Onward to Calgary

Director Jim Ether

2008 Boston Underground Film Festival

Saturday March 22nd @ 3:30 p.m.

Jim Ether's co-star is a tomato. A small, red, foam-rubber puppet tomato. But this doesn't mean that his morally-skewed new film, Onward to Calgary which he acted in and directed, is a kids film. Rather, Ether's been incubating his talents on the internet for a while now, building quite a reputation for himself and the hair-brained puppet/animated/live action shorts that have populated internet video sites like newgrounds.com as well as his own site persarc.com.

Now ready to expand beyond pimple-faced internet users, Ether has finally managed to scrounge up enough dough and foam-rubber to eke out this unorthodox feature length indy film, which will be playing this Saturday at the 2008 Boston Underground Film Festival alongside over a bakers dozen of other local and independent films.

If you've watched any of Ether's Poem Time online shorts, you'll know that the plot's framing device about Jim as the host of a public access Television show and the eclectic cast of human and sub-human characters that populate it, is only loosely able to contain the deranged sequence of ideas that are churned out of Ether's stunted-juvenile mind.

Onward to Calgary builds off of where his online series starts, injecting it with appropriate dramatic-tension when the Poem Time TV show is bought-out by a fish stick company and the ensuing road trip to Canada provides, if nothing else, the cinematic forward momentum needed in order to develop the puppet-lust/love story of Timmy Tomato (played by a crimson googly-eyed ball with a mouth) and his quest to meet his biggest fan, Tammy Tomato. But knowing that all road trips are really just journeys across the highways of our collective soul, the hearts and minds of these puppet creations are shown to be filled with more than just the noodling fingers of a spare cast member's hand.

Fleshing out the film are a series of animated asides in which Ether has enlisted a few of the internet's most well-known flash-animators, such as David Firth of Salad Fingers fame along with Leigh McGrath and Juho Lehmonen to provide their own interpretations of the story's tale of love, loss, tomatoes, robots, and chubby pants wearing elephants. Don't worry, there are plenty of humans in this film too, they're just not as perversely adorable.

Check out Onward to Calgary as part of the 2008 Boston Underground Film Festival, Saturday March 22, 3:30 pm, at the AMC Loews Theatre in Harvard Square. For more info check out www.bostonunderground.org