PROVIDENCE, April 14 — Corporate sponsorship can be a beautiful thing. For the 2007 Ivy Film Festival, it was a lifesaver. Not only did it give students the opportunity to make industry connections and likely gain access to coveted mail room jobs at the major studios, it also gave the audience exactly what it needed to weather a student film marathon: Red Bull and an open bar.

This year’s festival was sponsored largely by Current TV, the cable channel and Al Gore brainchild that solicits and broadcasts viewer-created content — or as they call it, “VC squared” (a phrase we do not object to, because yes, it is worse than the Vietcong). It’s sort of a perfect fit: Current is desperate for content, and student filmmakers are desperate for eyeballs. Did we mention the open bar?

We didn’t get to catch all the films, but the “clips” screened at the awards ceremony were so long that we might as well have. The audience and judges fairly slobbered over Rom Alejandros’ “Roskosmos,” a short set aboard a doomed Russian spacecraft — antigravity and all — which won best undergraduate film and the audience choice award. Best comedy was “Ode to Fredo,” a one-note-but-still-funny musical reimagining of Fredo’s death in The Godfather Part II. The winning animated short was “Phantoms of the Night,” a stop-motion one-night-stand between two salt shakers. (If anyone in high places is reading this — festival founder David Peck, this means you — we’d push hard to get these movies up on YouTube.) 

Other highlights came in non-celluloid form. In his opening remarks, Peck was in high spirits, dropping more f-bombs than verbs (the guy has been in a taxi with fucking Oliver fucking Stone!). Big-shot director Doug Liman, Brown ‘88 — best known for directing Swingers, worst known for the human rights violation that was Mr. and Mrs. Smith — stopped by to talk about how his “Rocks for Jocks” work ethic paid off. He admitted at the outset that he hadn’t prepared any remarks — you can take him out of Brown, but you can’t take the Brown out of him. But ten minutes deep into a tangential anecdote about hiking in the Alps, the apparent lack of preparation stopped being so endearing (although the girl with the walrus-laugh sitting in the back might disagree). (See the Herald article on his lecture here.)

At the final ceremony, Actor John Cho, who you know as the less famous half of Harold and Kumar, showed up to accept an award that had something to do with cinematic accomplishment and diversity. Cho was remarkably humble as he accepted it: Don’t forget he’s the guy who chanted “MILF” alongside Stiffler in American Pie. “I don’t know if this is deserved,” he said, “but let’s hope it’s prophetic.” In other words, let’s hope Harold and Kumar Maybe, Possibly Go to Amsterdam, or whatever it’s going to be called, doesn’t suck.

Then everyone went and drank.

As we may have mentioned, this weekend we journeyed to No’th Cackalack as guests of the illustrious, happily moneyed Duke University. Between Skoal, sweet tea, and other firsts (hotel staff calling us “mister”), we took in the first Duke lacrosse game since The Business.

We tried mightily to prepare for our trip to Duke, but plans were thrown into chaos early: the Drawl-English language cassettes we ordered were lost in the mail, nowhere in Brooklyn would serve us sorghum, and then, the day of the trip, airport security confiscated our brand-new Axe Body Spray. How would we blend in with the natives now?!? We arrived in Durham in a fever, feelin’ swell on 105 minutes of sleep, and set off for Duke’s Koskinen stadium anyway. Historic game, versus hated Dartmouth, beautiful crisp afternoon: we don’t need a map, sir, the sweet strains of ACC tailgating in the air will point the way.

Except. The pre-game tailgate in the stadium’s lower parking lot — the upper one was closed to accomodate the national media, which didn’t really show up — was nearly dead. A few SUVs with beer in the trunk; a coupla lifer Dartmouth fans with great-great-grandchildren swaddled in green. But nothing like the rollicking beerfest we’d imagined. Later, we found out a school VP had emailed the entire campus with a request to wear official Duke apparel proudly, leave signs at home, and generally put the ix-nay on the ape-ray okes-jay. (“We have much to gain as a community with our best effort and even more to lose with our worst”) Amazingly, the students played along: not a single violent Dartmouth chant, no burning Mike Nifong in effigy, no nothing to make for the ultimate IvyGate post. It was clear, though, fans had done some research on the enemy for heckling purposes; one Dartmouth player with by the unfortunate name of Tim McVeigh got special attention. But for the most part, Duke lacrosse fans were ridiculously well behaved, especially for a sport where the goal is to crosscheck your opponents’ faces in.

The few references to last year’s non-season were remarkably mannered: girls wearing Reade Seligmann No. 8 jerseys. A lone parking lot banner supporting the players.  Ubiquitous “innocent” blue rubber bracelets.  T-shirt report: there was, like, one guy with a “Disbar Nifong” [Ed.: we really wanted to buy one, but couldn't find a seller -- little help, Duke readers?]a cappella Admissions aleksey vayner alumni barack obama basketball Brown Columbia Columbia Spectator Cornell crime daily pennsylvanian daily princetonian Dartmouth Drinking Facebook football fraternities freshmen gawker guest editors Harvard Harvard Crimson i-banking IvyGate IvySports new york times nudity Penn plagiarism politics pranks Princeton professors racism RagTime reality tv Secret Societies Sex sororities Sports this is why people hate the ivy league Yale Yale Daily News YouTube

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