Don't get too close to the monitor...

... I'm not sure if I'm contagious or not. Been laid low the past few days with this creeping crud that my boss, The Divine Ms. S, apparently passed off to me Saturday night at the Sunscreen Film Festival. She has been trying to get me to take a day off for a while but it didn't work; I just wrote at home.

Between emptying my phlegm spittoon and scaring the pets with my banshee coughs, I neglected to mention how much fun Sunscreen's presentation of Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation turned out to be.

Picture and sound clarity was what you'd expect from middle-schoolers shooting with Betamax equipment 25 years ago; maybe straining my ears contributed to the nose and throat problems later. But the word that kept popping into my mind was: "fearless." Those kids had absolutely no idea of what they shouldn't have been able to do, or that lawyers might object, or that fire stunts can kill.

When it ended, I waited to chat with director Eric Zala -- now approaching middle age -- and got a kick out of two boys, just about his age when Raiders was remade, looking up at him like he was some kind of superhero. The spark of a dream, perhaps, and I couldn't avoid smiling.

Also wanted to drop in the Sunscreen festival's award winners, announced after the Raiders screening.

I was very pleased to see Holler Back: (Not) Voting in an American Town take the best documentary prize. Of all the Sunscreen entries (and I didn't see them all), that one seems to have the best chance of breaking into the mainstream.

Broke Sky was named best feature, while The Art of Pain took the audience award (perhaps because it had much of its avuncular cast attending and they stuffed the ballot box).

Best Florida Film award, named for Sunscreen patrons Stan and Cindy Heitman, went to Pawn'd, a Clerks-style comedy set in a pawn shop.

Michael Knowles was named best director for One Night (one I missed).

Other prizes were awarded to Through Any Window (best music video... and it starred The Office's hottie Jenna Fischer), Glitch (best animated film), and Rabia (best short).

Overall, a nice step forward for Sunscreen, although co-founder Tony Armer's prediction of thousands attending was obviously exaggerated -- which a Gasparilla Film Festival spokesman gladly pointed out to me in an e-mail. Maybe one sign that Tampa Bay is becoming a nice place for festivals isn't the number we have but the competitive sniping to ensue as each tries to stake out its territory.