My publisher invited me to write a movie review for the Port Townsend Film Festival. I have a better idea. I am going to write reviews of all the movies I see at the Port Townsend Film Festival. Because half-measures are for quitters and weaklings.

I have two and a half days to watch 11 feature-length narrative and documentary films, plus all their accompanying short films. I also have a backpack full of 24 sodas and two tins of raw cookie dough to supply me with lunatic strength.

We're doing this.

FRIDAY

After riding in that afternoon's downtown parade of filmmakers, courtesy of the Port Townsend Rakers Car Club, and specifically thanks to Will Humiston for dropping me off in front of the Rose Theatre in his 1970 Jaguar E-Type, I was able to take in a salmon dinner with the celebrity crowd before catching Jasper Jones at the Rose at 6:15 p.m.

Coming-of-age dramas are among the more well-worn and most challenging of cinematic sub-genres to execute well, especially when set in as exhaustively explored a decade as the 1960s, but Jasper Jones makes it fresh by setting the story in the 1969 of rural West Australia, whose landscape is captured onscreen with evocative on-location shooting.

Our title character is a mixed-heritage outcast who discovers the dead body of the white girl he loved, and he knows his skin is dark enough that the police won't bother to pin her death on anyone but him. So, Jasper reaches out to Charlie, a bookish teen whom Jasper identifies as an outsider, like himself, to try and find out how the girl died.

It's practically redundant to say that Toni Collette and Hugo Weaving play their parts perfectly — as Charlie's loving-but-overbearing mom and as an intimidating recluse, respectively — but what I wasn't expecting was for the younger actors to hold their own against the adults so well.

In the end, the families of Jasper, Charlie and the girl who died are each shattered by their own slowly simmering secrets, and yet, we're left on an uplifting note, with the potential for more hopeful futures for those who are still around.

If I have any criticism of this film, it's that its rich subplots could have easily sustained being expanded into something like a binge-viewing miniseries. As it stood, I watched the closing credits roll, feeling like I could have watched it unfold for another hour or two.

The Northwest Maritime Center hosted a trio of documentaries I was interested in seeing at 9:15 p.m. Nature-related docs often live or die by the quality of their outdoor footage, and to the extent that these films succeeded with me, it owed a lot to how much the camera work made me feel like I was on the scene and in the moment.

Denali's Raven was a slight but engaging personality profile of a former mountain guide in Alaska who became a pilot to retain an adventurous lifestyle even as she became a mother. It benefited greatly from extended shots of our protagonist soaring above the Alaska Range in her plane, and toughing out the harsh winds and snow as she camped out on the sides of its peaks.

Fix and Release, by contrast, was a well-intentioned but didactic call for support of a medical treatment center for wild freshwater turtles in Ontario. The cinematography was unremarkable, except for those moments when the cracked shells and other debilitating injuries of the turtles were shown in painfully clinical detail. It's impossible to watch this film without coming away with far greater concern and sympathy for the plight of these turtles.

Fishpeople succeeded in combining the strengths of the preceding two shorter documentaries, by profiling half a dozen swimmers, surfers and others from California, Australia, Hawaii and Tahiti, whose almost superhuman physical attributes and unique life goals have made them ideally suited to live out most of their lives in the water.

When a Hawaiian spear fisherman admits that his daughter has surpassed his deep-diving ability at its best, as she plunges hundreds of feet below the water on a single breath, you hear the pride and astonishment in his voice, as he insists that he can't take credit for her talent.

Likewise, when San Francisco surfer Eddie Donnellan takes groups of disadvantaged inner-city minority youths to the beach, to teach them his techniques, you hear testimonials from the kids themselves, and the adults in their lives, how much he's broadened their horizons.

And when Lynne Cox employed her exceptional tolerance to cold to swim the Bering Strait in the summer of 1987, crossing the distance between the United States and the Soviet Union in little more than two hours, it helped thaw the Cold War, as both Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev toasted her after signing a nuclear weapons treaty later that year.

If there are personality traits that all these profiled "Fishpeople" share in common, it is their patience, their flexibility, their peace with themselves and their willingness to take chances. There is nothing aggressive or posturing about them. They are as cool and fluid as the waters they inhabit.

SATURDAY MORNING

Supplemented my raw cookie dough with a bag of Cap'n Crunch to provide me with a less perishable snack alternative for the day's heat, since I already had to remove my hoodie sweater because even the dim morning sun made it too warm.

First up at 9:15 a.m. is The Hippopotamus, again at the Rose Theatre. Seeing Roger Allam finally get the sort of starring role he's so richly deserved for years would be a treat enough, but casting him in a film based on a comic novel by Stephen Fry is the peanut-butter-and-chocolate combination that I never knew I wanted until it happened, like watching Scarlett Johansson deliver Joss Whedon dialogue in The Avengers.

Allam plays a once-celebrated poet turned alcoholic hack journalist who sets the latter career on fire by delivering a hilariously scathing review of an agonizingly incompetent theatrical production of Titus Andronicus, in person, while in the audience, before winning a fist-fight with the lead actor. Basically, he's Lester Bangs with the eloquent belligerence of Christopher Hitchens.

Out of a job, he can hardly refuse when the leukemia-stricken daughter of an ex-girlfriend asks him to check in on her cousin, his godson, who lives in Swafford Hall, a modern-day Downton Abbey presided over by a surprisingly imperious Matthew Modine, playing his role as a sort of Richard Branson CEO.

As Allam's character struggles to connect with his godson, an aspiring but awful poet played with endearing earnestness by Sarah Jane Adventures alum Tommy Knight, he's also tasked with investigating whispers of miracles at Swafford Hall.

Those who know Fry's worldview will not be surprised by the denouement of less-than-divine circumstances being behind the seeming miracles, but by forcing the family to come to terms with its issues, and himself owning up to his past transgressions, Allam's character leaves things mostly better than where he found them.

In Syria stood as a complete contrast to The Hippopotamus, in not only genre, tone and setting, but also in its own conclusion.

This harrowing, unflinching, almost documentary-style slice-of-life drama shows us a day, a night and the start of the next day in a single-family apartment in Damascus that's been occupied, by necessity, by multiple families, all pinned in together by shelling, snipers and roaming bands of would-be home invaders.

The stark cinematography only enhances the claustrophobic nature of the setting, with curtains drawn over windows at all hours, multiple deadbolts and wooden beams over the door, and cramped quarters occupied by far too many people, who have been forced to make routine chores out of collecting and rationing out water for basic needs such as cleaning and drinking.

Circumstances only get worse from this already bleak status quo, and the film ends without offering any real resolution as to the life-or-death fates of at least two of its characters, to the point that the closest thing these people have to hope is knowing that they get to repeat this same struggle the next day.

It is a well-acted, well-scripted, tautly directed film that I suspect most folks would not have the fortitude to watch a second time, myself included.

On a more upbeat note, I watched In Syria in the Starlight Room, making it my first screening in that well-appointed venue, with its comfortable sofa seating, and I splurged on chicken and Pepper Jack quesadillas, because you can eat popcorn with movies any time.

SATURDAY EVENING

Among the best uses of the short-form documentary format is when the filmmakers pose a deceptively simple hypothetical question to the audience, then set about answering it in an entertaining but easy-to-follow step-by-step fashion.

By that metric, Food City: Feast of the Five Boroughs is a perfect documentary short, as its makers ask, "Can we prepare a four-course meal for eight guests using only fruits, vegetables, meats, salt and cooking oil that have originated within the boundaries of New York City, without being imported from anywhere else?"

The answer is a conditional "yes," as they scour neighborhood farmers' markets and rooftop gardens, collect sea salt from the Coney Island beach, forage for wild berries and mushrooms, and cast fishing lines into the waters surrounding the city, to prepare an appealing-looking gourmet feast that everyone seems to enjoy.

And yet, the challenges they face in meeting this seemingly simple condition, when all the original settlers of New York were able to live off the fat of their own land, illustrates how much even supposedly locally sourced farming now relies on shipping.

This makes for a great lead-in to Bugs on the Menu, a longer-form documentary which interviews the tribal harvesters, high-volume farmers, pre-packaged snack and cooking ingredient producers, chefs and restaurateurs who work with and serve up insects as foodstuffs.

The film makes a persuasive case for the environmental and economic benefits of insects as both main courses, in place of more wasteful animals such as cattle, and as substitutes for more common recipe items, with "insect flour" requiring far less area than actual grain harvests.

Just as importantly, it acknowledges the necessity of making insect cuisine appetizing to the average American, and while I remain leery of the crispy tarantulas that David George Gordon served up to the Explorers Club, if I have enough time between films on Sunday afternoon, I hope to sample some of his deep-fried crickets at the beer garden on Taylor Street.

Going from the Key City Public Theatre back to the Northwest Maritime Center, I'm treated to Life Hack, an impressively well-produced film in spite of its self-confessed nearly nonexistent budget.

After 1983's WarGames introduced "hackers" as ordinary teenagers, and subsequent films went through several revolutions of making them out to be either stylish and sexy rebels, mentally disturbed loners or virtually omnipotent terrorists, it's refreshing to see a film like Life Hack complete that cycle by portraying both "white hat" and "black hat" hackers as just everyday quasi-adults.

Our computer-savvy cast includes a recently divorced couple and a married dad, and none of our computer pros live glamorous lives. For the most part, they work in tech shops or serve as Internet security consultants. The feats they pull off aren't Matrix magic, but the sorts of skills developed by experienced experts who are very good at their jobs. Writer/director Sloan Copeland captures the dialogue and rhythms of the kinds of folks that we all interact with everyday.

Even with a meet-cute romcom subplot, the story never feels anything less than authentic, from the way people behave to the mechanics of how the Internet actually works. And even the worst of the "bad" hackers we meet are revealed to be not really malevolent, but merely petty and motivated by the same idle impulses as any number of other people. The difference between them and us is, if someone keys your car, you might wish you could get payback, but they can exact a far broader revenge.

Life Hack was preceded by Christine Choy's Legal Smuggling, an irresistibly cute, deliberately rough-hewn animated short, illustrating the absurd lengths she went to as a young woman to buy her brand of cigarettes in bulk.

My night was capped off with a return to the Rose Theatre to catch Adult Life Skills, which marks the first time I've seen Jodie Whittaker's work since learning that she would be stepping in as the next Doctor Who. If this is the caliber of performance I can expect from her in that role, then my favorite sci-fi show is in good hands.

Any time the professionally maladjusted Alice Lowe is playing a relative voice of sanity, you know you've got a weird little film. Whittaker plays an imaginative but aimless gal who's hurtling toward her 30th birthday, but still living in a shed outside her mom and grandma's house. She's emotionally frozen in post-adolescence, burying herself in memories of when she made funny Internet videos with her since-deceased twin brother.

It takes meeting a strange young boy named Clint, who's coping with the progressive illness of his mother, to make our gal realize that it's well past time for her to let go of all the childhood keepsakes she's collected and clutched onto like sacred totems.

It's at once mundane and heartbreaking when she realizes that the domain name that had hosted her and her brother's videos online has finally expired due to non-payment. As someone just barely young enough to have lived too much of my life online, this is a uniquely specific feeling of loss that's difficult to explain to older generations, because it's a reminder that so many of the websites and social media networks that we take for granted as concrete things are in fact incredibly ephemeral and vulnerable.

SUNDAY AFTERNOON

And this is when fatigue and environmental conditions finally caught up with me. Getting a slow start in the morning cost me the opportunity to watch The Farthest, a documentary about NASA's twin Voyager probes which I regret missing. Likewise, the Pacific Northwest finally remembering what sort of weather it's supposed to have in mid-September presented me with the prospect of waiting out in the rain to see Into Twin Galaxies, a video diary made by three National Geographic "Adventurers of the Year" as they spent 46 days kiteboarding, skiing, camping and kayaking through Greenland. I'll catch it online instead.

Before the skies turned dismal, the Cotton Building hosted Brave New Jersey, which used the real-life panic that followed Orson Welles' infamous 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds to show us how the inhabitants of the fictional rural New Jersey town of Lullaby responded to this "fake news" of yore.

Like the story itself, which avoids showing us Welles in the radio studio in favor of focusing exclusively on the small-town townspeople affected by his broadcast, Brave New Jersey's cast is made up of a host of stalwart supporting actors who rarely, if ever, have a chance to shine in lead roles, including Tony Hale as the town's put-upon doormat of a mayor, Hale's fellow Veep alum Dan Bakkedahl as a parish priest who's so lost his faith that he can't even summon up the energy to be cynical, and Raymond J. Barry as a World War I veteran who sees the "Martian invasion" as an opportunity to relive his past glories and encourage his neighbors to live for the moment.

There's a delicate balance of comedy and pathos here, because just about everyone we see onscreen has been duped by a ruse, and their hysteria occasionally escalates to the small-minded sniping of a suspicious mob, but there's also something undeniably uplifting about the mousy schoolmarm picking up a rifle to charge into battle against an apparently alien army, and the preacher lifting the spirits of his congregation more than he's done in years by anticipating that the Martians have been sent by God to raise them up.

As most of the characters come to realize in the aftermath of their collective freakout, the Martian invasion may have been a hoax, but the feelings it revealed were real and deserving of respect.

During the intermission between Brave New Jersey and The Mars Generation at the Key City Public Theatre, I dutifully made time to stop by Taylor Street for David George Gordon's insect cooking demonstration. While I had to skedaddle before I could sample the deep-fried crickets, I now know that black ants taste like citrus.

Which makes The Mars Generation, presented jointly by Netflix and Time, the final act of my three days of watching nine featured films, plus their attendant shorts (yes, I guess that makes me just a bit of a quitter). The documentary not only offers an optimistic view of future space exploration, via profiles of some of the bright and shining adolescent stars at NASA's Space Camp, but it also contextualizes the history of space exploration to date, including the decades I'd lived through.

I already knew that Wernher von Braun's moral legacy, as a former Nazi who switched sides to put his rocket science to use for America instead, is complicated at best, and the documentary deserves full points for acknowledging this duality. What I hadn't recognized before was that the space shuttle program, which I saw as this great technological innovation when I was growing up, actually represented a massive step backward for space exploration, since it was so expensive and earthbound that we literally haven't saved up enough money for a replacement program yet.

Getting to the kids themselves, they are intense, armed with impressive intellectual gifts and fueled by a combination of righteous teenage conviction and bigger-picture acceptance of the need for potential self-sacrifice, on behalf of Martian colonization, that's mature beyond their years. It's not just that they can cite you chapter and verse of all the technological and qualify-of-life benefits that are yielded from an active space program, but that they are utterly sincere when they say they would lay their lives on the line just to bring it all one step closer to happening.

One boy, a code-writer charged with programming a rover robot made of LEGO, is brutally honest in telling the camera that his team's efforts failed because of him. Another aspiring astronaut, an otherwise confident girl, breaks a bit as she admits to being bullied for being a "brain." These kids aren't scared of dying to do what they see as important, because they have other fears.

In Lawrence Kasdan's woefully overlooked 1991 classic Grand Canyon, Steve Martin tells Kevin Kline to watch more movies, because "all of life's riddles are answered in the movies." I'm not sure this is true, but I do think that all of life's great questions are asked in the movies, and by seeing how those people in the movies choose to answer those questions, we can maybe learn something about what our own answers might be.