Category Archives: Film

Coming to VOD today, Tuesday, June 9: GTFO THE MOVIE

Shannon Sun-Higginson’s investigation of hostility against women in the gaming world had its world premiere at SXSW earlier this year. It has since screened at DOXA, IFF Boston, Global Visions, and SF DocFest. FilmBuff now releases the doc on iTunes and Vimeo on Demand.

Last Summer’s Gamergate exposed rampant misogyny within some elements of the gamer community. While Sun-Higginson’s film is not focused on the particulars of that controversy, addressing it only as a postscript, she assembles more than enough damning testimony that speaks to the challenges faced by women in gaming, a player population that has been on the rise. As the film relates, at its most (relatively) benign, gaming culture historically and consistently has set up barriers to entrance to females, and displays a lack of diversity and representation within its design and play that caters nearly exclusively to males. At its most extreme, gaming has proven outright hostile at times, escalating a “boys club” sentiment that moves from condescension to harassment to even threats of physical violence against women who are encroaching on their territory. In addition to revisiting notorious examples of such hostility, Sun-Higginson surveys a range of women about their individual experiences. While the topic is engaging, essential, and rife with potential, the execution is sadly wanting – talking heads dominate and are repetitive, production values vary and are often rough, and music is overused and distracting. The film does make some good use of 8-bit graphics and titles, but much more could have been done to make this more visually arresting.

Coming to cable network Fusion and to VOD today, Monday, June 8: EXTINCTION SOUP

Philip Waller’s personal quest to help the world’s shark population debuted at the San Francisco International Ocean Film Festival last year. Since then, aside from Am Docs, the film has largely screened in smaller environmentally-themed and doc fests. Its release today coincides with Wold Oceans Day.

In a remarkably extended and overly conversational narration, Waller relates his past as a former child actor facing post-career doldrums, and how he stumbled into surfing and filmmaking. Continuing this irksome meta-filmmaking preamble, he explains that his original goal was to make a film about his friend Jimmy Hall, an extreme sports fanatic who turned his love of tiger sharks into a business giving shark tours. After Hall’s accidental death BASE jumping, Waller finally gets to the crux of his film’s thesis by deciding to focus on Hall’s bereaved girlfriend, Stefanie Brendl, and her efforts to get legislation passed to help halt the hunting of sharks for their fins. This practice has skyrocketed in recent years thanks in large part to an increase in demand for shark fin soup – associated with luxury and opulence – by the burgeoning Chinese economy, and as a result has decimated the shark population so dramatically that there are legitimate fears of extinction. Traveling back and forth between California and Hawaii, Waller follows Brendl as she assists in a not completely explained manner with lobbying efforts to ban shark fin possession, a measure that ultimately passes and begins to spread to other parts of the world. Despite his best intentions – and aspirations of creating the next BLACKFISH or THE COVE – Waller makes the fundamental mistake too many neophyte filmmakers do in thinking that the making of their film is the story that should be on the screen. Even if one were generously to forgive that essential error, what’s left – watching legislation pass, second hand – is not particularly engaging, despite Waller and Brendl’s impassioned efforts.