18th Kamloops Film Festival definitely raises the bar with short but sweet local comedy

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT — The 18^th annual Kamloops Film Festival still has two days to go but it definitely raised the bar in front of another packed house at the Paramount Theatre on Thursday night.

The triple-threat homegrown comedy team of Dusan Magdolen, Cayman Duncan and Gareth Medoc-Jones has scored a winner with Bar-Intender, a gripping tale of love in a pub.

Duncan, who wrote the script for this Kamloops masterpiece, doubles as Regular Guy looking for romance over a beer.

When he witnesses another bar patron (played with a sense of evil by Stephen A. Sawka) pull off an ingenious pickup, he repairs to his carport to perfect the technique. Without revealing any secrets, let’s just say if you saw the Brier you’ll enjoy this film.

Medoc-Jones, who shot and edited Bar-Intender, cut the original nine-minute version by a couple of minutes for Thursday night’s showing, with a tighter, brighter result.

It’s always nice to see familiar scenery in a movie, though it’s hard to know for sure how many in the audience recognized the inside of Bailey’s pub on Eighth Street.

Produced and directed by Magdolen, Bar-Intender was a deserving People’s Choice winner at the 2013 Kamloops Independent Short Film Festival.

Oh, yeah, there was another film Thursday night — No Clue starring Brent Butt and Amy Smart, a spoof on the old gumshoe films of the 1940s, shot in Vancouver.

Butt plays novelty salesman Leo Falloon, mistaken by Smart for a private eye, and together they weave a tangled web of intrigue complete with sleazy hotel rooms and a showdown on a moored yacht. Butt’s script has a lot of good lines (which Bar-Intender does not, but only because it has no lines at all).

At one point, when Falloon has a gun pulled on him, he exclaims, “Where’s everybody getting the guns? This is Canada!”

Falloon, whose idea of getting tough is to fire off “a stern e-mail,” looks like a guy you’d see running a corner gas station or hanging out at The Ruby.

No Clue is 90 minutes longer than Bar-Intender, but it’s still worth the time.

This Butt guy has definite promise as a writer — maybe he and Cayman Duncan should do lunch, or go for a couple beers.

The film festival continues with Siddharth tonight and wraps up with Finding Vivian Maier and That Burning Feeling on Saturday, followed by a closing party at the Plaza.