Seven Oaks Magazine.

Goldie Hawn was not impressed. As I barely squeezed between her and a pathetic troupe of autograph collectors who were blocking the sidewalk outside the Orpheum, I could feel disdain oozing from beneath her cowl of faux-flaxen hair. Disdain? Either that, or boredom. Ms. Hawn must be used to fan swarming by now. The poor woman must have suffered through hordes and hordes of idolaters for more than twenty years, back to the time when SFU's fourth year graduating film majors were born.

En route to an after-party at the supposedly hip basement of Lucy Mae Brown's, I thus began to reflect upon the SFU fourth year students films that I myself had just suffered through at Pacific Cinémathèque on Howe. Like walking into Goldie Hawn's lap, I wondered if I had been looking for too much from the student films. Was I being obtuse by expecting to find something tantalizing, something no one had seen before - something young and fresh?

Was I wrong to be disappointed when I discovered that no more than a handful of graduating film students had a grasp on the concept of proper lighting? Happily, I wasn't completely thrown into despair by a lack of talent. Three films, East Bound , Peter's Present , and When Pepe Met Poolio restored my faith in this generation.

East Bound , by Rita Tse, is a fifteen minute experimental film, examining a Chinese woman's plight when she is trapped in a scripted life. Beautifully paced, Tse interspersed old silent film clips with shots of a Chinese woman who sits at home watching those same film clips, and answering the phone at exactly 3 o'clock every day. Presumably on the phone with her husband, the woman carries on the same stilted, tenuous conversation that she had the day before.

East Bound becomes really interesting when you discover that the silent movie clips star Ruan Ling Yu, a woman reputed to be the greatest tragic heroine in Chinese cinema. In keeping with ten years of playing the onscreen role of the beautiful, troubled, weeping woman, a twenty-five year old Yu committed off-screen suicide in 1935. After what seems like eons of phone-answering, film-watching, and life-pondering, the woman watching the clips of Yu finally packs her bags and leaves. Later when the phone rings once more at 3 o'clock, the answering machine picks up and carries on the same stilted, tenuous conversation.

By having transferred her daily script to the answering machine, the woman passed on her role, escaped her destiny, and was set free. It was beautiful, sad, and complex, and I still don't think I understand half of what Rita Tse was trying to say, through no fault of her own. Though the audience may have been caught up in the beauty, the sounds, the colours, and the implications of East Bound , this film posed no real contest to the juvenile pleasure that Daniel Moxon delivered.

Okanagan-raised filmmaker, actor, and musician Daniel Moxon displayed his true colours - various shades of day-glo yellow - as the star of Gareth Madoc-Jones' hilarious dialogue-free Kung-Fu style saga, Peter's Present . As birthday boy Peter (Nabem Ruthnum) sulks amid balloons and a pyramid of hot-dogs, his good friend Billy (Daniel Moxon) is on his way, grooving and twitching in an obnoxious yellow sweatsuit to the beats from his headphones, with a glorious yellow present. Unbeknownst to Billy, evil will soon attempt to snatch the gift, but a mysterious benevolent force is also at work this day. Mayhem - and hilarity - ensues.

But Moxon truly lit up the screen with his direction, story, and score for When Pepe Met Poolio , an odd little film where the two protagonists are played by the same talented and captivating actor, Kevin Keegan. Pepe, a performance artist, vows revenge upon Poolio, a UBC communications graduate, when the latter sneers "you're pathetic" at Pepe while he is performing a substantial air guitar repertoire. The crowning glory comes for Pepe when his most successful revenge tactic - an incessant campaign of smothering the streets with posters of Poolio's face and the words "Poolio is a Douchebag" - finally drives Poolio into mental breakdown. Poolio cries out "Who are you? Who are you?" into the street, but I won't say what happens next, only this: What goes around, comes around.

Poolio is a douchebag . Puerile, but still funny. When I finally got past Goldie's crowd and made it to the film screening after-party, Moxon told me the story behind his inspiration for the film. The idea of driving someone mad with posters occurred to him when a woman he once met recounted how her ex-boyfriend put photo stickers of her and the words "I hate you" around on bus stops in her neighbourhood. Ah, true love.

The sold-out theatre, packed with 210 people, seemed to respond the same way I did to Moxon's work, and with polite clapping to some of the other films. Should an audience admire an emotionally rich film like East Bound more than an infantile laugh-a-minute opinion piece like Peter's Present or When Pepe Met Poolio ? It is possible, after all, that we are all so accustomed to Hollywood comedy and straightforward storytelling, that any other type of filmmaking disorients our intellect and turns us off.

It is easier to critique than to create. It is even easier to create bad stories, cast bad actors, and apply technology badly to any project. I can abide by any lack of technical expertise if the storytelling talent is there, either in the writing or the acting.

It takes a lot to make some people laugh - really laugh - the way the audience did witnessing the craftsmanship of Daniel Moxon. His contributions to the collection of films were so stupid - stupid in the same way that the Kids in the Hall and cartoonist Don Hertzfeldt's creations are stupid. So stupid, in fact, that they may just be brilliant.

Watch out, Goldie Hawn, because a new breed of media stars is coming up behind you. And their Kung-Fu is better than yours.

The fourth year screenings are over, but SFU second year films will be screened Tuesday May 4 th , 6:30pm and 8:00pm at Pacific Cinémathèque, 1131 Howe St.