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TAMPA BAY FILM - BLOG - MODELING - ACTING - PHOTOGRAPHERS - TAMPA FILM FESTIVAL

THE UNAUTHORIZED REVIEW OF

THE TAMPA FILM REVIEW

The unauthorized review of the Tampa Film Review monthly film festival By C. A. Passinault

INTRODUCTION - PART 1 - PART 2 - FILM FESTIVAL SCORECARD

The Tampa Film Review Film Festival Event Scorecard
2006-2007

Please note that a score of 5 is average.

Concept (1-10): 6
Good concept, but not as professional as it needs to be due to the casual theme and the fact that the organizers only seem to be motivated to do it for “fun”. With professional competition on the way, the concept is now, more than ever, in need of a serious overhaul, as the participants only seem to tolerate it because it is the only game in town.

Venue (1-10): 6
Mismatched venue. A busy retail store in a party city, with noisy, often intoxicated customers, is not at all appropriate for a film festival. Tampa Film Review participants can expect lots of rude distractions as the store activity clashes with the film festival. This was much better two years ago in a coffeehouse café!

Vendors (1-10): 1
There are no vendors or sponsors outside of the sponsoring retail venue. This is part of the problem, as vendors would give the Tampa Film Review the capital that it needs for professional improvement. The lack of vendors is also a missed opportunity, and proof that the organizers do not see this as a business. With the lack of business-mindset, how far can this go, and how long can the Tampa Film Review last? Film Festivals are not charities, and those who operate as such don’t go far.

Organization (1-10): 3
The Tampa Film Review is plagued with poor organization and a casual, unprofessional execution which, perhaps, is an offshoot of the concept behind it. The production standards are amateur, the same technical problems occur with each event and solutions are not even attempted, and it is too difficult to meet and network with the few professionals in the sea of fanboys. Again, a professional business mindset would do wonders. This is supposed to be a film festival, and not a fanboy club for a self-important, self-serving clique with shades of false modesty.

Entertainment (1-10): 4
You get what you pay for, and in this case, it really is true. The Tampa Film Review may be free, but count the costs of wasted time, parking, and gas, and you may not be too happy. Sometimes the Tampa Film Review is entertaining for unintended reasons. You can go there to laugh at what are supposed to be indie films or the organizers cursing at the technical problems, which aren’t the only repeats with every event. As a film festival, however, it falls way short. The organizers intend to show every indie film submitted to them regardless of the quality, and don’t bother screening them. Some Tampa Film Reviews don’t have a single good film to show. Others may, but prepare to endure the onslaught of bad films before you can see anything even approaching mediocre. The Tampa Film Review shouldn’t even be considered a film festival because of the lack of quality control and the pathetic programming.

Attendance (1-10): 6
Usually moderate, the attendance is only as good as it is because this is the only monthly film festival event in Tampa, for now. While it does demonstrate that people are interested in film festivals and indie films, you can’t help but wonder if the attendance would be much higher if the film festival was professionally organized and executed, which it is not. The participants largely tolerate the shortcomings of the Tampa Film Review because it is presently the only game in town. When professional competition arrives, it will be interesting to see what happens to the attendance numbers if the Tampa Film Review refuses to get serious and improve.

Features (1-10): 4
The only features would be what are being passed off as indie films. The only purpose of the event is to sit and watch indie films, often of laughable quality. There are reviews of said films, which could be considered to be a feature, and the reviews can be seen on the Crazedfanboy web site every month. Some of the reviews are actually quite good, and add to the entertainment value if you had to sit through the films with the review writers.

Admission Value (1-10): 3
The Tampa Film Review is free, and be glad that it is. There is no direct admission cost. When you add gas and parking, however, expect to shell out around $10.00 for the privilege of attending. When you factor in the high crime of Ybor City, the fact that you will have to walk several city blocks at night in a crime Mecca to get to and from the venue, and the fact that you could be spending time doing something constructive, it just isn’t worth it. You are better off renting a DVD somewhere and watching it at home. If you must watch indie films, Tampa Bay Film does have an online film festival, which is free and can also be viewed from home.

Overall Event Score (1-10): 4
An overrated monthly film festival, marginally successful in spite of itself because it is currently one of the few events of its kind. The Tampa Film Review seems to always be organized at the last minute, is held in a venue which is ill-suited for a film festival, always has serious technical issues, has no accommodations or support for serious professional networking, and is often hard to participate with. At this time, we cannot recommend this film festival to anyone but someone with too much time on their hands, a fondness of paying for their parking, and a love for the dangers of Ybor City as they walk blocks to reach the film festival. Perhaps competition will be good for the Tampa Film Review. They will either be forced to become a professional venue for quality indie films or will finally be put out of their misery, as little has changed in the two years that this reviewer has wasted in attending this sorry excuse for a film festival. As it now stands, the poor quality of this event and the unprofessional attitude by the organizers is an insult to the people who attend. There are a few who state that Pete and Paul should be given a medal for the "work" that they have done for the "indie film community" and this travesty of a film festival, but given what we have experienced with the Tampa Film Review and the questionable motivation of the organizers, we would have to say that those who praise this are deluded, and their statements speak volumes about their professional judgment.

Tampa Film Review Introduction

For the past four years, there has been a monthly film festival in Ybor City, a film festival which has featured many short indie films, and which has served as a gathering for people interested in Tampa independent film. This film festival, known as the Tampa Film Review, or simply TFR for short, started as a free, grassroots-sort of event, and it has remained largely the same. Little has changed for the Tampa Film Review except for a change in venue within a two block area of Ybor City. Like an actor with limited acting range, little has changed but the name and the location; it is a case of same face, different place. The format, and the issues which have haunted it, remain.
My very first Tampa Film Review was in October of 2005, just over two years ago, when it was then known as the Coffeehouse Film Review. I had been aware of the film festival since it began, but it took me a while to research the participants, and I always seemed to have something going on, so it took me over a year to finally attend. The film festival was then held on Thursday nights, and I set out on a pleasantly warm October evening to finally check out what I had been reading about for so long. I was hoping to see some creative indie films and meet talented filmmakers.
Perhaps I set my expectations a bit too high, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
As a place, Ybor City has a lot of history going for it. It also seems to attract some of the oddest people in the Tampa Bay area. I seldom go there, and when I do it is something modeling related. As a professional photographer, I have done a lot of modeling photography shoots in Ybor during weekend days, and I even recall doing one with another photographer and six models at night on 7th avenue as far back as 1999. Although Ybor does have a high crime rate, I've never had a problem walking around with models and expensive cameras (at least a few years ago when I last used it as a location). The reason for this, however, was literally day and night. I always spent my time there during the relatively docile days and early on weekend mornings. The night was when Ybor came alive, and night is when the dark side of the area became prominent. As a professional in the entertainment industry and as a working artist, I, too, had been at odds with the Ybor City scene as a productive and a professional artistic community. I was fresh from the end of a long modeling industry war in the region, where my modeling web sites Independent Modeling and Tampa Bay Modeling slammed local operations and addressed some issues, and my feelings about the area for professional art were subdued, to say the least. For the record, I have had bad experiences with the Ybor “art” and “entertainment” scene, and this trend shows no signs of ever changing.
Arriving in Ybor for my first Tampa Film Review, I was annoyed to learn that parking was not free. I parked in the parking garage, and quickly made my way down to the street level and onto the busy 7th avenue.
It took me a while to find the location, which was a small coffeehouse café. The neon signs of the tattoo parlors and loud music blaring from the storefronts proved to be most distracting, and after a time of wandering and asking around, I finally found where I was going. The coffeehouse, Walter Romero’s Studio 1515 Coffeehouse, was a small place which proved to be very difficult to find.
Upon locating the storefront, some people exited, complaining about an inconvenience. I asked them if this was the Coffeehouse Film Review, and an attractive, young woman told me that it was, and that they were having all kinds of technical problems inside. She told me that this was nothing new, and that they simply took the bad with the good because this was the only monthly film venue in the Tampa Bay area. I exhaled and pushed forward, not at all optimistic about what I would find on the other side of the door. The unhappy couple walked off, telling me that they wished me luck and that they were sick and tired of all of the problems that the event had. They were going home for that night.
I entered the café, and was pleased with what I saw. Brick walls contained genuine charm and style. I later found out that this would be the last Coffeehouse Film Review, as the place was half-gutted and in the process of going out of business, but I must say that, in retrospective and looking back, that this venue was the high point in the Tampa Film Review’s cyclic history. Although the smell of coffee makes me ill, I absolutely loved this place, and was sad that it was closing. I was also sad that, due to the pending closure, that it was difficult to get any food service in the café, and most of what they had available were the aforementioned coffee and some pastries, which held little appeal for me.
I looked further in the back of the store, and witnessed event “organizers” Paul and Pete Guzzo working on some audio problems, an ongoing and regular feature of the Tampa Film Review. I introduced myself and offered to help, but was told that they had things under control. With that, I took a seat and waited. I waited some more. Hungry, and with little hope of progress, I left for another restaurant to get a bite to eat, and returned a while later.
Upon my return, the Guzzo brothers had relocated the screen to the front of the café, and were using some band equipment for the sound, which hardly was an improvement (as an event planner with far more experience with sound, I rolled my eyes at the fiasco, but out of politeness decided to keep my mouth shut). They had set up some chairs for the new configuration, and were just starting their late debut. Several other people had shown up, among them Crazedfanboy’s Nolan Canova and Icon Film Studios legendary Chris Woods. Although I knew a good amount about everyone there from research and from visiting their web sites, no one knew anything about me or what I looked like, so I decided to formerly introduce myself.
Nolan knew who I was only because our mutual friend Steve Beasley (who I had trained at Bank Of America when I was a banker and was helping with the training of new hires) had told him about me years before, and also because I had contacted Nolan a few days before. He had been depressed about the cancellation of his Nolancon event, and I broke my self-imposed communications blackout to let him know that it wasn’t as bad as he thought it was.
Why did I study up on the Tampa indie film scene and why didn’t I introduce myself sooner? I wasn’t ready. I had other things going on, and I already had a strong disagreement with one of the main Tampa indie filmmakers years before, back in 2002, over some actresses, auditions, productions, and other issues. I was sure that I had been “blacklisted” by his friends, after he complained about me, and the comments about the Tampa indie film community from my Independent Acting web site became known. This, of course, did not prove to be the case, and I later patched things up with the filmmaker. Indeed, no one really knew much about me or my entertainment projects, and I also discovered that the Tampa indie film community was not as organized, as large, or as supportive as I had believed. I also discovered that the points made and the opinions shared by Independent Acting regarding the Tampa indie film community during the Saints and Sinners film festivals were right on the money. Sometimes you make a professional observation and later wish, and convince yourself, that it wasn’t true, only to discover later that the initial assessment was the correct one. More on that, however, later.
After making my introductions, freaking out Chris Woods (he later told me that he thought that I was a stalker because of my good amount of knowledge about him, but was glad that this did not turn out to be the case after he took the time to get to know me - That’s how it works, I suppose. Some conceptions turn out to be true. Others are simply misconceptions, and you can never know the difference between the two until you make an effort to learn the facts), I sat down with Nolan, Chris Woods, and some other person who I don’t recall, since it has been over two years. The first film I remember seeing was the Guzzo’s Life Is A Circus, which I remember was competently put together, but one which I absolutely hated as a film.
Two months, and one Halloween Horror Picture Show indie film festival later, the Coffeehouse Film Review relocated at the International Bazaar, a block away in Ybor, and was renamed the Tampa Film Review. With that, my review of the Tampa Film Review begins.

NEXT: PART 1

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UPDATED 04/13/08

 
   

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