Adam Baran

My friend Darren Stein’s short film “Color Me Olsen” screened last night at the Tribeca Film Festival in the “Mood Enhancers” shorts program.  You must check it out! 

“Color Me Olsen” tells the story of two twins (Edmund and Gary Entin) who land in Hollywood with dreams of making it big, and take a job in front of Mann’s Chinese Theater impersonating the Olsen twins.  The job takes it’s toll on them, as the two become increasingly more obsessed with their roles and the lines between reality and fiction begin to blur.  It’s really a very funny film, gorgeously lensed and tightly edited. 

Here’s the remaining screening times:

Sunday, April 29th 6:30PM - AMC Village VII Theater (66 Third Ave at 11th St.)  Darren Stein will be present at this screening for the Q and A.

Thursday, May 3rd 11:30PM - Tribeca Cinemas Theater 1 (54 Varick St.)

Friday, May 4th 11:30PM - AMC Kips Bay Theater 13 (570 Second Ave. at 32nd)

There were a few other good shorts too, most notably “I am Bob” which actually stars Bob Geldof as himself.  When he’s abandoned by his limo driver at a remote pub holding a Lookalike contest, he’s forced to go head to head with another Bob Geldof impersonator to win the prize so he can win the prize money and get himself out of there.  It’s really funny too. 

I also really liked the Spanish short “The Water and the Milk,” although it seemed drastically, and unfortunately out of place in this program.  It’s a serious, beautiful piece about an old woman who lives in the desert with a cow, and what happens when a rainstorm strands the cow on a small patch of land surrounded by deep rain water.  It’s a very good short, if it does have a few moments shot a bit too much like one of those Stella Artois ads with the French villagers. 

Some of the other films didn’t fare so well and I won’t mention them, but it’s fascinating to me to watch bad shorts and wonder what the programmers were thinking when they picked them.  I do bare a sizable grudge since my own awesome film “JINX!” wasn’t selected for the festival, but seriously, it seemed like most of the films in this program were backed by heavy loads of money - in one case the filmmakers raised a staggering 60,000 dollars for something that was a painful waste of time.  Another filmmaker boasted about how heavy his use of product placement and sponsorship enabled him to do so much stuff he couldn’t have been able to do.  Perfect for Hollywood!  It made me wonder if I should just bridge the gap and write films like “Pepsi: The Movie” or “Me and my Helio Down by the Schoolyard.”  I’m sure they’d get made. 

And there’s something about the programming that’s totally off - this was a long program of shorts, too long to schedule for 10:30PM, and two of the remaining screenings are at 11:30PM.  Who wants to go see shorts that late?!  I’d recommend the Sunday screening, if you ask me.  Okay, end mini-rant here.  Must go self-soothe.

That’s not to take anything away from ”Color Me Olsen” which is worth the price of admission, and the Bob Geldof film too.  I like that Darren, who previously directed the twisted teen flick Jawbreaker, and the awesome pre-Tarnation home movie doc Put the Camera On Me, isn’t opposed to going back to doing a short now and then.  There are a lot of great things that shorts can do when they’re not restrained by standard story conventions and structure and Darren’s film does a lot of great things, indeed. 

Support your local (actually, he lives in L.A.) gay filmmakers!