The Other Woman (2014)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Kyle Gerkin, Rachel Tullio, Jennifer Lind, Michael Coleman and William Long

At almost fifteen minutes, The Other Woman is another longer, more thoughtful entry into the 52 Films in 52 Weeks series. It's also a welcome updating of Sherwood Anderson's short story, first published in 1920 and notably dated today. The original story reads like a manifesto of male privilege, the tale of one man's transition from bachelor to husband through one last desperate fling. It's difficult to see either of the two ladies involved as anything other than objects, one being cheated on unrepentently and the other used and discarded. Adapting this sorry state of affairs to contemporary Arizona, Mills preserves the majority of the story for a change, but he carefully updates it so that 'the other woman' of the title is progressive and refreshing, the most well adjusted, knowing and understanding character in the entire piece. She's not incompatible with her source story equivalent, but that's because the 1920 character has little to no definition. Here, she's worthy of being the title character, even if she's not the focus of the story.

She's Patricia and to reflect modern Arizona more than 'a fat tobacconist's wife' would, she's a barista at a coffee shop, Cartel. She's good at her job, enough so that she recognises Robert when he comes in and has his drink ready before he orders it, correct in every detail right down to the receipt not being needed. He's a regular who shows up at the same time every day, but he may not have really noticed her before now. From this point on, however, he can't get her out of his mind, right down to a dreamlike party scene where only Robert is in focus until she walks up and kisses him, with increasing passion until reverting to being his fiancée, Mary, which switch ably highlights Robert's quandary. He's about to be married and he apparently loves the young lady whom he has asked to be his wife, but his abundant second thoughts are wrapped up in the neat little package that is this knowing barista. This story isn't about whether the pair will do anything about it, it's about how and what he'll feel before and after they do.

Generally speaking, I've enjoyed the longer short films in this series more than the shorter ones, perhaps inevitably because there's more room for their stories to develop and more opportunity for Mills and his Running Wild crew to leave us with something to ponder after they're done. It gives the actors something to get their teeth into, which both Kyle Gerkin and Rachel Tullio achieve here, the former a natural casting choice for a role that is both manly and clearly confused and the latter nailing her part as a strange piece in someone else's puzzle. In the story, the unnamed other woman is 'a very ordinary person with nothing special or notable about her,' except that she's ten years older than the man telling the story, but she's a contemporary here who's a lot more than very ordinary. I don't remember Tullio's role in Awesome Guy: A New Identity but I called her out for special notice in Wouldn't Be Love, though she was hampered by the sound guy clearly not being James Alire. She's support here, but she's very good indeed.

The fifteen minute running time also allows Mills to add moments of clarification that aren't in the source story. In Anderson's original, the chain of events is fragmented by tortuous prose so that we struggle with the timeframes involved, while Mills sets everything up chronologically by day. The other woman doesn't know in the original that the man who propositions her is about to be married, but Mills makes sure that Robert explains that to Patricia immediately, before he even knows her name. He even has Mary give him a coffeemaker as a wedding present, unwittingly removing the reason why he might ever see the barista again; in the original, there's no such device as the man simply chooses to avoid the tobacconist's wife by never going down that street ever again. While this remains a story about a man cheating on his wife on the night before his wedding, these details help to make it a little more understandable and a little less offensive; it also raises the title character to prominence by giving her awareness.

Mills also blurs the line a little between reality and fantasy. Anderson's prose is clumsy and confusing but it mimics the mindset of the lead character. He's all over the place, trying to explain why he cheated and what it meant and didn't mean to him. Mills has the benefit of visuals to help get this over and they help a lot. The daydream scene is the centerpiece of this approach and it's beautifully shot with a good choice of music to accompany it. There are other scenes too where we switch back and forth between Mary and Patricia, because that's how it's going in Robert's mind. However, I did wonder if some of the new scenes that Mills added were literal or imaginary, like the basketball scene. While Michael Coleman shows off his dribbling skills, he tries to set up a bachelor's night for Robert, but this is entirely detached from the rest of the film, so could easily mean that he's a little devil on Robert's shoulder, merely one with mad skills. It's even possible to read that Robert never cheats for real, just in his mind, though I don't buy it.

Many of the earlier 52 Films in 52 Weeks films were shorter and more experimental, while The Test Case and The Other Woman are a solid pair of exceptions. While they still capture particular moments, as do the majority of these films, they take their time about doing so and thus allow them to expand naturally into their own spaces rather than being confined into a particular shape. While they're still crafted, they feel a lot more relaxed than many of the earlier films, which in this case hides another catastrophe that was averted close to the shoot. The web series episode that covered The Other Woman explained how a key location, the coffee bar, was lost during the week leading up to the shoot, leading to a good deal of scrambling to find a replacement. It also meant an increased financial cost, which highlighted how little Running Wild were spending on these films; their $10,000 Kickstarter budget was split over 52 of them, so averaging only $192 each. That's pretty incredible and it highlights why this series is so important.

The Test Case (2014)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Angela Haines, Brian DeMarco, Michael Hanelin and Tenley Dene

Week 16 in Running Wild's 52 Films in 52 Weeks project proved to be a huge departure for many reasons. For a start, Travis Mills aimed 'to lighten up the mood amongst our Joyce adaptations' with a comedy, but chose one by P G Wodehouse, the creator of Jeeves and Wooster, so it's about as far from contemporary Arizona as could be imagined. While almost all of the non-Joyce stories adapted thus far were by classic American names like Hawthorne, Twain and Conrad, P G Wodehouse was emphatically English. I couldn't highlight this better than by quoting the opening line of The Test Case, which was first published in 1915 in Pearson's Magazine: 'Well-meaning chappies at the club sometimes amble up to me and tap me on the wishbone, and say 'Reggie, old top,'—my name’s Reggie Pepper—'you ought to get married, old man.'' I can't help but see any attempted adaptation to modern Arizona as a Gordian knot level puzzle. Mills had an Alexander the Great moment and discarded almost everything in the story.

Wodehouse's story revolves around Pepper, a blusterer in the vein of Nigel Bruce's Dr Watson, whose girl, Ann Selby, describes him to his face as 'entirely vapid and brainless' and suffering from 'the handicap of large private means.' Reggie and Ann are now serious, but she's having second thoughts about marriage for precisely the reasons she mentions above. 'You're one of the idle rich, and your brain, if you ever had one, has atrophied,' she tells him and he determines to impress her by doing something notably clever to prove otherwise. 'Suppose I pull off some stunt which only a deuced brainy chappie could get away with?' he asks her. 'Would you marry me then?' She answers in the positive only because she doesn't believe he could do such a thing, but a discussion about a mutual friend, Harold Bodkin, inspires him. Harold lost his first wife, Amelia, five years earlier and has married again, to Hilda. He loves both wives, but is alienating the latter by idolising the former. Pepper decides to simultaneously fix the problem and win Ann's hand.

Of this story, Mills retains only two things. His adaptation revolves around two couples, albeit neither Ann and Reggie nor Harold and Hilda, and one of them isn't yet married and may just never be. That's it. His version follows an awkward couple called Alfred and Judy, who are engaged and planning a honeymoon in Paris but don't seem to have much of a clue about the whole marriage thing. Beyond gender, Alfred's only similarity to Reggie is his awkwardness and Judy may not have anything at all in common with Ann; she's more like a female version of Alfred. Deciding that they should learn more about what they have in store for them as man and wife, they visit another couple who have been married for over a decade. I'm not sure if they expect to gain insight or that Gary and Alexandra might take them under their wing, but the evening to which we're made privy is surely far from what they might have imagined. The last scene is a strange but satisfying one, which might just show what Mills took away from The Test Case.

Alfred and Judy are portrayed with suitable awkwardness by Brian DeMarco and Angela Haines, but Mills needed them to be shocked too and only DeMarco seemed able to find that reaction. I like the situations into which their hosts relentlessly placed them and I love the acute discomfort that Michael Hanelin and Tenley Dene sent their way in waves. Paired off by gender, the first question Gary asks Alfred is, 'Do you like guns?' and Angela's first to Judy is, 'How big's his dick?' Perhaps partly because Gary and Alexandra are completely in control of the evening, Hanelin and Dene automatically find themselves in the driving seat, but they milk it throughout. Hanelin especially shines in a comedic role, something I don't believe I've seen him in before; his timing is pristine and his reaction when Alfred assumes his guns equate to a love of hunting is priceless (they're vegetarians who don't eat anything with a face). Dene keeps up with him well in the scenes they share and takes over when alone with Judy. They own the film.

While it's fair to say that anyone watching this because it was written by P G Wodehouse is going to feel rather misled if not utterly outraged, I enjoyed the new story Mills put together. In fact I can laugh at the idea of dialogue like, 'All any man really wants is a home cooked meal and a place to put his wiener' in a Wodehouse adaptation. Trying to imagine the dry wit of Fry and Laurie in a conversation like the one that Alexandra leads Judy into in the appliance room is a riot all on its own. Certainly I want to see Hanelin in more comedy; all I can remember prior to this is Star Babies, but he's hardly the focus of attention there, more of an in joke for people who are used to seeing him paired off with Colleen Hartnett. I appreciated a longer running time, twenty minutes or so, in a series where even the longest stories Mills adapted got a lot less than that. It allowed the actors to play things slower, build in awkward silences and react with the thoughtfulness that the characters deserved.

I also appreciated some of the technical decisions behind the film. While I do wonder why Angela Haines, tasked with playing a stunningly naive young lady, would be placed in a dress that shows off her tattoos, not to mention emphasises her bust, she did otherwise look the part, as did the other actors. When they meet for the first time, 'the newlyweds' are in the dark while their evening's hosts are in the light, a clear analogy for their respective experience levels. The camera's focus is also consistently well chosen, some scenes focused on the characters rather than what they're looking at (of course, that also helps budget concerns) and others focused on reactions rather than actions. The dinner scene in particular highlights both connection and disconnection and, in tandem with the editing, it's superb. As Gary moans in delight at his wife's salad, we don't watch him; we watch in turn Alexandra enjoying the tease and their lost and embarrassed guests. It's also the film in microcosm; it's those who get it who will enjoy it most.

The Captain's Story (2014)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Robert Peters, Collin Gaveck and Ron Bowen

While Mark Twain is a titan in American literature, most won't have read the obscure story that Travis Mills adapted into this film. The Captain's Story was first published in 1892 with roots in a travelogue which he published in The Atlantic Monthly fifteen years earlier called Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion. A key reason to adapt this rather than better known material like The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County must surely rest in how contemporary it feels. A hundred and forty years doesn't mean much to satirists of religion, after all, given that the writings they spear generally predate them by thousands. This one is a relatively straightforward narrative, given by an old sea captain, 'Hurricane' Jones by name, to a clergyman in plain clothes, the Revd Peters, on board his ship during a sea voyage. Without knowing that he's addressing a man of the cloth, he explains how the miracles of the Bible should be interpreted, with results that he apparently doesn't realise contradict his obvious unyielding faith.

While the captain's story is the heart of The Captain's Story, Mills adds bookends to introduce it. He has a very eager young man waylay his pastor to seek help because he feels that he's losing his Sunday School class, unable to explain what he's finding in the Old Testament. Collin Gaveck is well cast as Kenny, a well meaning, bright eyed youngster, clearly out of his depth but willing to ask for help, something of an open book waiting to be written on; and Robert Peters is just as appropriate as Pastor Larry, just as clean cut, if we can ignore his cigarettes, but an older, more cynical sort who would like nothing more than to be back home on his leather sofa watching the Knicks on his big screen TV. As is so often the case with priests, he delivers his answer in the form of a story, the captain's, as delivered to him as a seminary student losing faith while doing community service at a rest home. We receive the story in monologue from Ron Bowen.

And, if Gaveck and Peters are well cast, Bowen is a gimme for this role, suitably grizzled and with a well travelled accent. He has to sell the picture because, for the most part, all we see is him, his face and his pipe in front of a plain white background. It's a fun story, full of outright theological mistakes and aiming to impound a highly unorthodox view of miracles, but it does explain what a young man must do to keep his flock. In fact, quite deliberately, it even mangles the Biblical passage it aims to explain, the one from 1 Kings that pits Elijah against the 450 prophets of Baal on the slopes of Mount Carmel in a battle to see whose god will light the fire under an altar holding a bullock as sacrifice. The captain doesn't just forget the sacrifice or the fact that the Baalist prophets were slaughtered afterwards, he even transposes Isaac for Elijah. What's important is that he puts his faith not in God but the ability of man to convince people of His power. It's a circular argument that fails horribly but in a delightful and reminiscent way.

Given how minimal the setup is, there's very little on which to comment. The text is Twain's, albeit in an expurgated form, and Bowen delivers it with relish. The framing story is a decent addition that highlights an irony. Mills had his eyes set on a particular church outside which to shoot Kenny and Pastor Larry, but he gained permission to shoot for only two hours. With merely two actors and no other crew, Mills would have found it an easy task if it hadn't been for noisy road construction nearby. The three of them kept at it, recording take after take to provide clean audio throughout, and they finished within the two hours. It has to be a particularly cruel irony that it played with horrendous sound early on the Sunday morning at the 52 Films in 52 Weeks festival, thus prompting my desire to see this afresh to hear it properly, as it's hardly strong visually. A different event at the same venue after the Saturday screenings had ended had messed with the speakers and it took even James Alire a little while to get back to pristine quality.

The choice to shoot the majority of the film against a static white background is an odd one for a visual format; this would play almost as well on radio without any changes to the words. However, it does add to the timeless nature of the piece. Twain's story was sourced from a trip to Bermuda with a clergyman friend, Joe Twichell, and it's open as to which particular flavour of Christianity he had fun with, possibly the Presbyterians who are tangentially referenced in the text. However it rings true with any number of targets today, from TV evangelists through Southern Baptists speaking in tongues to snake handlers in the Pentecostal Church of God. The story has probably been ripe for reapplication every decade since it was written and removing visual context from this adaptation will aid its passage down the years in the same way. The only thing that leapt out as odd to me was the pronunciation of Baal, which is correct in English but highlighted to me that I've been using the Hebrew pronounciation instead. Baal humbug!

A Respectable Woman (2014)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Colleen Hartnett, Michael Coleman, Travis Mills and Stacie Stocker

This film is Running Wild's second attempt at a Kate Chopin story as part of the 52 Films in 52 Weeks and it may be the best picture in the project thus far, in large part because it has time to breathe. With twenty minutes of running time for the fourteen hundred words Chopin wrote, it's explored with a lot more depth than The Kiss, which translated a thousand words into a mere four minutes on screen. It also allowed for the first great performance to manifest itself at last, following a number of notable ones like Bill Wetherill in An Encounter, Eric Almassy in The Liar and Holly Dell in You Touched Me, not to forget Shelly Boucher's supporting role in The Devil and Tom Walker. Here the entire picture is written on Colleen Hartnett's face and, thankfully, she proves more than able to carry it. It's an especially strong showing, given that for the second Chopin adaptation running, Michael Coleman is gifted with a peach of a wild card character; he's capable enough to have stolen the whole thing if Hartnett hadn't been on top of her game.

She's the title character, of course, though hardly the respectable woman that Chopin wrote about back in 1894 for Vogue. Mrs Baroda was a lady of society, who wouldn't dream of appearing with tousled hair or with so little make up, let alone dressing casually even when working from home. In fact, I'd suggest that she would see work as being beneath her station. In Chopin's original story, she's spending a restful spring at the plantation after a busy winter of entertaining guests when her husband, Gaston, surprises her with another one, a college friend named Gouvernail. He's no society gentleman, merely a journalist, so he doesn't move in Mrs Baroda's circles and they've never met. She immediately makes assumptions as to how common he must be and thus decides that she won't like him before he even arrives. Instead, she finds that she does like him but can't explain why, even to herself. Over time, she struggles with who he is and what he means to her carefully constructed world.

With the exception of the 120 years and 1,200 miles between the Louisiana story and the Arizona short film, this adaptation is relatively close. While the respectable woman of the title isn't truly respectable in the society sense meant by Chopin, she thinks she is. Clearly houseproud, she has no wish for her home to become a frat house, and to avoid such a horrendous fate, her mouth moves faster than her mind and her mind faster than her perception of reality. Certainly she looks down on Walt before he ever shows up to stay and she may well look down on her husband Tom too. Certainly Hartnett doesn't have the shared charisma with Travis Mills that she does with Michael Hanelin, who would normally play the husband in a film like this. Given that Hanelin was the Running Wild casting director for this project, I'm sure it was a conscious decision to cast Mills instead of himself and probably for that very reason. It adds an edge to the relationship which underpins how this respectable woman interacts with her husband's guest.

In both the story and the film, the implication is that the respectable woman isn't, that she's just putting on airs and graces to play a role and it merely takes the right guest to make her aware of it. Perhaps that realisation is slightly different, that in the film she merely finds it while in the story she also decides that she doesn't have to be restricted by her role, but that's open to interpretation. Certainly she's a lot more comfortable with herself in the story than the film, with cinematic choices here emphasising how distant she and Tom are: either a careful distance between them while they talk or back and forth editing, not to mention the deliberately weak moments of affection. Chopin's ladies are generally in control, even when their worlds are shaken up, but Mills chooses to have his respectable woman shaken at the outset and in various degrees of turmoil throughout, until the decision she makes at the end of the piece which we get but Tom completely fails to understand.

And in talking about the title character, who owns this film, I've mostly avoided talking about Walt, who serves the same purpose as Gouvernail but in a completely different way. In the story, Gouvernail is run down from overwork and wants nothing more than to rest at his friend's plantation to recoup his energy; his interactions with Mrs Baroda are driven by her not him. Here, Walt is a complete fish out of water but one who nonetheless finds a way to be comfortable, perhaps another reason that the lady of the house finds herself drawn to him even as she's horrified by him. He drives their interactions here, beginning as she finds him bathing in their pool. He doesn't drink the way he used to and he wants to eat outside; he doesn't want to be indoors and his first time inside is shot at a suitably odd angle to show how poorly he fits there. The final straw has him shoot darts from a blowgun at the cushions on the couch, an obviously Freudian act that is an immediate affront to a respectable woman but, later, something that resonates.

Michael Coleman is excellent here, the sort of different, exotic, interesting character that Seth Gandrud is so good at playing. Perhaps he'd have been cast if only he hadn't played a similar role as recently as You Touched Me three weeks earlier, but Coleman nails the part, even when he's leading scenes while facing away from the camera so that all we see is the little pony tail on the back of his head. He's as powerful a presence in the film as he becomes in the mind of his friend's wife, enough that when he leaves, the hall seems empty without his bags in it. The camerawork at that point is excellent, coming right after a scene of tender motion and switching to urgency as the lady of the house finds Walt gone and rushes down the hall to look at the empty rocking chair in the back yard and realises that he's gone from her world. If this film belongs yet again to the writer and the lead actor, the way the camera is used is worthy of note too. Travis Mills was the writer and the director of photography, but thankfully not the leading lady.

While A Respectable Woman was arguably the strongest 52 Films in 52 Weeks picture at this point, it has its technical problems. The editing occasionally felt a little sharp between scenes that warranted a softer transition between them. Most obviously the lighting is often wild, not so much on the actors themselves but on the backgrounds behind them. It's not consistent, sometimes too dim but often too bright, enough so that I wondered if there might be a cinematic reason for it but I came up dry. Certainly the odd angles used are deliberate, as are the lackluster moments between Tom and his wife. The webisode shot for this picture raises sound as a deliberate trigger for suspense à la Robert Bresson, but sound felt less obvious than lighting, sitting back and mostly doing its job rather than disturbing us with its prominence. If the lighting lessened it, the more relaxed running time and strong performances from Hartnett and Coleman enhanced it and it could easily land a film festival slot on its own merits.

Tennessee's Partner (2014)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Mikal Benion, Andre Stephens, Michael Rivers, Jason Tucker, Hanifah Holsome, Billy Williams, Gus Edwards and Dre Ducati

I remembered Tennessee's Partner pretty well from its festival screening. It stood out at the time because it had an all black cast, the pace was notably slow and the music was a little different to the films around it. After rewatching, it's the genre that stands out as Mills converted it into a completely different style to the 1869 story by Bret Harte. Harte is mostly known for his early work that surrounds the California gold rush, so westerns. Tennessee's Partner is one of his most remembered stories, enough that it's inspired a following. Allan Dwan directed a feature in 1955 with Ronald Reagan in the title role, playing what Peter Bogdanovich described as 'his most likeable performance.' Parts of the western musical Paint Your Wagon are clearly inspired by it, as is the Four Seasons song Big Girls Don't Cry, at least in the memory of lyricist Bob Gaudio, as recounted in Jersey Boys; he thought he was watching John Payne in Tennessee's Partner, when it was really John Payne in Slightly Scarlet. Anyway, Travis Mills turns it into an urban gangster flick.

It's an odd story, with an odder ending. I literally reread the last couple of paragraphs half a dozen times to figure out exactly what Harte was trying to say. Initially I thought he'd turned his western into a ghost story, but really he was emphasising the brotherly love between Tennessee and the unnamed character known only as Tennessee's Partner. It's a strong one because it had already survived the sort of incident which would set most brothers at each other's throats. After Tennessee's Partner had brought back a wife to the fancifully named Poker Flat, Tennessee promptly stole her away for himself. Yet when he returned, without her, as she'd been stolen away in turn by another, the Partner met him with a handshake and not an ill word said. No wonder the similarly nameless narrator (Harte makes it clear that names have little meaning in Poker Flat) felt it important to tell the tale of this forgiving man who met betrayal with loyalty. He's a simple and serious man, who risks his life for his partner and whose dying thoughts are of him.

Mills actually keeps most of the story intact, even with its translation to east side gangster story. He kicks things off at the point where Tennessee returns and tells it primarily through the gossip of two black men who sit on a porch and drink. As is appropriate for a Bret Harte story, they aren't given names but they're played by Billy Williams and Running Wild Films co-founder Gus Edwards and the dialogue is strong. This is a good way to fill in background and both of them are easily up to it. As neither of them is likely to ever leave that porch unless its to get a fresh bottle, it falls instead to Mikal Benion's character, who sits there listening but never saying a word, to literally take us with him to witness the consequences of the events they're gossiping about. Quite why he's such an obvious tail I have no idea. Maybe Mills read 'simple and serious' in another fashion entirely. Maybe his Partner is happy for someone to tell his story. Maybe it's all conjured out of the mind of Benion's character, of which more later.

What Mills cuts out is the ending, not only those last couple of paragraphs that I had to reread but quite a few before it too. In Harte's story, Tennessee is known to be a gambler and suspected to be a thief, but he apparently gets a little too blatant and is consequently tried for armed robbery. Quite whether this is true or not is open to debate, given that he's caught and tried by the man he allegedly robbed, a Judge Lynch no less, in one day, then hanged and buried the next. The wings of justice were ever swift in the old west, but they weren't always just, especially with the word 'lynch' in play. Even with his translation to gangster flick, Mills keeps it all consistent up until the trial, merely substituting the real judge for a local crime lord merely nicknamed 'the Judge', again an appropriate switch for a Bret Harte story in which everyone goes by a nickname whether they need one or not. After that, he takes a couple of details from the story and gives them a whole new meaning, thus providing an intriguingly new and more substantial ending.

I liked Tennessee's Partner when I first saw it, but that ending is what's staying with me from this viewing. It's appropriate to quote a western here, given that's what Harte wrote, so I'll quote the memorable line from the ending of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance which said that, 'When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.' Everything in Tennessee's Partner, both the original story and this adaptation of it, are legend, recounted by a nameless narrator about characters whose real names he doesn't know. It's very possible that he transcribed hearsay to go with what he saw, or perhaps just made stuff up. The truth is so far hidden behind the words that we can only guess at it. Mills taps into this with an adaptation that does the same. If Benion's character is the narrator, ironic as he never speaks, he does the same thing: watching and listening and turning it all into an unreliable story. It's always possible that he's recounting the legend to us just as much as the old gossips told parts of it to him. But hey, it's a good legend.

Eveline (2014)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Stacie Stocker, Maria Patti, Susan Rienzo, Dillard Taylor and Jesse Michael-Geronimo Valencia

By week twelve, Travis Mills was getting into his stride and feeling confident. 'Every week I feel us getting better at telling these stories,' he noted in the webseries episode shot alongside this. It's understandable, as he'd cleared some notable obstacles in previous weeks and found this one easy running. 'We got done in one day what I had scheduled for two,' he explained. Then again, this was a relatively simple film, with a tiny crew and a cast that wasn't much bigger; only three locations, none of which were outdoors; and a source story that tries to do a lot with very little, much like many Running Wild short films. It's the next in James Joyce's Dubliners and it has to do with a young lady who wants out of the life she has and into one that's different in every way: exotic, romantic and alive. Her ticket to this new life, literally, is a sailor who has 'fallen on his feet in Buenos Ayres'. He wants her to be his wife and he has a house ready for her to move into. Of course, this is a Joyce story, so pessimism ensues.

It's easy to see Eveline as yet another of Joyce's short stories that has a huge build but no payoff and it's easy to leave it empty and unfulfilled. However, there's a real truth here that I've witnessed myself often and I've personally gone through what Eveline finds that she can't. Everything in the story exists to lead up to her decision and it's the sum of it that makes the difference rather than any one piece. Eveline has a miserable life, one she dearly wants to leave behind, but that miserable life is all she knows. In the end, it'll always be better the devil you know even if the grass isn't as green, or some other mangled pair of proverbs. There are a lot of them that speak to this situation, because it's such a common one. I grew up in England, where I thankfully wasn't miserable like Eveline, but I left my family, country and life to move to another continent and get married. Ten years on, I haven't once regretted my decision, however much I miss the food, but I know many others who dream of doing the same thing but absolutely never will.

Mills's adaptation to the screen is an anorexic one indeed. I was surprised to find that it ran six minutes, as it feels like half that. Much of Joyce's story is built of memories and to adapt it faithfully would require a much more substantial shoot than was viable. I like what Mills brought in to replace them, a miserable pair of women from Eveline's work moaning about how she's leaving and talking down her chances. I'm familiar with bleating women like this (of both sexes) because I've had to listen to conversations just like this one while I was fixing their computers and they couldn't work in the meantime. They're the sort who are happy being unhappy and the best way to do that is to be jealous about someone else who might do what they know they never will. Maria Patti and Susan Rienzo are frustrating to watch because I've seen this so often, but they do it well. Unfortunately, the flipside of ditching all those memories is that Stacie Stocker has to find a way for Eveline to explain everything she's leaving with facial expressions.

And that's frankly impossible, so she's up against it from moment one. She's a really odd choice for this role and I wonder why Michael Hanelin cast her as Eveline. For a start, she's a long way from nineteen, however good she looks, so the whole dynamic of a young woman wondering if she can really leave the only home she's known is completely lost. This Eveline has a whole lot more experience behind her than Joyce's Eveline, so her decision is completely different. Perhaps that's why Mills ended his story a little sooner than Joyce ended his. Stocker's also a very strong woman, which makes this part a tough one for her to sell. The scene where she summons up the strength to leave her father behind in their RV without making his breakfast first is exactly what she does best, but most of her part calls for weakness instead, whether it's through fear of her father or fear of the unknown. With a lot more screen time, I'm sure she could nail the part, but she doesn't have that luxury and it really shows.

While Dillard Taylor is a much more natural casting choice and he does very well with his few moments on screen, Jesse Michael-Geronimo Valencia has an even tougher task than Stocker. While Joyce had his Eveline fall for a sailor who's back in his home country for a holiday and wants her to sail away with him, Mills's contemporary version has an internet romance that leads to her driving out to Sky Harbor. It's the right update, but we only hear the object of Eveline's affections through a computer screen as we watch her face and that's a really tough set up to generate shared charisma. In the end, Valencia merely has to settle for matching Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio's record in my mind as the actor with the most syllables in their name. I'm unsure as to what Mills could have done with this story, as a faithful adaptation would have been ten minutes of narrated montage leading up to a brief and unsatisfying ending. He tries for a better film than that but only manages to give us the bones, not the flesh.

You Touched Me (2014)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Holly Dell, Jessica Bryce, Seth Gandrud and Donald H Steward

Even though You Touched Me screened in the very first set at the 52 Films in 52 Weeks festival, closing up the opening night selection, it stayed with me in much more detail than most of what followed, and I was keen to find out why. I wanted to know what D H Lawrence was saying in his short story and what Travis Mills excised to make it fit into a short film. I especially wanted to discover what the character of Hadrian meant, as Seth Gandrud had little to do in the film but somehow owned it regardless. What I found was that this is one of the more interesting adaptations of the whole series. While Mills retained Lawrence's title and the scene that warrants it, along with character names and a little of the dialogue, he rewrote almost everything else entirely. He didn't do so merely because of time and place, as Lawrence's English story, framed as always in the classes, wouldn't be easy to translate directly to modern day Arizona. He changed every dynamic of the story too and replaced the mildly creepy tone with a more uplifting one.

Not one of Lawrence's characters is remotely likeable. He introduces us first to the Pottery House, an ugly affair which used to be a commercial property but is now residential, then to Matilda and Emmie Rockley, two old maids whose attributes remind of their house. Emmie's coming up to thirty, while Matilda has just passed it, but their attitudes are of much older women, dismissive spinsters waiting for their father to die and leave them everything. Into their life comes Hadrian, as he had done once before. With four girls and no boys, Mr Rockley chose to adopt one from a charity institution, bringing him up as his own. Each of the girls insisted he call them 'cousin', as if it would serve to distance them from his lower class background. They're all framed in class. Emmie and Matilda are unmarried because they feel they deserve better than the town has to offer, while Hadrian moved to Canada so as to be able to escape his class limitations and move up the chain. Mr Rockley sits above it all and plays with the lives of his children.

This depressing tale saw first publication in 1920, soon after Lawrence had begun his voluntary exile from England, what he called his 'savage pilgrimage'. He saw his own country through bitter eyes, as it meant to him poverty, harrassment and accusations. He'd already been investigated on allegations of obscenity, charges that would consistently plague him throughout his career. It's no stretch to read this story as the opposite of a love letter to his country. Thankfully Mills jettisons most of it, replacing creepy manipulation with a more conventional love triangle. He kills off the father immediately, highlighting at the very outset that he's been dead for a couple of days. He keeps Mattie and Emily the same age physically but renders them younger mentally, less isolated and more endearing. Hadrian shows up because of correspondence with his father, so his arrival is a surprise to the girls. Each of the relationships between them are framed in much more positive ways than the bitterness and machinations of Lawrence's characters.

Mills does keep enough substance to avoid this becoming a cheesy romance and wisely frames his story around Mattie rather than Hadrian. Her dialogue is very telling. When the family lawyer tells the girls that Hadrian is here, her immediate response is, 'He isn't blood'; yet when Emily mentions his powerful arms, her first thought is, 'But he's your brother.' Holly Dell is a strong lead, effectively playing two characters who are fighting for control. She's mostly brusque to the point of rudeness, instinctively pushing people away from her, but inside aches to love and be loved; she struggles to let that side of her out. She isn't the old maid of Lawrence's story but, unless she changes, she'll get there. On the other hand, Emily is a soft and giving free spirit, played effortlessly by Jessica Bryce. When the girls are told that Hadrian is in the stable, Emily rushes there to be framed superbly in the doorway, blurry and in soft light because the camera's focus is on him. It's an odd choice but an appropriate one, because it speaks to her emotions.

The two girls are alike in many ways, not least their attraction to Hadrian, but they're polar opposites in others. Emily's heart is on her sleeve, but Mattie's is hidden away deep inside. In many ways, this is why this story works, but it's assisted in no small way by Seth Gandrud as Hadrian. He's a strong man; he left years ago, did whatever, hitch-hiked back from Maine. We get the impression that he could do anything he wants to do, but here he does nothing, just stands there like the cover of a romance novel, while the girls fall apart in front of him, waiting for them to find themselves. He spends his most important scene asleep; it's a parallel to the one in Lawrence's story but switched up entirely to render the title obsolete. Most of his dialogue is, 'I don't mind', his 'As you wish.' Westley in The Princess Bride, was also an active man choosing to be passive for his own reasons. Gandrud is almost messianic in his inherent peace and ability to be in two places at once, but I couldn't find a religious subtext and I looked. This isn't Joyce.

The connections between the original story and Mills's adaptation to contemporary Arizona are one of the more interesting aspects of most of the 52 Films in 52 Weeks. He often had to cut out material, especially from the longer stories and to mixed success. Some of the better films, like The Kiss and Araby, retell the originals in a different way, not just removing material but adding new elements too, whether in the style or the script. Here, Mills rewrote the whole thing, creating a completely new story out of a few elements from the original. Had Lawrence's story been more worthy or Mills's less strong, this could have backfired spectacularly. Fortunately, Lawrence's story leaves a notably bad taste in the mouth and Mills's punches notably above its weight. There's little on the surface, just another love triangle, but there's more going on underneath and it's constructed very well indeed, compact but unrushed: the script, the lighting, the choice of focus. Perhaps Bryce's early scenes should have had a few more takes, but that's about it.

The Bum (2014)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Eric Almassy, Travis Mills, Tenley Dene, David Wellnitz, Rohan Shetty and Steve Wilson

I saw most of the 52 Films in 52 Weeks at the three day festival that debuted them to the public, and not one of them stood out as more immediately and obviously meaningful than The Bum, a 1929 story by W Somerset Maugham originally titled The Derelict. Even before it finished, I was intrigued as to how much of what's on screen is what Maugham wrote and how much what Mills brought to his adaptation of it, as it's impossible not to read it as the Running Wild Films manifesto. That interpretation is aided by real life observations. This was the first of these 52 films to feature Mills himself as a prominent character, not as the lead but as the most important character in the film. The first day of shooting, which took care of the present day scenes, is why he cultivated a memorably bushy beard over a number of months, one which got ever bushier with each succeeding episode of the webseries they shot during 2013. Once done, that beard was promptly shaved so he could shoot scenes the next day set years earlier.

Mills plays the bum of the title, in which form he never speaks. He just wanders around, looking unkempt and notably intense. In another story, we might believe he was dealt tough cards or abused a substance or three, but not this one. Here, he's the architect of his own destiny, through sheer stubbornness. To find out how and why, we have to meet him through the eyes of the real lead character, Barry Connor, played by Eric Almassy, who's really good at being the visualisation of a narrator, the person who experiences a story on screen along with those of us watching at home, without necessarily playing a part in it. Here he wants to be a writer, but he doesn't seem to have the drive to make it happen. Perhaps he's more in love with the idea of having written than actually going through the process of writing. As we meet him, in the present day, he's taking a couple of weeks off to write, which may just mean reminiscing through the box of old stories he keeps out of sight because his wife wants to throw them away.

The connection between the two almost happens when Barry is sitting at an outdoor table thinking while his wife shops. Enter the bum to look for scraps on tables, bundled up in a hoodie but with those piercing eyes and bushy beard. He looks potentially dangerous. He moves on, but Barry has recognised him. He's the centre of attention in the flashback scenes that we watch in colour, as if everything was more vibrant back when Barry and Tom were in college. Tom, sans beard but with just as intense an air, holds court in an auditorium, three other students hanging on his words. Somehow he's relaxed but angry, denigrating the validity of the professor who's been giving them advice because he's never been published, at least not really. Barry and the others are unnerved, as if they know they should agree with Tom but don't have the courage to dive down that rabbit hole. Further conversation backs that up and it all feels exactly like Mills's views on film schools and professors who only teach, never do.

Barry says he wants to be a writer, but his writing revolves around classwork. He's inquisitive enough to ask Tom for feedback on The Desert Stranger, the story he pulls out first in the present day which sends him back to these flashbacks, but Tom doesn't give him the critique he expects. He asks why he wrote it, whether he'd have written it outside of class. Barry doesn't have answers to questions like, 'Where did it come from?' Tom believes that writers write because it's who they are, not because it's who they want to be. 'It should be coming out of you,' he enforces. 'It should be coming from your gut.' This dialogue is all the more magnetic because while we're hearing from Tom, we're clearly also hearing from Travis. There are scenes in the 52 Films in 52 Weeks webseries where Mills sounds just like Tom, driving and analysing because the best education is doing. That's what this project is all about, releasing the films that burn to come out of him and, in the process, making him a better filmmaker. It's learning by doing.

Barry Connor doesn't understand and Eric Almassy captures that well. He's a little too loose in the earlier scenes but in the flashbacks he reacts just right. Half of him wants to reject Tom's arrogance, but half of him wants to adopt him as his guru. None of him realises that his dreams aren't going to lead him where he wants to go because he doesn't have the passion. Instead he turns on Tom when he says that, 'I don't have any answers' and tells him that he's going to end up a bum, which of course he does. This is the old paradox of integrity: if you compromise, you might just succeed and be able to create professionally as a living; if you don't, you might never get anywhere but you'll still be true to your artistic vision. Many may see the last scene as a suggestion that you have to compromise that vision or you'll burn yourself out. I see it differently, that Barry's compromise inevitably led him nowhere while Tom's still true to himself, as a bum writing in puddles in the park. Each sees the other as worse off than them. Who's right?

Maugham's story leaves that question as open as Mills does, but cloaks the idea subtly in religious garb as if the bum his narrator meets in Vera Cruz, Mexico and who he eventually recognises as the confident and arrogant writer he knew decades earlier in Rome, has Christ-like attributes. The narrator realises that 'he had sacrificed everything to be a writer,' but for whom? Is he merely suffering for his art or for that of others, like the man who tries to help him but is rebuffed. Perhaps this act of charity, after the symbolic three days, is what will save the narrator instead, who began by lamenting 'that I had not half the time I needed to do half the things I wanted.' Perhaps he'll now make the time, if only out of shock. Barry might do the same, because Tom has at least lived and experienced. Maybe Barry might have achieved without the distractions of an easy life with a job and a wife who thinks old stories should be thrown away. Maybe he should reevaluate his dedication. Maybe he can write the sequel to The Bum.

I have no idea how much Mills has sacrificed for his art, but I know that making 52 films in 52 weeks isn't an easy task and it surely involved a great deal of sacrifice. This challenge was about creating new films, however easy or hard the task at the time. Sure, some films might just flow easily, especially to someone who had already made fifty or so, some of them features, but others wouldn't. We've already seen that in Catastrophe, The Return and Araby, but there were challenges here as well; this time the crew were able to use the rain to their advantage. Mills chose to shoot the present day scenes in black and white but the flashback scenes in colour. Clearly one reason is just to delineate between them, but I doubt that's it. Are we merely enforcing that Barry's ambition has faded over time or are we highlighting how his options are more polarised and obvious? Perhaps if he makes the right choice, to let his passion loose and write what he perhaps aches to write, everything will shift back into colour. Maybe Tom saw it that way all along.

Araby (2014)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Kevin Ashton, Andrew Laguna, Henry Ibarra, Antonio Elzy, Dana Bohanske, Marissa del Prado and Michael Hanelin

Given that many of my comments on the last few 52 Films in 52 Weeks have tied to what Travis Mills did to the source stories he adapted to the screen, it seems odd that Araby is at once one of the truest to the original material and one of the strangest adaptations of them all. Part of this is because of the trouble he found putting this film together. The Araby of the title is a bazaar in Dublin, thus providing through name and purpose an exotic enticement to both the reader and the lead character, epitomising his new crush. Yet for all that Joyce conjured up such a place through his words, his story remains firmly about everyday Irish folk, with all the Catholic guilt that drives them, especially about sex. Mills aimed to cast the short with Middle Eastern actors, perhaps to play with the notion that what we see as exotic, others know as routine and vice versa. However, he was unable to find his cast (maybe Mina Mirkhah was in New York), so switched the whole thing around to be Hispanic instead, all with a mere week to go before the shoot.

Being forced to deal with this sort of roadblock is precisely the sort of challenge that the 52 Films in 52 Weeks project was supposed to hurl at Mills. Gus Edwards talks in the webisode shot alongside the film about how the project was always aimed at being a 'baptism of fire', enforcing that, 'The best thing is: it doesn't stop you.' It didn't stop Mills and he found his cast and made his film. His choice of words in the webisode is rather telling: 'The idea of having to recast and reimagine a short film in less than a week,' he suggests, 'was a little daunting.' Now, he can play it up as a greater challenge than the rain that fell during Catastrophe or the loss of a lead actress in The Return, but his own words betray him. Only nine weeks in, this challenge was merely 'a little daunting'. Obviously the project is already starting to work. An added challenge was that while he found his cast, their availability meant that he only had six hours to shoot the entire film. 'It was fast and fun,' he later said, 'like a Running Wild film should be.'

However, while it's an especially interesting film, it's no 'motion picture' because there's no motion. The whole thing is comprised of a set of still photographs, an approach surely taken because of the pressing time constraints rather than any influence from Chris Marker, though with Mills you never know. Marker was an overtly English pseudonym for a French filmmaker, after all. Whatever the reasons, this approach is an appropriate one because Joyce's Araby was all about capturing a moment, not merely of a boy at a bazaar but of a point in his life where he stopped thinking about playing in the street with his friends and started thinking of a girl, Mangan's sister. 'Her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood,' explains Joyce's anonymous narrator. 'Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance.' In this film, all we have is an image, because we never see Antonio's sister move. The biggest success here is the capturing of the moments Joyce aimed at, literally through still images.

Mills captures much more though, underlining how Araby is one of his most successful translations. The exotic undertones, which of course aren't merely suggesting unknown delights on foreign shores (neatly highlighted through changing The Memoirs of Vidocq into The Arabian Nights and having some dialogue delivered in subtitled Spanish) but also unknown delights under Antonio's sister's dress, are well caught here in these fleeting glimpses, even if the natural translation of a bazaar to modern Arizona is as banal as a mall. The self-loathing and bigotry of Joyce's characters, instilled through the religion which echoes through his work as much as the rain outside his windows, is written into good narration, softly delivered by Cisco Saavedra and Ixchel del Castillo. That book belongs to our young hero's father, a scholar who his uncle describes as 'a man with soft hands'. Those aren't Joyce's words, but they easily could have been, as that's precisely the sort of politely barbed putdown that can be discovered everywhere in his work.

Perhaps the best line that Mills adds in is one that appears overly simple but absolutely nails the point of the story. 'I never wanted to play again,' emphasises our young lovestruck hero, now that he's enchanted into what Joyce described as 'confused adoration'. Even the casting of this boy is spot on, because he's a number of years too young to do what he thinks he wants but, of course, he wouldn't believe that. Every boy has a crush at a time when they imagine they're old enough but really aren't any more than a boner on legs beginning to figure out what it's for. This short film ably shows both how unattainable Antonio's sister is and how the much too young boy beginning to think about the future has no comprehension of that truth. All he hears is his uncle's voice telling him, 'You are a real man now,' in another deceptively simple line that packs a lot more punch than it might initially seem. It also ably shows the magic of this moment in every boy's life, before he really understands what that is.

This is far from an ordinary film and I'm sure it's far from what Mills aimed it to be, but it still admirably, if unconventionally, succeeds in telling a story that's at once contemporary to us in Arizona and true to the original material written a hundred years ago on the other side of the pond. Because Mills managed to turn an apparent disaster into perhaps the best adaptation in this project so far, if perhaps not the best picture, he proved that Gus Edwards was more than onto something with his comments before shooting began. This would have been so easy to give up on, but perseverance took care of business. Perhaps the only easy decision Mills made here was the music he picked for the soundtrack, Kevin MacLeod surely the most recurring name in 52 Films in 52 Weeks credits after Mills, Alire and Hanelin (after the festival at which all these films were screened, I keep seeing Kevin MacLeod's name everywhere). In a film about magic, we're reminded that it's the magic of art that our hardest creations are also sometimes our best.

The Devil and Tom Walker (2014)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Ron Foltz, Kevin Phipps, Shelly Boucher, Raymond Scott and Patrick Giglio

On the face of it, Washington Irving's The Devil and Tom Walker, published pseudonymously in 1824 and set for the most part in a 'thickly wooded swamp' outside of Boston, might seem a difficult story to adapt to contemporary Arizona. This thought leapt quickly to mind as I revisit Travis Mills's adaptation for his 52 Films in 52 Weeks project because of the difficulty he found in adapting longer stories like The Return and The Liar in the weeks before this one. He does a much stronger job here, even though, as he did with the two earlier films, he excised a little more material than he should and altered the source story a little too much. Where that approach was problematic before, it's intriguing here, aided by an excellent location, a talented cast and a good eye for composition. If anything, the most troublesome aspect is the sound, not a common complaint on Running Wild pictures, as some dialogue out in the open is a little quiet. Perhaps that's due to James Alire only handling the sound in post-production.

The visuals are Arizona from moment one. The swamps and inlets of Massachusetts are replaced by the deserts and mountains of Arizona and they're captured well. There's a great static shot as the credits roll and Tom Walker wanders through the cacti towards the camera, underpinned by music by Ohioan that's as wide open as the landscape. We're introduced to Tom through Mills's opening narration, which sounds old but isn't from Irving's story, and to one of the changes Mills made to the material, namely that Walker isn't 'a meagre, miserly fellow', as Irving had it; he's merely ordinary, Ron Foltz as generic here as he was stirring in The Sisters. He's in the mountains being ordinary enough to hold his friends back, so he stops to let them enjoy their hike. They leave him water but he looks for more, finding it in the form of a water cooler attached to the fireplace that's all that remains of an old collapsed building in the middle of the desert. It's at once surreal, believable and metaphorically appropriate, a magnificent choice of location.

It's here that he encounters a rather grizzled and sunstricken Kevin Phipps, playing the Devil, Arizona as close to Hell as it gets. Phipps is known within the Arizona film community more as an acting coach and a director than an actor, but he does move in front of the camera on occasion and he's the obvious choice to play this part. I've always seen something of the trickster god in him and it's deceit and omnipotence that he's tasked with bringing out in this character. He gives a gloriously memorable performance, which to me screamed Torgo from Manos: The Hands of Fate, given all the twitching, the wild voice and wilder cactus infused walking stick. I asked him after the screening in February what his influences for the role were and he told me that he was channelling Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice, who heeded Jimmy Cagney's old advice that actors should never stop moving. Beetlejuice is more obvious in his little interjections and in his dialogue. 'Your wife's a bitch when you get up in the morning,' he growls to begin his pitch.

And of course the pitch is what this story is all about. In Irving's tale, Tom Walker is a miser, he's married to a miser and his miserly habits are enhanced through a deal with the Devil to become his moneylender in return for Captain Kidd's treasure. Mills switches this up a little, not only by replacing that gold with the gold from the Lost Dutchman mine, another neat little Arizona touch, but by making Walker driven not by his own characteristics but by those of his wife, to whom he is utterly subservient. Old Scratch wants Mrs Walker, while Tom wants her to be gone from his life; it isn't a difficult deal to make. When we meet Marcy Walker, we realise why. Shelly Boucher is as superbly cast as Foltz and Phipps, though she has much less screen time than them. If Eric Almassy was my big discovery from the 52 Films in 52 Weeks project, then Shelly Boucher came close and she only appeared in a couple of these shorts. By the time I saw this film, she'd already stunned me in A Mother; her brief but pristine portrayal here further underlined her talent.

Keeping Marcy Walker close to the character in Irving's story but changing Tom's dynamic means that the ending of the film has to change too and I wonder if that's what drove Mills to take this approach. There's an arrogance in it but also a peace, which makes it a highly attractive way to end the story, if not the far more traditional one that Irving used, which of course was old even when it was published in 1824; deals with the devil had been good fodder for storytellers for millennia with the Faust myth first seeing print in the sixteenth century. Perhaps Mills was more inspired by more recent American adaptations of the story, such as The Devil and Daniel Webster or even The Devil Went Down to Georgia. It's also ironic given that the real winners in the film are the two most outrageous characters. Boucher's Marcy is believably a 'tall termagant, fierce of temper, loud of tongue, and strong of arm', while Phipps is far from the 'great black man', 'swarthy and dingy, and begrimed with soot'. Both, however, are delightfully memorable.

The Liar (2014)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Eric Almassy, Amber Michelle and Michael Hanelin

I missed two and a half of the 52 Films in 52 Weeks when Running Wild presented them as a complete set over a February weekend, mostly because I was enjoying the venue too much. This remains the only film festival I've attended within a Mexican restaurant, the Mariscos Vuelve a la Vida in eastern Phoenix, and I enjoyed it enough to wish that all film festivals in the future might be held in Mexican restaurants too. I'm bringing this up because, revisiting The Liar six months later, I thought it was one of those I missed. I had no recollection of it whatsoever, even after reading Henry James's source story, a long, evocative 20,000 word piece from 1888. It only slowly worked its way back into my memory as I rewatched it, not a strong recommendation for a film I'd seen only half a year ago, even if it was amongst 48½ others. It does hold an importance, marking the first time actor Eric Almassy worked with Running Wild Films, but it feels like it's more relevant as a challenge: to condense twenty thousand words into twelve minutes.

In fact, its moments of note seem to be tied more to that challenge than to the quality of the piece itself, hardly a surprising conclusion for anyone who believes that writer/director Travis Mills defines himself at least as much by challenges overcome than by the end results of his work. It's why he shoots so many films, why he takes active part in every film challenge going (even when he has a bigger one eating up his attention, like the 52 Films in 52 Weeks project) and why he drives all the people he works with to do likewise. It wouldn't surprise me if he deliberately selected a few longer stories to adapt just to see how well he could condense them down to their essence, especially The Return and The Liar, the two longest of the entire project, which are both conspicuously attempted early on. Only three later entries are more than half as long as either of these two and one of those is The Dead, the James Joyce story that wrapped up the entire project with an epic sprawl. This surely isn't coincidence, this is Mills challenging himself.

Unfortunately for this film, I feel he was more successful with The Return, which would have been better still had it played out with the running time of The Liar. It only had seven minutes, which felt jam packed with material, and it needed more time to play out and find an ending to the adaptation Mills gave it. By comparison, The Liar runs over twelve but feels a lot emptier, even before going back to the story to see what Mills cut out. Other than that, there are strong similarities. Both feature three main characters, one couple and one third wheel; both feature Michael Hanelin, the casting director for this project; and both are films where the driving force of the story doesn't tie to the lead character. Most of all, of course, both are long stories all about character which Mills had to massively condense to fit within a short film. This one does have more action and dialogue, always easier to adapt to the screen, even though, ironically, most of that was cut out of this version, but it's still about emotion mostly held in check.

Here, the lead is Geoff, an artist played by Eric Almassy, fitting into the Running Wild family immediately and feeling like he'd been there all along. He's found himself in an odd situation, contacted by Mary, who is clearly an important person from his past, though the importance is far more apparent in his mind than in hers. She's Amber Michelle, Mills's girlfriend at the time, and she's good at distracting us from the real emotion, which is in Geoff rather than in the more overtly emotional Mary. She's back in town to broker a business deal and she's brought her husband in tow, whose name we never learn, in the form of Michael Hanelin. It's an awkward experience for Geoff, only rendered more so when he mentions that he painted Mary once before and her husband suggests he should do it again. This awkwardness is exacerbated still further when Mary doesn't show for her sitting and her husband takes her place. With no time to provide background as to why he's the liar of the story, he explains to Geoff what he's hiding from his wife.

If Mills was successful in condensing down the liar's part and adding some neat awkward moments in the process, he's less successful in providing the motivations in play for this adaptation in miniature. In Henry James's story, the motivations of two of the three characters are made very clear while that of the third is the point of the story. Oliver Lyon, the artist, meets his former flame at a social event and we realise that he's still in love with her. However, she's now married, to Colonel Capadoce, who Lyon quickly discovers is what we might call a teller of tall tales, a sort of Baron Münchhausen, similarly without any apparent malice; he simply appears unable to tell the truth under any circumstances. The drive of the story, made possible through the device of Lyon painting members of the Capadoce family over many months, is that he simply cannot believe that the woman he idolises can be a party to her husband's lies. He decides to prove it by painting the Colonel so well that everyone, even her, would see his true nature.

Clearly that's a lot to cram into twelve minutes, but Mills condenses things too far and those motivations are confused. Geoff knew Mary and painted her in the past, as with Lyon and Mrs Capadoce in the source story. He still has feelings for her, though the depth of them is left unclear. In the story, he had proposed to her and been rebuffed; in Mills's adaptation, they may or may not ever have been anything more than friends, though Geoff may have wished otherwise. So far, so good, but why would Mary be horrified when her husband asks Geoff to paint her? There are no horrifying pictures in their past, so it seems strange to presage the eventual painting so quickly. Why Geoff would paint such a thing is inevitably skimmed over because of the running time; he turns out in an hour a portrait based on a minute's monologue, which is too soon for him to feel that he should do so. What's more what we see in his gallery isn't even portraits; they're abstracts that would be difficult to interpret. Maybe he's the liar in this take. Maybe they all are.

While this is generally a weaker entry into the series, if mostly because the size of the challenge was too large to overcome, there are some positive aspects. Not all the compression failed, as Hanelin's liar does make internal sense even after being chopped down into a mere fragment of his original self. This version also gifts him with an opportunity to appear polite and courteous, only to then reveal a much darker man underneath, a skill that he's particularly good at. It's Eric Almassy who shines here though, because he's great at appearing real, whatever the context. He would do better work in later films but he's strong here in his first for Running Wild, more grounded than Michelle or Hanelin, making Geoff appear very natural, even when faced with situations that are very awkward. I didn't believe his studio, his motivation or the closure he finds at the film's end, but I believed him. Yet, as the end credits rolled silently, emphasising the shock of the last scene, they also allowed me to focus on the next film, this one already forgotten.

An Encounter (2013)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Max Mendoza, Trevor Robins, Ryan Horacek and Bill Wetherill

While Travis Mills selected short stories from a variety of authors and times to adapt for his 52 Films in 52 Weeks project, his choices were clearly centred on James Joyce. He started with a Joyce story, The Sisters, and he ended with a Joyce story, The Dead; in between, he adapted every other story in Joyce's Dubliners collection, first published in 1914. I'm not a huge fan of Joyce, if only because of personal bias: in telling quintessentially Irish stories at a time of nationalistic fervour, everything becomes inherently drenched in religion and all delineations are defined through prejudice. However, I can appreciate how good he was at capturing moments with his short stories, something that surely appeals to Mills, who does the same with his short films. Joyce often appears to ramble around a lot, only for us to realise that he merely paints his backgrounds first then gradually focuses in on an abstract moment that often proves universal. This one is no exception, as he sets up a single incident to emphasise the coming of age of his lead character.

In fact, An Encounter is so universal that it must have been one of the easiest of the 52 source stories to bring into the modern day. In the web series episode, Mills mentions how it reminded him of Stand by Me, one of his favourite movies. While both are quintessential coming of age stories, they're very different in their accessibility. Stand by Me is grounded in the little rituals that American kids go through, which often appear inexplicable to foreign eyes, a sort of junior version of John Ford's films, merely replacing square dances and social obligations with wedgies and mailbox destruction. An Encounter, on the other hand, is far more universal, its rituals as accessible as peer pressure and ditching school. Mills adds another here, that of stealing money from family members, but keeps his film as easy to approach as the story. All that he had to update were some minor details: a tanner becomes five bucks; the river Liffey, the lifeblood of Dublin, becomes a Salt River Project irrigation canal, the lifeblood of Phoenix.

Joyce's story follows three boys, young ones who are just reaching the age where rebellion is a draw, who decide to ditch school and travel to the Pigeon House, a famous Dublin landmark that was at this point in time a tuberculosis sanatorium built on reclaimed land in Dublin bay. Of course, nothing goes remotely as they expect. One of the three doesn't even show up and the other two don't make it to the Pigeon House, instead wandering around the docks and failing to find a dairy to buy milk. Eventually they settle down in a field by the banks of the Dodder, one of the Liffey's tributaries, where the encounter of the title occurs. A shabbily dressed man with a stick and an ashen-grey moustache walks past them, then returns to sit and chat with the boys about books and girls, how many of the former they've read and how many of the latter they have as sweethearts. He wanders off to relieve himself but comes back again, changed in his demeanour and ranting about whipping rough boys who talk to girls, a shocking end to their adventure.

Mills's film mirrors this relatively well. He sets three similar boys on a similar journey, though he adds one agreeable little detail in that the boy who doesn't show is the one who had pushed their adventure most emphatically. By comparison, Joyce's no-show is the one who he describes as 'fat' and an 'idler'. This little change heaps pressure on the two who go because they're the ones who are least confident, most out of their element. With no obvious equivalent in Arizona to the Dublin docks, Mills has these boys wander up a canal just to see where it goes, which is where they meet the unnamed bum played by Bill Wetherill. A regular face in Arizona film, Wetherill is a gimme for this role, looking drab but characterful in his beanie and eyepatch, shambling along with a limp. Like the man in Joyce's tale, he's initially friendly, sitting with the boys on the canal bank and telling them tall tales. After he drains his bladder onto a bush, though, he changes, mumbling and beating the ground with a long stick. It's a neatly scary moment.

Of course, the whole point is that these kids believe themselves grown up, ready to be part of the world, but this encounter strongly disavows them of that notion. It's not a deep story, which is probably why this adaptation runs a short four and a half minutes, but it carries a resonance that remains long after it ends; the inherently memorable nature of the encounter makes An Encounter one of the most memorable of the 52 Films in 52 Weeks. The kids are believable, Max Mendoza in particular able to conjure up a strong reaction at the end, but it's Wetherill's show. He's reliable at not looking entirely there and he believably vanishes inside himself to rage at unknown targets, perhaps his own character, while the boys react as if they're in danger. His presence is aided by the fact that the film mostly plays with music and a narration by Mills himself rather than dialogue, so this last sound scene is emphasised. A shift to handheld close ups, rather than the longer shots thus far, also builds this finalé. It's a memorable encounter indeed!

The Return (2013)

Director: Travis Mills
Star: Michael Hanelin, Stacie Stocker, Bailey Stocker and Tony Sarnicki

The fifth of Running Wild's contemporary adaptations of public domain short stories is one of the oddest of them all, because of what it attempts, what it ignores, what it does and what it has no interest at all in doing. The source is an 1897 story by Joseph Conrad, which at over 20,000 words is notably longer than the first four stories Travis Mills adapted put together, but very little happens in it, at least that could be easily translated to the screen. Physically it unfolds within a single room in a single house, mostly in the form of a conversation between a couple who had been married for five years; she left a note explaining that she's leaving him, but then promptly returned while he was still absorbing the news, apparently not willing or able to go through with her plans for reasons that are never explained. However, the real story unfolds in Alvan Hervey's head, as he tries to wrap his head around it. 'He stood alone, naked and afraid, like the first man on the first day of evil,' wrote Conrad, and the story is his response to that.

Given that what drives the story isn't the fact that Hervey's wife left him but that she returned, it's a trip to realise that Mills removed the return entirely from this adaptation of The Return. Sure, Alvan Hervey is updated to become Martin Klinger, whose wife e-mails him at work to tell him that she's leaving, but the script departs from the source story at that point, except for its concentration on Klinger's wild struggles to come to terms with what's just happened. While we soon see a lot of Chelsea Klinger, not to mention their daughter, a character who doesn't exist in the story, we never once see either of them for real, as each scene is conjured up inside Martin's mind as he searches for some sort of understanding of what their relationship really was. In ignoring almost the entire story and removing the event of its title, Mills ambitiously concentrates on what Conrad was aiming for, namely an exploration of emotion within the descriptive language for which he was known and which is incredibly difficult to adapt to film.

Running less than seven rushed minutes, it makes a pretty decent attempt to adapt the claustrophobic and hallucinatory tone of much of Conrad's fiction into visuals. One of my favourite lines from Conrad is one from The Secret Agent where he described a street as 'a slimy aquarium from which the water had been run off.' It's a magnificently concise setting that reeks of oppression, but it would take a budget far more substantial than anything Running Wild can bring to bear to show that as well on screen. This sort of thing is very apparent in The Return, which means that, for instance, Mills is tasked with visualising a sentence like, 'He walked at her, raging, as if blind; during these three quick strides he lost touch of the material world and was whirled interminably through a kind of empty universe made up of nothing but fury and anguish, till he came suddenly upon her face—very close to his.' Such a task would stretch the likes of a master, but Mills does give it an interesting go.

He does it through a combination of close-up shots, fast paced editing and hand held camerawork, which combine into a strong sense of urgency. The first thing we see is Michael Hanelin's face, as he wills a mail to show up in his inbox, albeit not the one he gets. If that's a close-up, the next shots are closer, because they only depict halves of faces, more like chads than the zooms we see in Carl Theodor Dreyer. When we see the Dear John mail from Chelsea, we only see fractions of it, enough to catch phrases like 'I'm going', 'I'm leaving' or 'I'm sorry' without the need to highlight them. Then Martin rushes home, in rapid fire cuts that do far more than crop his journey, they suggest that his mindset precludes him from experiencing it himself. The handheld camera takes over, staying as close as it can as he rages around, emphasising his bewilderment. To highlight how quickly these emotions are running wild (pun clearly intended) inside his head, a whole host of shots begin out of focus and rush quickly into it, only to cut to another.

It's ironic that I most want to praise Rolo Tomassi here, the Running Wild editor, given that it's a clearly a pseudonym borrowed from LA Confidential, where it was used to subvert a screen adaptation by cropping out hundreds of pages of source material and allowing it all to move in a completely unfaithful direction. I have no idea who handles the role of Tomassi at Running Wild, or whether it's even the same person from one film to another, but whoever it was here did a great job. If it's Mills himself, he deserves extra praise for his work with the camera. The various experiments of this sort that pepper the 52 Films in 52 Weeks project which, after all, was an experiment to begin with, aren't always successful but they were a strong point in this entry. That's a good thing, because there's little here except the experimentation. Certainly, anyone wanting to see the source story on screen is going to be disappointed, even if they factor in the contemporary setting. You can't really have The Return without the return, after all, and it needs an end.

The key actors tasked with bringing this one to life are used to Mills's experimentations. Michael Hanelin, the Running Wild casting director, is the actor given the opportunity to bring life to Martin Klinger. In this adaptation, he's less an updated version of Alvan Harvey, given that he has neither his name nor any of his dialogue, and more of a similarly fraught bundle of emotions with a new name. Hanelin is powerful in what must have felt somewhat like a test scene performed for an acting class. Playing Chelsea is Stacie Stocker, who never disappoints, even with only a week to prepare, as she substituted here for an actress who baulked at the last minute from performing a (completely safe for work) scene with a vibrator; even bringing her real daughter, Bailey, to play her screen daughter. Surely less of a disaster than the rain that saw the last film become silent, Mills masochistically enjoyed the challenge. 'It's almost becoming fun,' he said in the accompanying webisode, 'to solve these problems.' And that's why 52 Films in 52 Weeks.

Catastrophe (2013)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: David Chan, Ron Bowen, Jim Robertson and John Miller

The fourth picture in the 52 Films in 52 Weeks project continued Running Wild's initial backward journey into time. They started in 1904 with The Sisters and proceeded slowly back through 1896 to 1890, then took a particularly ambitious leap all the way back to 1834 for a Nathaniel Hawthorne story which was originally titled Mr Higginbotham's Catastrophe. It's a particularly interesting entry into the project for a few reasons, the most obvious being that the title proved prophetic. The first of two days allocated for shooting were hammered by rain, not as unusual as you might expect for Arizona, given that late July is monsoon season, but enough to prompt writer/director Travis Mills to improvise some way to salvage his film. Under usual circumstances, he could have merely delayed the shoot but that simply isn't possible when locked into such an ambitious shooting schedule as he'd set up for Running Wild Films in 2013, so he was forced to make the most of it. He ended up turning Catastrophe into a silent movie.

Another interesting angle is that Mr Higginbotham's Catastrophe is a deceptively complex short story, an easy one to adapt to the modern day but a tricky one to get right in all three of its themes. Mills captures a couple of them capably but decides to avoid the third entirely in this adaptation; I'd have liked to have seen it addressed, but do agree that it wasn't viable in a short film that runs just shy of ten minutes. Like Useless Beauty, there's a lot more story than he was able to cram into his running time but, unlike it, he focuses more on that story than the acting, even if we imagine that the rain never forced them to remain silent, so we can actually hear what they have to say. Only David Chan gets much screen time, the rest of the cast taking the roles of talking props far more than characters. Perhaps it's the rain that causes me to see these last two pictures differently. I'd have liked to have seen more to Useless Beauty, but I feel that Mills made the film he wanted to make; I'd like to see him remake this one at greater length.

Rewatching the 52 Films in 52 Weeks pictures immediately after reading the short stories from which they were adapted has been an eye-opener from a writing perspective. Mills's approach mostly seems to be to distil each story down to its theme and then build it back up again in modern day Arizona with characters and situations that feel like contemporary equivalents. So here, Mr Higginbotham, who owns one of those surnames that would prompt jokes in 21st century Arizona, becomes simply Mr Higgins, but what we hear about him stays rather similar. You see, this really isn't about him as he only shows up for the finalé; it's about a rumour that's spreading about him, heard and retold by the lead character. In Hawthorne's story, an ill-looking traveller informs a tobacco-pedler that Mr Higginbotham was murdered the night before. In Mills's adaptation, an agreeably wide-eyed and grizzled stranger tells a fellow itinerant that Mr Higgins was murdered the night before. In each take, the story promptly gains a life of its own.

The most obvious theme of that story is the way that such rumours spread, something that remains very familiar to us today. Sure, in 1834 they would have propagated through people like Dominicus Pike, that tobacco-pedler who trusts what he's told and carries it with him on his journeys. In 2014, they would find new ears far quicker, travelling not by foot but by text and tweet or at least by Facebook post. Hawthorne would probably be horrified to know that, a century and a half after he wrote this, we've finally invented a word to describe this sort of escalation; today we'd call it viral. Mills eschews the technological angle, but I'd be fascinated to see this story retold again but centered around teenage girls and the communication media du jour. Merely updating travelling salesmen and wanderers to homeless people is a simpler, more direct translation and it works well, but what's most interesting to me is that Mills directed more attention to the second of Hawthorne's themes, that of prejudice.

The racial aspect of the source story might not be immediately obvious to anyone reading it today or, at least, not grasped fully. The traveller tells Pike that, 'Old Mr Higginbotham of Kimballton was murdered in his orchard at eight o'clock last night by an Irishman and a nigger.' We might concentrate on the political incorrectness of the latter but in the rural America of 1834, a century and a half before 'African American' was adopted, it was a common term, usually inferring inferiority more than signifying hate. What's more, Irishmen were seen in just as negative a light; Monika Elbert, editor of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, wrote about how the story 'played to anti-Irish sentiment.' The traveller had his reasons for what he said, which this film avoids, but it has to be said that casting his villains as 'an Irishman and a nigger' made it more readily believed. Mills updates the villains to be two Mexican punks, but Michael Hanelin's casting allows the theme to build: the lead is clearly Asian and the only legitimate authority is African American. The mob of extras is notably multi-ethnic, strikingly different from the usual lynching we see in westerns.

Had Mills not found himself painted into a corner by surprising Arizona weather, I feel that he would have done more still with each of these angles. They warranted more running time to be fully explored and I'm sure that at least some of that restriction was due to the rain. I wonder if he ignored the third and last of Hawthorne's themes deliberately or whether that was forced upon him too. It's a combination of karma, irony and a mild sense of the supernatural; it brings the source story to a memorable close but doesn't get the opportunity here because this adaptation is played straight. While I particularly appreciated the performance of David Chan as Barney, the 'wanderer' whose heart is in the right place but whose mouth does a lot more than he expects, I didn't like his final shot at all. Acting isn't a problem here; Ron Bowen is perfect as the source of the rumour, while Jim Robertson looks agreeably affected when Barney passes the news on to him. Chan excepted, the actors merely get very little to do.

The technical side is more inconsistent; that the circumstances of production were surely behind some of the less successful aspects doesn't excuse them. Bizarrely channelling Yoda, Mills explained in the weekly webcast that accompanied this project that, 'It's a gamble, filmmaking is.' The rain's first victim was the sound, prompting this movie to become silent. It plays surprisingly well, though I wonder why Mills didn't go all the way and make it black and white too; he did for Useless Beauty. As a silent movie, there should have been less intertitles; they interrupt the flow of the visuals and, while some of the dialogue would be appropriate for a sound film, it should have been ditched for the silent version. The camerawork survived the rain, the handheld camera providing a little sense of urgency without ever descending into shakycam nonsense. It should have been longer, but survives without all the meat it should have had on its bones. Mills feared that Catastrophe would be a catastrophe; it isn't, it just isn't everything it could have been.