested it wasn't just audiences that fell for her allure. Poor Jose Ferrer's character, an uptight moralist convinced that only he knows what is right and what is wrong, didn't stand a chance against Rita's charms!

Although not exactly enlightened in its treatment of either South Seas islanders (the film is set on a tropical atoll near New Caledonia) or what moral compasses are really meant to gauge, Miss Sadie Thompson proved great fun for the 200 or so people who showed up. Kudos, once again, to The Charles' John Standiford and the festival's Jed Dietz and Skizz Cyzyk, who studiously hunt down the few remaining 3-D prints for this annual eye-popping cinematic experience.

Maybe we'll get Jane Russell and The French Line next year! 

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At noon, North Charles Street was pretty empty right, except for a few filmgoers milling around outside the Charles Theatre. 

Maryland Film Festival organizers expect things to start heating up around 2 p.m.

The streets were lined with people last night, and some were turned away from a couple showings. About 100 attended the outdoor screening of Yellow Submarine, organizers said. 

So far, screenings of I.O.U.S.A. and various comedy shorts have been sellouts. The opening night program with Barry Levinson sold out four days ahead of time.

"Its been unbelievable" said festival director Jed Dietz.

"When we started, the question was, could we do things in our own way that would make this one have its own personality. I think it very distinctly does."

Sun photo by Sam Sessa

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Three questions with Guilford-born Michael Cuomo, a 30-year-old Dulaney High and Loyola College grad who stars in K. Lorrel Manning's short film, Happy New Year, as one of two Iraq War vets spending New Year's Eve in a rundown veterans hospital.

Q: How long have you been acting, and how did you get started:

A: I've been acting for about five years, living in New York. I studied under Joe Chaikin, studied theater, started doing a lot of off-Broadway and regional theater. I was cutting my teeth on stage, as they say.

In Baltimore, I had never done any acting. I was a playwright, graduated from Loyola College, class of 2000. I met Lorrel at a theater called the Barrow Group, where we had done a few readings of his plays. I said, I really like your work, I'd like to collaborate on something that I could star in and you would write. He then sent me "Happy New Year," and when I read it, I was overwhelmed and terrified. But I knew that we had to do it.

Q: "Happy New Year" packs a pretty devastating emotional punch. How have audiences reacted?

A: The audiences, they're very emotional and affected by the film. The piece was adapted from the theater to film, because a group of military mothers who came to see the show were so affected by the realism and the accuracy of it, that they implored us to get it our to a larger audience, and put it on film. Vets have been really moved.

Q: Where do you go from here?

A: We're currently in pre-production on a feature-length version, The pitch is, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," with Iraq vets. Lorrel is the writer-director, we co-wrote the story, I'm starring and producing. Veteran producer Ian Smith ("Children of Men") has just come on board as our executive producer. We're looking for an August 2008 shoot in New York City.

I also just finished work an a Hollywood feature, "Will," directed by Todd Graff, who did "Camp." This is his big Hollywood debut. It should be out next February, sort-of a rock 'n' roll coming-of-age story. I play the art teacher in high school. It stars Lisa Kudrow, Vanessa Hudgens, from "High School Musical." David Bowie's in it, and his music is all over the film. 

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No plastic skeleton hovered over the audience and no electric buzzers jolted moviegoers in their seats. But that's about all that was missing from "Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story," a loving tribute to the master of cinematic ballyhoo.

Director Jeffrey Schwarz spent nine years putting this film together, and his love for Castle's work showed in every one of his film's 78 minutes.

Last night's screening was filled with Castle fans, even though most were too young to have seen the original "The House on Haunted Hill" which featured a stunt that left plastic skeletons hovering over the audience. Same goes for "The Tingler" which was first staged with seats booby-trapped with joy buzzers.

Castle's films may have lacked in production values and artistic vision, but few filmmakers have been more dedicated to showing his audience a good time.

The evening did include one Castle-inspired gimmick, however. As each person entered the theater, he or she was handed a "Beneficiary Agreement" to fill out, designating who would receive the proceeds of a $1,000 insurance premium, to be paid if the bearer died of fright while watching the film.

I don't think there were any deaths last night. But the festival will tempt fate again tomorrow (Sunday), when "Spine Tingler!" gets an encore screening, set for 12:30 p.m. at the University of Baltimore Student Center, 21 W. Mount Royal Ave.

ABOVE: Maryland Film Festival photo of director William Castle. 

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Only John Waters, Charm City's beloved Sultan of Sleaze, could convince a few hundred Baltimoreans to spend their Saturday night watching a French-language film about a sullen wife who treats her husband like yesterday's garbage, refers to her son as an ugly duckling and rents out rooms in her house to the neighborhood prostitutes. Oh, and did we mention she's got a lucrative business as a black-market abortionist going on the side?

Claude Chabrol's Story of Women (Une affaire de femmes) continued Waters' 10-year run of letting festivalgoers in on Baltimore's most eclectic taste in movies. The film benefitted from a tremendous star turn from Isabelle Huppert, who won a best actress award from the Venice Film Festival for her role a World War II-era abortionist who runs afoul of Vichy French "morals." "She's such a brave actress," Waters marvelled.

Story of Women proved substantive enough to get people on both sides of the abortion debate thinking, with a surprising amount of humor and a central character who moves from being unappealing to sympathetic almost without the audience noticing.

"Thank you very much for coming, and for having faith in what I pick," Waters told the audience after last night's screening.

Afterward, Waters said one of the pleasures of his annual film-festival appearance is picking a film people normally wouldn't see. "Even (festival head) Jed Dietz has never heard of any of the films I've ever picked," he boasted.

One question, though, and it's not for Waters. Rather, I'd like to ask all those people who show up, but then leave before the post-film Q&A: Why the rush? Most of you show based on Waters' say-so; don't you want to hear what he has to say? Even if you find his film choice disappointing, I guarantee you'll be entertained by his commentary.

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Some might call it delusional. Others might see it as triumphant. Me, I saw Greg Kohs' Song Sung Blue, the story of a working-class Milwaukee couple who struggle to make a living as a Neil Diamond tribute act, as a celebration of playing the hand God deals you, low cards and all.

Filmed over the course of 10 years, Kohs' film watches Diamond lookalike and soundalike Mike Sardina and his wife, Claire, perform throughout the Midwest as Lightning and Thunder. He's Lightning, she's Thunder, and their story is far more than just another look at marginal talents trying to ride the coattails of the famous. It's about family, and celebrity, and emotional honesty.

For about half its 87 minutes, Song Sung Blue plays as another look at a dysfunctional family that seems oblivious to its dysfunction. But slowly, surely, Kohs' camera, intrusive in a way that is nearly unbearable at times, reveals a story about enduring love, undying dreams and amazing resiliency. By the time it's over, Song Sung Blue reminds you just how strong, not to mention enduring, the human spirit can be.

The evening's highlight came at the film's conclusion, when Claire Sardina was introduced to a standing ovation from the crowd in Charles theater 5. With grace, humor and honesty, she took questions from the audience, then went across the street to the festival's Tent Village to perform.

Song Sung Blue has a second screening set for 11:30 a.m. tomorrow (Saturday) at the University of Baltimore Student Center, 21 W. Mount Royal Ave.

(Photo of Mike and Claudia Sardina courtesy of Maryland Film Festival)

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It's too early to peg any movie as the hit of the 2008 Maryland Film Festival, but Patrick Creadon's I.O.U.S.A., a primer on why we should be concerned about the rising national debt, is clearly among the most popular.

By early afternoon, both this evening's and tomorrow's screenings were sold out. And today's 11:30 a.m. screening, while not a sell out, packed 'em into Charles Theater 1, the largest venue at the festival.

Maybe economics isn't as boring as we all thought ... 

(Photo of Addison Wiggin, co-writer and executive producer of "I.O.U.S.A," by Algerina Perna, Sun photographer)

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