The CMJ Festival ended Friday night with a whimper -- well, maybe that was me whimpering after I left a special screening of the spooky ooky alien thriller, The Fourth Kind. In case you haven't checked out the trailers and featurettes on the official site, I'll give you a quick breakdown -- the movie switches between "real" footage of director Olatunde Osunsanmi interviewing Dr. Abigail Tyler, a psychiatrist in Nome, Alaska, an area with an allegedly high rate of reported alien abductions, and Milla Jovovich playing Tyler as she struggles with the mysterious death of her husband and her patients' nightmares and mental breakdowns. Interestingly enough, the movie also sometimes intersperses Tyler's "real" footage of her sessions with clients with Jovovich acting them out using split screens. In any case, despite any questions as to the validity of the Tyler story and problems with the last third of the movie, I found it pretty damn scary. The Fourth Kind will be begin probing theatergoers on November 6th. (Note: It's unclear whether this was the final cut or not.)



However, my favorite movie there was the intimate, stunning film The Messenger, starring Ben Foster as Will Montgomery, a decorated Iraq war vet whose last three months of his tour of duty is spent in the Army's Casualty Notification service. His partner, Tony Stone, is played by steel-jawed Woody Harrelson, whose attempts to keep Will to the script and rules of their job -- a literal script with rules like "No touching the NOK (next of kin)" that tries to keep a soul-searing job as regimented as possible -- prove impossible. The packed house kept the Q&A panel (writer/director Oren Moverman, writer Alessandro Camon, composer Nathan Larson, and Harrelson) as long as possible, thanking them for such a moving film and surrounded them after the Q&A was over. The Messenger is from Oscilloscope Laboratories and will be in limited release starting November 13th.

A big shout-out to the The Terror Twins (aka Lisa Hammer and James Merendino), for their Best Feature Film win for The Invisible Life of Thomas Lynch, a creepy little indie about a hitman and the filmmakers following him. The film examines the fine line between reality entertainment and sheer voyeurism/exploitation. Lisa is a super-cool indie film director and actress whose voice talents you've heard on The Venture Bros. as Triana Orpheus; Merendino directed SlC Punk! They also collaborate on music under the name moniker.