Freshly Cut

SAT 8/23

Mark Weinberg dealt with very few costs while filming Mower, Blower, and Whacker. By getting friends and family members to fill all the roles, he kept to a low budget — setting some funding aside for snacks on location. Compared with the thousands of dollars other filmmakers require just to get a movie shot, prepackaged breakfast food didn’t set him back much.

Mower, Blower, and Whacker features landscapers who spend a lot of time talking about their outside interests. For a movie that turned out to be two hours long, it seems unfathomable that Weinberg finished filming in just three weeks. “It was just craziness as far as trying to fit it in,” Weinberg says now, recounting one day of filming that started at Lulu’s Noodle Shop & Satay Bar, moved on to the Pub (now the Brick) and concluded in his parents’ driveway.

Though he’s entered the movie in out-of-town film festivals, Weinberg’s current distribution hot spot is Town Topic, where the movie’s available on DVD. Otherwise, catch it at 2:30 p.m. Saturday at Westport Coffee House, 4010 Pennsylvania, 816-756-3222.— Gina Kaufmann

Exploitation Factor

FRI 8/22

For Exploit — opening at the Fahrenheit Gallery (1717 West Ninth Street, 816-304-5477) — photographer Nicole Cawlfield has been working on a “Thin-Up Girls” series, depicting “voluptuous girls doing exercise.” One girl poses on a stationary bike in a field, going nowhere. Another stands on a vintage medical scale holding a heart in one hand and a cake in the other, weighing the two. Cawlfield puts different spins on the pin-up style photograph, asking a local art historian, for example, to pose on a stack of books looking smart. “It always involves some kind of personal fantasy,” she explains. “I photograph women how they picture themselves when they fantasize about themselves, and I don’t necessarily mean sexual fantasies.”

Eric Grimes, who usually photographs inanimate objects, contributes shots of fetish balls, hip-hop shows and frat-boy hangouts. “That’s a kind of exploitation,” he says. “It’s not criminal — it’s just the nature of photographs.”— Kaufmann

Riot!

FRI 8/22

Friday Night Trivia at the Brick (1727 McGee, 816-421-1634) isn’t just trivia. It’s trivia riot. If your team doesn’t know an answer, you can riot another team, forcing the question on it. If the players choke, you get the points. Unfortunately, when the team known as “Suck It, Trebek” is on a roll, our team — we answer to “This Is How We Do It In Orange County, Bitch!” — is most fallible. Question-asker Pat Hopewell will try to stump you on matters ranging from Prince lyrics to Greek mythology. And he’s not saying Condoleezza Rice isn’t a liar; he’s just saying that’s not a specific-enough answer.— Kaufmann