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.