Kansas International Film Festival – Day 2 – Saturday 9/20

There’s no hot tub here, so we settled for the pool to start the day. Other than the creepy onlookers, it was a delightful experience and the water was nice and warm. After that the first thing on the agenda was to once again look for the best BBQ that KC has to offer. Every time we come here, we ask the locals where the best is, and every time we get a different answer. Sometimes a consensus is achieved, but that’s somewhat rare. This time we found an ad in the yellow pages and in the ad they list their “highest rated” status from 2005, 2006 and 2007 according to Zagat, so we figured it had to be good, right? So we trekked out to Oklahoma Joe’s and were surprised to find that it was actually attached to a gas station. Hmm. Well, we’d driven this far, so we had to check it out. Amazing. We all got samplers so we could try a bunch of stuff out and it was absolutely fantastic. Highly recommended, and when we got there at 11:00, we saw a steady influx of people and by noon the place was packed. I wish I had a fridge in the car, cuz we would have had a ton of leftovers.

So we got to the festival in time for the first round of screenings and caught the family drama ”The Rainbow Tribe,” a film about 6 wayward kids going away to summer camp, and their counselor who’s going through a significant issue in his life. It was a great film and the writer gave a great Q&A. We had a chance to chat with him a bit after and it sounded like it was a fun project to work on, and it was somewhat therapeutic since a lot of the story came from his personal experiences. The parents of the person that inspired the story were there in the audience, so there was certainly some emotion there.

Film number two was “The Art of Travel” which was a drama about a guy who ends up going on his honeymoon by himself due to an interesting series of events and the next two hours of the film show the main character going through a couple of years of personal and “travel” discovery. Interesting film with a ton of incredible visuals filmed around the world.

The last film I had a chance to see what “Harold” which was a comedy about a 13-year-old Jr. High kid who has male pattern baldness and the experiences that he goes through. The film stars Cuba Gooding Jr. and there were a ton of Saturday Night Live alum in the film and Colin Quinn was there in the audience and did the Q&A afterward. It was a pretty fun movie going experience and the audience responded well to it.

Pretty good day two. Day three only has a couple of films on the docket before we make the big trek back to Omaha.