A Beautiful Waste (2012)

Director: Jon Kasbe
Star: Steve Duncan

This film was an official selection at the Filmstock Arizona 2013 round of the revolving Filmstock film festival. Here's an index to my reviews of all selections.

Steve Duncan is a historian and urban explorer and he would see the two as interchangable. I've read a lot about people who explore the places around us that civilisation has forgotten, both in fiction and non fiction and I find them fascinating. The pictorials that they publish, often pseudonymously, are amazing things to see because they contain things that are amazing things to see, whether that's routine sights empty of the usual clutter or just completely unexpected beauty in places where nobody sees it. What we see late in this film falls into the latter category, all the more unexpected because it's found in the sewer systems under New York. As the tagline for this documentary short would have it, 'Most people don't spend their Saturday nights in New York's sewers. Steve Duncan isn't most people.' We can thank our deity of choice for that because he, along with filmmaker Jon Kasbe, brings us a moment of movie magic here, setting us up for it but never letting us imagine the scope of its grandeur.

The film follows Duncan into the New York sewers, and for a while it's merely interesting. He explains a sense of awe in experiencing true silence in New York City. He shows us a natural stream that was there before the city was, but which is still making its presence known. He talks about such natural things in man made environments in such a way that we feel a connection to the past, which seems to be much of what drives him. 'They're still there,' he says of the things that the first settlers saw. 'They're hidden away and invisible,' but only if we don't know where to look. And here's where it gets special. Duncan is a man who knows where to look. He takes equipment down with him into the depths: a camera, a set of lights, a tripod. And he takes photos in the dark. 'What do you think? Would it make a good picture?' he asks the cameraman who sees what we see, which is to say nothing. Then we see the result, which is a rook between the eyes and then some. I stopped breathing for a moment.

With magic on the table, the rest of the film is far more routine. We only see Duncan, so we only hear a single perspective. There are no other interviewees to quantify how valid that is, so we're forced to trust it. We only see him in one place on one adventure, so we glimpse only a fraction of what he talks about. There's no overlay of maps or old photos to back up the historical data, so again we're limited in scope. Really, this is an experience. It sets us up to be disgusting and, sure enough, we watch Duncan wade in effluent to get to where he wants to be. When it's set us up enough, it hits us with a shock moment that matches what we know from horror movies, but rather than throw horror at beauty, it throws beauty at horror. And once done, it settles down and wraps it up, before letting Duncan walk away, as if this was a one time tease that will stay with us forever. Fortunately it isn't. There are more short films from other directors at Duncan's website, Undercity, along with other similar material. History can be addictive.

A Beautiful Waste can be viewed for free at Vimeo.

Keeper of the Mountains (2013)

Director: Allison Otto
Star: Elizabeth Hawley

This film was an official selection at the Filmstock Arizona 2013 round of the revolving Filmstock film festival. Here's an index to my reviews of all selections.

I first saw the documentary short, Keeper of the Mountains, back in October at Filmstock in the Park, a free outdoor screening of short films at the Downtown Phoenix Civic Space. I'd heard about its subject, Elizabeth Hawley, and had read a little about her, but I hadn't seen her on video. To see her and hear her speak was to underline everything I expected of her, but with emphasis. She's an old woman, 89 years young, but one who refuses to kowtow to anyone's perceived conventions. To suggest that she's her own person is an understatement. She's more like a force of nature than a human being, yet it was fate which perhaps led her to the role she has unofficially kept for more than five decades. To describe her is impossible, but she's somewhat like the classic images of a teacher, librarian, journalist, lawyer and judge, all wrapped up together. What she does is to maintain the archives of the Himalayas, with every climber dating back to Sir Edmund Hillary and beyond falling under her purview.

I don't know how much filmmaker Allison Otto captures Miss Hawley and how much this lady's emphatic presence reaches through the camera to stamp itself directly on our conscienceness, but I was shocked to realise later that this is a 25 minute film. As leisurely as it sometimes feels, it really races onward at a rate of knots, perhaps because the camera rarely strays from Hawley herself. Her no nonsense attitude and staccato speech ensure that we're always hearing just the facts, ma'am. We can't help but believe that we're listening to something important and, for the most part, we are. It's almost a challenge to be as sharp a listener as she is a speaker. We do encounter climbers during the film, but only briefly and in Hawley's company, so it's nigh on impossible to focus on them. Those of special note, such as Reinhold Messner, the first man to climb Everest solo or without oxygen, are relegated to the end credits, where we can concentrate on their words and memories better.

It's difficult for me to figure out why Hawley fascinates me so much, as there are a few reasons. In fact, perhaps that's why she fascinates me so much. This film ably illustrates each of them, through careful questions or just simple observation. A famously private person, she gave Otto some insightful history and even backed it up by reading some of her letters home from Khatmandu in the early sixties, where she'd ended up as a reporter for Time and stayed as a reporter for Reuters. She's a strong woman, one who understands who she is. She flouts every convention, not only those that would frown on a young lady travelling around the world in the late fifties. She speaks her mind without fear. In short, she's who she wants to be and she has no unfulfilled wishes before she dies. It's magnificent irony to realise that this ultimate authority on Himalayan climbing has never tackled a mountain herself. She's a character, pure and simple, and this film ably captures that. I only wish I could watch it for the first time again.

Elegy for a Revolutionary (2013)

Director: Paul Van Zyl
Stars: Brian Ames and Martin Copping

This film was an official selection at the Filmstock Arizona 2013 round of the revolving Filmstock film festival. Here's an index to my reviews of all selections.

This film was an official selection at the Phoenix Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

While watching Elegy for a Revolutionary, a quintessential South African story rooted in the struggle for freedom and the ethics of violence, it seemed all the more timely because of the recent death of Nelson Mandela, for many years the leader of the African National Congress or president of South Africa. After all, he served 27 years in prison for doing exactly what the characters in this short film do: perpetrating acts of sabotage in a concerted campaign to overthrow the government and so end racial segregation, the policy known as apartheid. It could have been far more timely, however, for Paul Van Zyl, the South African filmmaker who wrote and directed. While he deserves respect for making the film at all and for doing so when he did, I'm sure his Indiegogo campaign to fund it would have done far better a year and a half later, when the world's attention was, for a brief time at least, focused on South Africa in shared mourning for a man who perhaps did more than anyone to change it.

The characters we meet are attempting to change it too, even though they're white. Donald Quick and Jeremy James are university friends who abhor apartheid and take part in demonstrations against it. They're apparently based on characters in C J Driver's 1969 novel, Elegy of a Revolutionary, itself based on real experience in the South African underground of the sixties. We're not told which demonstration changes Quick and James, but we assume it's the Sharpeville massacre, during which police opened fire on unarmed protestors, killing 69 and injuring 180, but also prompting the founding of a military wing of the ANC, by Mandela among others, whose activities landed him in jail. Quick and James follow a similar path, deciding that they must join the ANC and fight for what they believe in, albeit through deliberately non-lethal acts of sabotage. The story explores the conflicts they find in that choice, between law and a higher moral duty, and in particular whether violence has any justification in such a fight.

At 23 minutes, it condenses the source story substantially, dropping the lead characters from six to two, but it still packs a lot of thought into its running time. The strongest scenes focus around loyalty, as our heroes, if that term is appropriate for people who are, in the truest sense of the word, terrorists, realise that friends and cause can becoming conflicting loyalties. I can't go much further without venturing into spoiler territory, but suffice it to say that Quick and James take very different routes and there are great ironies in how those routes are perceived by others. Not only are we asked to question their actions and decisions, we're also asked to figure out who the hero is and who the traitor. The ethical minefield they find themselves traversing makes that identification difficult. In many ways both of them are heroes and both are traitors too. Most writers would do much for a story that contains so much depth and conflict. Van Zyl gives us clear pictures with no ambiguity woven in; the complexity is all in our interpretation.

Brian Ames and Martin Copping are strong as the leads, giving decent performances throughout with a few excellent scenes each. Perhaps each have lesser scenes too, but they're not helped by the budget. The most obvious downside to the film isn't in what the actors do, it's in how obviously few of them get to populate many of the scenes. While we're not sure how much time passes, it's not a short span, yet we're given only one prison guard, only one cop, only one judge. Surely, in urban South Africa under a tyrannical government, there would be many of each but the budget didn't stretch that far. It's notable too that most scenes are quiet, not from an absence of score but from an absence of background noise. This is the quietest prison I've ever seen. It's apparent enough to give the film a stage feel, as if it was written for a small space and cast accordingly. At least the players are consistently up to the task, but the story was always going to win out. It's a timeless one that shouldn't need to be told. But it does.

Those That Play Your Clowns (2013)

Director: John Broadhead
Star: Mike Ostroski

This film was an official selection at the Filmstock Arizona 2013 round of the revolving Filmstock film festival. Here's an index to my reviews of all selections.

Those That Play Your Clowns couldn't be much further from El Western if it tried, even though it shares a 26 minute running time and suggests from its first moments that it's going to be funny. It does have a few cleverly funny moments, but it's no comedy, it's an increasingly serious drama that carries a strong punch. Mike Ostroski dominates as the lead character, George Hill, to the degree that it'll be a struggle to talk about anything except him, but he doesn't look like much as the film begins. He's a ragged man, one who struggles out of bed to make a 10.30am children's party, to which he manages to be late. He's apparently a pretty good clown, but we figure out before he even leaves his bedroom that he's really an actor who happens to play a clown pretty well, even if it wastes his talent and his degree in performing arts. He puts on the role of Pompey the clown along with the outfit and make up, but it's killing him, not only because paying the bills means he misses another audition for Hamlet.

Most tragic is that he knows that it's killing him but can't seem to find his way out of the rut. Talk about method: he's become a tragic character even as he dreams of playing the most famous of them all. The quality of the production is high; it may be a little long and we may see Hill wallow a little too much, but it grows strongly. Even as we wonder where it's going, why he's still in clown make up as he gets drunk at the bar where other actors wait to hear who was cast in Hamlet, we start to realise that, to Hill, there are no other actors. That extends to Ostroski, because every other character here is really there only to be a prop for him to work with. The moment where this becomes clear, almost exactly halfway in, turns out to be when he interrupts another actor, so proud of landing the role of Laertes that he recites lines for his friends, with a bellow of, 'You're doing it wrong!' Everything stops, to roll into the supreme irony that this drunken clown tells him, 'You're making a fool out of yourself.'

Ostroski is magnificent here. He's doesn't just play George Hill, he plays an actor, a thespian at that who has been King Lear four times, but an actor playing a clown. What's more, he's descended to the point where he's an actor playing a clown playing an actor, turning down roles that reflect what he's become and, in so doing, unwittingly distancing himself from the roles that he knows he deserves. And, in the end, as he realises it, he delivers his tour de force to what audience he has, while imagining that he's delivering it for real. The film's title comes from Hamlet, from the part that we hear Hill perform and it's highly appropriate for the story in which it sits. This is no Shakespearean adaptation, but it does bring the words of his play to life through characters he never wrote in settings he never created. It's a clever script, one that takes a couple of viewings to realise just how many layers it has. But in the meantime, letting Ostroski wash over you is hardly a bad way to spend half an hour before he exits stage left.

Those That Play Your Clowns is available to watch for free on YouTube.

El Western (2013)

Director: Ivan Malekin
Stars: Karl Beck and Leoni Leaver

This film was an official selection at the Filmstock Arizona 2013 round of the revolving Filmstock film festival. Here's an index to my reviews of all selections.

There's a moment early in El Western, an Australian riff on the sexual stereotypes in spaghetti westerns, that made me laugh so hard I nearly broke myself. El Bandito, a Mexican outlaw as feared as his generic name suggests, arrives in the frontier town of Rosebud. We know he's a dangerous hombre because he lights a cigar with a stick of dynamite and we know that he's an immoral one because he carefully steals an apple from a young boy, takes one bite and throws it away, just because he can. The rotter! Anyway, an elegantly dressed young lady sashays out of a wooden building and into the dirt road; as she catches sight of El Bandito, she drops her basket and shouts out his name, prompting everyone to scatter. And I do mean everyone. Including the boom operator, who looks as terrified as the rest of the townsfolk. I do hope this magic moment was a deliberate one, not an unnoticed goof, because it made the film for me, less than a minute in, while the opening credits are rolling. Everything that came after was just a bonus.

As you might expect, the story is built around the town figuring out how to get rid of their new outlaw, given that their sheriff promptly up and quits on them. I'm sure you won't be too shocked to find that they don't have a clue, especially if I point out that if the town elders had hired Roscoe P Coltrane in his stead, he'd have fit right in. The Dukes of Hazzard is certainly the source of some of the humour, but El Western borrows from Mel Brooks, Monty Python and the Carry On team too. The mayor is most natural in the setting, as a quintessential comic relief western sidekick, one upgraded to mayor to provide more opportunity to look idiotic on camera. While he's the brightest of the three elders, he can't tell that the cowboy he swears in as sheriff is his daughter, the very one who he just turned down for the same job five minutes earlier. Danielle just doffed a cowboy hat and lowered her voice; actress Leoni Leaver may not be a girly girl but she's feminine enough that this turn of affairs shifts us into pantomime territory.

And that's where it stays, as Sheriff Dan and El Bandito meet and promptly fall in lust. They're set up for a shootout the next day but that just leaves more time to struggle with their sexual urges, especially as both of them are supposed to be men. It's the humour that carries this, because the acting is not stellar, much of it deliberately. Leoni Leaver does what she's asked to do as Danielle/Sheriff Dan but she's stuck looking wistful for most of the film, rather than acting. It doesn't help that she fails badly in drag, clearly a good looking woman rather than a mildly feminine man. Karl Beck is clearly far too cuddly and nice to be the big bad El Bandito; I bet that more people run to him than run away from him. Everyone else is a caricature, with Tom McCathie's overblown mayor the best of the bunch. I wonder why he wasn't played in drag, with or without those terrible teeth, because he could easily have been this pantomime's dame and McCathie could have stolen even more of the show than he does.

Perhaps it's a little long at 26 minutes, but it could easily be spun out to an hour and a half pantomime performance on stage (for adults only) with a host of distractions thrown in to keep it all fresh. The only loss in that transition would be the location, which is a good one. El Western was shot on location at the Kattemingga Ranch outside of Melbourne, where Ponderosa, the Bonanza prequel series was shot. More tellingly, an Aussie TV show called Snowy River: The McGregor Saga was also shot there, complete with its very own overlooked character called Danni. I wonder whether that was a deliberate riff. After all, it was a successful show (it starred a young Guy Pearce, among others) that was based on a classic poem by Banjo Paterson, The Man from Snowy River, which is famous enough to feature on the $10 banknote down under. That sort of background feels right for this affectionately playful riff on history, standards and archetypes. This is Spaghetti Southern: The Adult Pantomime. All it needed was a song or two.

Happily Ever After (2012)

Directors: Yonni Aroussi and Ben Genislaw

This film was an official selection at the Filmstock Arizona 2013 round of the revolving Filmstock film festival. Here's an index to my reviews of all selections.

As different an animation as could be imagined from Highway Duel, the only common element this film shares is its lack of dialogue. Instead of a battle of mechanical vehicles unfolding against a backdrop of unspoiled nature, this one's battles are very human and take place in manmade settings, mostly a new home in the big city that turns into an old one as we leap through the decades. We show up as a young couple very much in love are about to move into their first home. They look rather like the Simpsons might have done had Jim Henson created them: animated muppets with huge eyes and slitted mouths that give the animators a lot of breadth for play with expressions. They're accompanied by the sort of smoky jazz that would benefit from an overlay of dark Tom Waits poetry, appropriate because it's light and hopeful but with hints that maybe it won't stay that way for long. Sure enough, as the new man of the house prepares to walk into it, he pauses to ponder on his possible future and wonder if it's worth it.

The design of Happily Ever After is immediately engaging, but it's how directors Yonni Aroussi and Ben Genislaw play with progression that is most successful. We watch as Rani and Keren, the young couple (both names seem to be female, so I don't know which is which), are hurled through their life together, but however good the what of it is, the how promptly trumps it in a consistent manner. Whole decades flit by so quickly that we don't even see them, while other skips forward are much shorter. Conception to imminent childbirth is literally a blink of an eye, after which the parents to be are immediately hauled up to dance on the strings of their puppetmaster newborn who's controlling them from his crib. There's a lot of that sort of metaphor here too and it's cleverly done, often as part of the segue from one scene to the next. I like how metaphor merges the literal with the fantastic, such as when the moon is pulled from the sky and laid on the grass as a blanket for a sexy escapade.

That's an early hint at the surreal nature of some of the metaphor. The most overt one is the trip to the supermarket, where the register racks up the seemingly unending cost of the future as the couple are hurled down the conveyor belt to battle manifestations of the oncoming costs in a mad rush that's half nightmare and half game show. There's a lot going on here, trust me. The clear message of 'don't blink or you'll miss something' is aimed simultaneously at the lead characters and at us, both as viewers and as similar participants in the mad rush of life. For all the magic that's conjured up during the bulk of this flashforward vision, for us if not Rani and Keren, the real magic comes at the end with a brief, touching moment that will surely prompt us all to reflect on our own life, love and commitment. Did we make the right choice? Are we on the same road into the future? Most importantly, was it all worth it? One thing is for sure: this short, voiceless Israeli animation is.

Highway Duel (2013)

Director: Auburn Hodgson Setlogelo

This film was an official selection at the Filmstock Arizona 2013 round of the revolving Filmstock film festival. Here's an index to my reviews of all selections.

This is an odd one. It's an animated short that may just be all about the feel, attempting to recapture the excitement of car chases in the desert. If so, it does a pretty good job, avoiding such distractions as characters and plot for the familiar abstractions of fast cars and motion blur. This is a fetishistic piece through and through, more akin to a Fast and Furious movie than the inspirations cited in the synopsis, like Duel and Knight Rider. The style may be older school, but this is never about the drivers, it's always about the cars. There's no Jason Statham here, let alone a Steve McQueen. We do see people, briefly and rarely, but they don't matter in the slightest and have no meaning. They're not who we're supposed to watch. We're supposed to watch the blur of a red muscle car and a police vehicle chasing each other in a timeless battle. Drivers are replaced as the decades pass. Cars may be replaced, part by part or all at once. Only the chase remains consistent, along with the mountains and cacti who get to watch it live.

If the film succeeds with its mythic placement, it fails with its story. I'm still trying to figure out exactly what's going on here, because the obvious interpretation breaks halfway through. Initially, it's straight forward enough: that red muscle car fills up with gas in the Mohave Desert in the morning as the sun is coming up, then pulls out, apparently to chase a truck but perhaps just to chase its own demons. When a cop car follows it out onto the highway, we know that a chase is about to begin and, sure enough, it does. It's halfway through that I lost track. Both cars skid off into the desert, avoiding a truck, but when they get moving again, it's the red car chasing the cop. In 'cat and mouse' chases, it's the cat always chasing the mouse, never the other way around. I'm sure there are ways in which that could be played with, but not in an animated short that's deliberately bereft of background detail. Maybe it's meant to be so archetypal that only the chase matters and none of the details are anything except cool.

In between that success and failure is the animation style, which is a little mixed. Initially it feels rather like machinima, created with a video game engine. It looks good, if compressed so that colour gradients aren't as high resolution as they could be. As the chase begins, the backgrounds are more like a comic book for the cars to be animated through. The motion blur behind the title card is magnificent, while it looks it was done with coloured pencils for most of the rest of the film. There's an agreeable pastel feel to the colour palette that's appropriate, given how remorselessly the sun is drenching the desert. My biggest concern with the animation came with the big crash at the end. That's some sort of magic paint job that escapes that animated stunt without an apparent scratch. Auburn Hodgson Setlogelo wrote and directed and I'd be interested in seeing what she comes up with next, whatever software she uses. It's always great to watch animators develop their style and this appears to be her first credit.

Silent Treatment (2013)

Director: Mark Lobatto
Stars: Lily James and Bart Edwards

This film was an official selection at the Filmstock Arizona 2013 round of the revolving Filmstock film festival. Here's an index to my reviews of all selections.

Silent Treatment didn't play next to Apparition at Filmstock, but the two films bear many similarities and play very well as a double bill. Most obviously, as the title suggests, this also plays out without dialogue, though it's accompanied by a well chosen score rather than just ambient sound. It's also fundamentally about human interaction and it has a similar focus on disability. Its unnamed leading lady is deaf, which I wondered Natalie might be in Apparition after my accidental experiment with the mute button. Rather than the daily routine of a train carriage, we're given a stagnant waiting room left to fend for itself by a sleeping receptionist. Where the two films diverge is in how the human interaction works out, which is an inevitable failure in Apparition but a quirky and enjoyable success in Silent Treatment, even after the guy and girl swap unusual first words, not only because they're written not spoken. 'A guy who doesn't listen,' she writes. 'That's original.' He replies, 'A girl who won't talk. That's refreshing.'

I liked Silent Treatment immediately, but it improved. By the time the end credits arrived, I knew I had to see it again to find if it would play even better on a second time through. I found that it certainly did. Lily James plays an enticing young lady, whose posture and pixielike movements are delightful and full of life. She's as out of place in a blisteringly mundane waiting room as a Kandinsky in the crapper. She was new to me, though she's doing well for herself, having moved up quickly from a brief role in Wrath of the Titans through a recurring slot on Downton Abbey to the title role in Kenneth Branagh's new take on Cinderella, due in 2015. Bart Edwards is an able foil for her here, as the similarly unnamed guy who takes an interest in her. He's only acted on TV before, with his most notable part being an eight episode run on EastEnders. It wouldn't surprise me to find this buffering up his demo reel and moving him on to something a lot more substantial on film. Both actors are a joy in a room that's bereft of it.

Mark Lobatto succeeds magnificently here in the second short film he's written and directed; I'll search for Comes But Once a Year now, which he made in 2011. It's a playful piece, without the discovery and depth of Apparition but with a delightful quirkiness and joie de vivre. There's so much neat attention to detail that makes the film worthy of a number of viewings. We're given very little to go on, beyond the general assumption that this waiting room is some sort of hospital. We fill in all the blanks ourselves, if we're not distracted enough to see where they need filling in. I love the underling irony, which is never explained but clearly hinted at, that this couple hit it off magnificently, even though the girl is deaf and the guy is apparently so hooked on music that he can't help but sneak a listen of what the next patient has playing on his headphones, though he's wearing two large and bloodstained wads of cotton wool in his ears. Who says they're a terrible match? As in the best romcoms, love will overcome.

Apparition (2013)

Director: Jahanara Saleh
Stars: Rhonda Christian, Ryan Zimmer, Kenneth Applegate, Lou White, Bryan Snow and Julie Ann Penman

This film was an official selection at the Filmstock Arizona 2013 round of the revolving Filmstock film festival. Here's an index to my reviews of all selections.

It took so long for Apparition to get moving that I found myself scrutinising the characters to figure out where writer/director Jahanara Saleh planned for it to go. In doing so, I also realised that I was bizarrely mirroring the characters, none of whom ever speak. They just look at each other and try to figure them out, surrounded by nothing but ambient noise. Everything here is perception and, while nothing really seems to happen, there's a lot subtly going on. I discovered by accident that turning the sound down to nothing adds another element to the story, albeit not intentionally, and certainly makes it stranger still. Who is this odd woman that we're apparently supposed to be watching and why are we supposed to be watching her? We aren't given her name, though IMDb tells us that she's Natalie and played by Rhonda Christian. We aren't given details like her job, her family, her background, anything. All we know is that she takes the same train every day and she's apparently unable to talk to anyone.

We meet her indoors, on what might be a therapist's couch or might just be furniture at home. She has a thick scarf on already, which she may well never take off. She just waits for eight o'clock and leaves, without saying goodbye to the dog. She walks oddly, not confidently. She appears to be worried about everything and everybody that she sees. The dancing guy with earphones who waits for the same train might look suspicious, but then to Natalie, a passing pigeon looks suspicious too. Once on board and in a quiet seat safely away from everyone else, she smiles at unaccompanied men in a vaguely coquettish way, but is freaked out by another woman who stares incessantly at her. She clutches her bag, perhaps both as a security measure and as a security blanket. Eventually, over half way through the brief seven minute running time, we get a breakthrough. The dancing guy helps a woman in a wheelchair and, all at once, Natalie knows how to connect to the world. Next day she wheels up to the station too.

Of course, it isn't that simple and the script takes a couple of neat left turns as subtly as it's set it all up thus far. Clearly Saleh is explaining to us through entirely visual language that people aren't necessarily what they appear to be. Just as Natalie makes assumptions about all the fellow passengers she sees on a daily basis, so do we and we may be just as wrong as her. What makes this such a memorable film is that this happens on a number of levels, not just the cheap first one in which the young lad listening to his headphones is the one who helps the lady in the wheelchair. The last one is the best of all, because it's all internal and it changes everything. Just as Natalie believes she's finally figured out the world, the world slaps her in the face. Christian is excellent as Natalie and her similarly quiet co-stars support her well. It's Saleh who deserves most credit though for conjuring up a highly cinematic film. This wouldn't work in any other medium but it makes for an enticing little life lesson on screen.

Menschen (2012)

Director: Sarah R Lotfi
Stars: Dan Cheatham and Connor Long

This film was an official selection at the Filmstock Arizona 2013 round of the revolving Filmstock film festival. Here's an index to my reviews of all selections.

This film was an official selection at the Phoenix Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

Wrapping up the high drama set, as well as the entire Filmstock Arizona festival, was Menschen, a war yarn that doesn't play the usual safe cards. For a start, the lead is a Nazi officer, albeit a captain drafted into the Wehrmacht who was never in it for the politics; he especially has no interest in fighting for the Reich in the last days of the war after Hitler's suicide but before Dönitz's surrender. He's only interested in keeping his men safe behind Russian lines in Czechoslovakia, both from the Russians and partisans who are smelling victory. His idea is to find the Americans to turn them all over to and it's a pretty good one, but they're hindered by the unplanned addition to their ranks of a boy with Down Syndrome who was left alone after the death of his mother. Their journey is a complicated one, partly because of the circumstances, partly because of the history and partly because it doesn't really end when it ends, just continues on in our minds because of who the characters are and the context they're placed in.

Hauptmann Himmelbauer is an interesting lead character, not only because of who he is but because of what he does. He looks like the usual Nazi villain with a severe face and sour expression but he cares for his men and for Radek, who he tolerates patiently. The boy is just as interesting a character in support because he's as important to the story and its message as the captain and he's played very capably by an actor who really does have Down Syndrome, Connor Long. He and Dan Cheatham, as Himmelbauer, work well together and prove a surprisingly successful pair to carry the film, given that neither of them has a previous acting credit. Sarah Lotfi, who directed from a script she wrote with Dustin Dunaway and Randy Rodriguez, refuses to do things by the book, highlighting her approach with her title. In German, Menschen means 'people' or, as the poster tellingly translates it, 'human beings'. These characters are examples of those the Nazis destroyed as subhuman and those the Russians murdered after the war.

Himmelbauer is a challenging character and we leave the film wanting to know far more about him. As an officer of the Reich who presumably fought the Allies for years, he's clearly a 'bad guy', but he feels more like a 'good guy'. He's loyal to his men if not his Führer, he openly despises the SS and he risks much to save Radek from a sure death. Radek is another fascinating character, because we don't just see his human nature as well as his condition, we see instances where he's superior to the characters around him; he can hear a sniper before trained and experienced soldiers. Appropriately, Long swam in the Special Olympics during the shooting of this movie. Clearly we're shown Radek as an example of a human being whom the Nazis would have euthanised under their T-4 program, but just as clearly we're given Himmelbauer as an example of a human being who the Russians would have killed off in captivity after the war. If the Nazis were wrong, then surely the Russians were wrong too. And how about us?

Lotfi successfully expands this concept by showing every character in her war movie in shades of grey. The SS are perhaps the only truly black characters and there are no white ones. Most notably, the key American soldiers we see are flawed, whether a triggerhappy rookie or a quick to judge officer. In each scene, there's another reminder that we're not watching the good guys vs the bad guys, we're given a war between human beings and menschen, each with their flaws. It's impressive how Lotfi manages to avoid preaching to us, all the while highlighting that many of us would have brought bad assumptions along with us. She clearly aimed at giving us a war movie with leads who flouted our expectations and supporting actors who did no less. That she did as much as she did in a short film that runs just under half an hour is impressive; it would be fascinating to see what she could do at feature length. Her cast and crew are more than up to the task and clearly so is she.

Spare Real Gun (2013)

Director: Jayme Davis
Stars: Shayne Topp, Kasey Campbell, Damien Haas and Danielle Morrow

This film was an official selection at the Filmstock Arizona 2013 round of the revolving Filmstock film festival. Here's an index to my reviews of all selections.

I got a kick out of Spare Real Gun, which plays with very black humour indeed. It phrases itself as a rite of passage, where a newbie gets thrown in at the deep end and wonders if he'll be able to swim, but all done in a friendly manner, because this is just paintball. As the film begins, three veterans surround a table assembling their weapons like they've done a hundred times before. Ted, the new guy, completes the team of four, but he quite obviously hasn't got a clue and he smiles in the sort of way that people tend to do when they know they're out of their depth and hope that the help they need is about to be thrown their way to save them from embarrassing themselves. His new teammates seem eager to help, but it's all just a little off and the more you pay attention to the little details, the sooner you'll figure out what's going on when the title makes itself clear. The book on the table is the first hint but there are others as the story builds up to its big reveal.

The script is what makes this memorable, though it's certainly more about where it goes than in how it gets there. The acting meets the need without doing anything more, except for Ted, who does manage to sell some of the growing nervousness that crawls over him as everything escalates. However the cast are hindered by the technical issues that surround the piece. The light is overdone, flooding in from the window behind one of the veteran paintballers. The cinematography is hindered by the tiny room and a subsequently enforced lack of movement throughout, though the cunning shot taken from within a cat tree deserves kudos, even if I could easily figure it out. Most obviously, the sound is poorly synched to lip movements, which is the toughest hinderance to the actors. There are subtler issues too, like the fact that while the scene with the beer bottle is well done, it's clearly the only one on the table, so only there as a convenient prop for that particular scene.

The bad news is that all those technical issues are there. The good news is that Spare Real Gun is able to move consistently forward anyway, driven by the script and the neatly distracting way that it keeps ratcheting it all up another level. Many pictures with problems like this can't survive them, but this one may well be an exception for most viewers. Whether you're going to like this or not is far more likely to revolve around your sense of humour than your sense of aesthetics or how much your OCD screams at you because of the sync issues. This is not politically correct humour, the character of Julie intended to mess with our assumptions rather than to throw in a token girl, but it's funny stuff. It's edgy but much safer and more enjoyable in a fictional setting like this than as a set up on a reality show, where I could totally see it be reenacted. It also benefits from knowing its limitations and keeping it short. At only five minutes, our tolerance for issues is tested; any longer and they may have become showstoppers.

Spare Real Gun can be watched for free on YouTube.

The Last Piper (2013)

Director: Iain Forbes
Star: Jim Sturgeon

This film was an official selection at the Filmstock Arizona 2013 round of the revolving Filmstock film festival. Here's an index to my reviews of all selections.

My better half and I are at odds as to what the ending of The Last Piper actually means and I'm not sure that either of us have it right. What we agree on is that the nigh on twenty minutes it takes us to get to it is magnificently shot. The highlight of the piece is clearly the cinematography of Sondre Sandbakken, which only fails when his camera is occasionally as snowblind as the rest of us when looking at the vast white expanse of mountains in northern Norway. The opening scene contains wonderful composition of frame and many of the scenes that follow do likewise. As capable as actors Jim Sturgeon and Ole Jørgen Farstad are in the main speaking roles, the locations steal the film from them, indoors or out. There's a bleakness to the end of the world that seems entirely appropriate for the story, set in the year 2084 as a mysterious trio hunt the last bagpiper in the world, one who owns a pristine set but apparently isn't able to play them. He's looking for a mythical cave to learn how and so keep the art alive.

The myth is explained in the opening text, so is presumably fundamental. It speaks of the Cave of Gold, where pipers could, for a price, gain unrivalled musical talent. There's no mention of the Devil, but this sounds rather like the crossroads of the blues, merely much further north and lost under the Norwegian snow. Ryan MacCrimmon, the last piper of the title, is in dire need of the cave if he's to keep playing of the pipes alive. 'Of all the sorry souls God could have picked,' is his description of himself, but he made it this far and he'll get his shot at playing the right note in the right place. That was never in doubt, but what happens next is certainly up for debate. Does the note needed tie to the price to be paid? Does it effectively bring the pipes back to life or does it kill them off for good? Is what we see the future or the traditional requiem for the last hope of one coming to pass for this particular instrument? I still haven't figured out if we're even looking at anything real or just a vision.

At least the script thus far has taken us on a straightforward quest, if phrased in a surprising way and in a surprising location. What it hasn't given us is any background to why the quest is needed. What has the 21st century brought to lead the pipes to the brink of extinction? Who are the mysterious trio who go to brutal lengths to make that happen once and for all? Certainly their leader is a very severe villain with very severe eye make up to make sure we understand that she's very severe, but she doesn't get a single word of dialogue. The date in which the film is set suggests that this is science fiction but we see no expected tropes, so maybe these are aliens for whom the pipes are the sound of death. It seems like a stretch without supporting evidence which is notably absent, but there's nothing else to suggest what these folk are doing or why. They become less characters and more the different parts of a weapon, but if that's the thought, who wields them? This looks and sounds great, but what does it mean?

Love Notes (2013)

Director: Ryan Scheer
Stars: Josh Kopp, Elisabeth Zimmerman and Laura Beth Kirsop

This film was an official selection at the Filmstock Arizona 2013 round of the revolving Filmstock film festival. Here's an index to my reviews of all selections.

It may be impossible not to like Love Notes, even if we fully realise how few clothes the Emperor has on, because it's just so kawaii. Everything surrounds its gimmick, which is a rather fun one: everyone in the film, along with most of the inanimate objects, communicate through Post-it notes. This provides a cute and bubbly layer that sits on top of the usual story, enhanced by a cute and bubbly score. It's the sort of picture that's so inherently upbeat that it could be prescribed by doctors to treat depression; it can't fail to coax a smile from anyone watching it and it has a pretty good shot of managing it even when merely thinking about it. The fantastic side of the story is impossible to avoid, with a set of wildly unrealistic but highly grinworthy moments like Jim's alarm clock, which wakes him up by dropping BEEP notes onto his head or the way he plays solitaire on his computer screen with a Post-it per card. That one's technically doable, a lot more so than Post-it texting or Facenote, which are still cute.

Yet behind the gimmick, there's really not much of anything. The Post-it notes merely provide the glue for the usual romcom framework where a boy loses a girl and then finds another one, with little chance for the actors to sell how wonderful they are because none of them are given the opportunity to speak, at least not out loud. Josh Kopp is a vaguely endearing lead, though we find it tough to concentrate on his character over his interaction with the gimmick because he's as two dimensional as his notes. His dream girl only shows up for one scene, which is promptly stolen out from under her by the solid silent era musical accompaniment, which leaves Elisabeth Zimmerman tasked with pulling both Jim and the story out of the doldrums. Fortunately she's up to the task, as cute as a button in a girl next door sort of way. In many ways she's the personification of this entire film, because she isn't just cute, she's a plea to us to be just as cute going forward. The cuteness is infectious.

To be fair, there is a little substance hiding in the cracks, opening up commentary about what we keep private and we make public, because we may not always be aware of which is which. The fantastic side blurs into more realistic abstraction at points, such as the core romantic scene on a riverside bench with the characters literally wearing their emotions on their sleeves. The most efficient shorthand of the film arrives here, as Jim draws a broken heart and Ramona colours it in. Another example is the ending, for the film wraps up with one of the great kisses of cinema; great because even little boys won't feel icky about it. It's these moments that help Love Notes to shine, because the script is flimsy, the characters archetypes and the outcome never in doubt. Fortunately there are many such moments. I liked the way that Jim's co-workers are colourcoded by notes, right down to the boring white guy, and talk in different languages. I like how Spero at Pete's Gyro clearly let these students rework his entire restaurant, down to the menu, with Post-it notes. I like Molly the dachshund's bark. All in all, this is a very likeable film!

Brightwood (2012)

Director: L Gabriel Gonda
Stars: Lauren-Brooks Wilson, Jonah Beres, Sam Motley and Stefan Hajek

This film was an official selection at the Filmstock Arizona 2013 round of the revolving Filmstock film festival. Here's an index to my reviews of all selections.

Brightwood is one of those playful pieces that suckers us into the whimsical world of a child, showing us the wonder of youth at an unpressured time of discovery, only to gradually sneak in a dark side, raise it into focus and endow the whole film with a haunting, unsavoury feel. In short, it succeeds in giving us a quirky movie escape and then grounding it in uncomfortable reality. The lead character is a ten year old girl named Sparrow, who wakes before the rest of her household one morning and sets off on a journey of apparent delight. Most of it is routine, the one new addition being the discovery in her sock drawer of a pair of baby mice, which she carries with her on her travels, possibly safe in a cigar box in her bicycle basket, all wrapped up in cotton wool. Much of what she interacts with is found, only beginning with the mice. Her bike ride feels like an unhurried scavenger hunt in which she's tasked to find assorted objects in the woods; a piece of blue glass here, a candle in a bottle there, a book where you'd least expect it.

The score is upbeat too, quietly bouncy, as befits the hope of a new day, especially one in Seattle when it isn't raining. Lauren-Brooks Wilson is well cast as Sparrow. She's an engaging enough child to retain our attention in a variety of well shot locations, from the Pacific Ocean off San Juan Island to a disused school bus that someone has apparently made into their home, but she's not so infuriatingly cute that she smothers the whole thing. She's clearly capable enough to take care of herself but frustrated when she comes up against something that she doesn't understand. Here, that prompts a violent response as she tries to feed the baby mice a biscuit. I wanted more emotion in this scene but perhaps it was more appropriate that she didn't show it, given what we're to discover later about her and her family. Life is not the idyllic rural dream that it might have initially seemed for Sparrow. The discoveries we make in our first viewing flavour our take on it all during a return visit.

There's a good deal of joy here, but there's also a great deal of sorrow, much of it swept under the rug but never quite forgotten. The story is told ambiguously enough that we're not sure exactly what we're to take away from it. Presumably the two baby mice are a parallel to Sparrow and Timber, her younger brother, so are we supposed to see their reconciliation with a neatly animated mother mouse as naive hope in a future happy family for the children? Are we supposed to focus instead on how near to death the baby mice came and how little Sparrow and Timber can really offer them going forward? If I was a gambling man, I wouldn't know which way to bet on these kids. They have a long way to go and a road ahead of them that I wouldn't wish on anyone, but they're hanging in there for now. LaDora Sella wrote a fascinating script that's worthy of discussion, but even after a couple of viewings I'm still unsure if it's even a hopeful film or a fatalistic one. Maybe I'll figure that out on a third time through.

Into the Black (2012)

Director: Dae Hyun Song
Stars: Keith Wagner, Jack Suman and Donald 'Don' Pettit

This film was an official selection at the Filmstock Arizona 2013 round of the revolving Filmstock film festival. Here's an index to my reviews of all selections.

One of the toughest film formats to do right is the documentary short film, because documentaries need time to build and that's just not viable with short films. The worst of them are mere snippets, while the best still only hint at subjects that deserve more depth. If you can keep me interested throughout a full ninety minute feature, I'm going to be more than happy to follow up and explore on my own, especially if you've taught me something I don't already know. However, even if you hook me in the ten minutes of a short film, I'll likely be pissed that you don't have another eighty minutes ready to go. Dae Hyun Song does well with a subject so vast that no length of time could do it justice and grabs our attention with a gorgeous array of visual eye candy, but at a mere eight minutes, it's only the briefest of glimpses and so ends up feeling like a good YouTube video to watch, marvel and move on from. Given what he shows in this brief time, I hope he can expand it into something much more substantial.

What he provides here is a short visual poem to the worlds beyond. He succeeds in setting up a subject, the fascination that some amateur photographers have with the vastness of space, and he casts his net wide enough to trawl in a trio of very different people who fit that bill. Song is currently a student of film at the University of Arizona and all three of the people he interviews have Arizona connections too. The youngster with an infectious enthusiasm who heads out beyond the city lights to snap digital pictures of the stars is Keith Wagner; he's another University of Arizona film student. Jack Suman is the gentleman who takes photos on film for the sheer joy of it, but some of them have seen publication in magazines like Arizona Highways. The third is Don Pettit, a chemical engineer who earned his doctorate at the U of A. More importantly, he's also a NASA astronaut who spent two long missions on the International Space Station, so was able to take pictures of Earth from space rather than the other way around.

Song manages to capture some of their enthusiasm, whether that's through Wagner's mouth struggling to get out everything he wants to say before he thinks of something new and awesome or whether it's through a silent Pettit looking at some of his images during a presentation with an air of peace to him. I liked the glimpse, but I wanted a lot more than eight minutes would allow. What will stay with me isn't the interview footage but the visuals, especially the time lapse photography. Some of this was shot by Pettit from space but most was Song's own footage, taken from ground level in Arizona. I've seen similar shots to many of these, where the starry sky revolves above the static mountains. New to me were the amazing shots of trees, moving slowly through time lapse from regular daytime snapshots to what look like infrared shots at night. The colour play is fascinating and somehow otherworldly. Maybe it's just the context. Here's hoping to see a lot more of that in a much longer version of this.

Ta (2013)

Director: Kunlakan Chanakan Mamber
Stars: Chamnan Suwannaruang, Kittayaporn Yimyam, Butsaba Konyong, Chalarak Thanurak and Pannaree Chaipaew

This film was an official selection at the Filmstock Arizona 2013 round of the revolving Filmstock film festival. Here's an index to my reviews of all selections.

I have a fondness for horror films from countries you wouldn't expect, though Thailand hasn't been on my unexpected list for a while. Having already expanded from Japan to South Korea, I found Thai films through the work of Pen-ek Ratanaruang and Oxide Pang and explored from there. Films like Dorm and Shutter obviously took influences from those more prolific countries but had a feel all of their own. The growing importance of Tony Jaa can't hurt, as his action movies are as much about Thai culture as they are about his elbows and knees. There's always something interesting about watching a horror picture set in a foreign culture and this little ghost story is no exception, even though everyone involved seems to be brand new to the business. None of the lead actors have previous credits and Kunlakan Chanakan Mamber, who wrote, edited, produced and directed, was new to all those roles, having only shot second unit on a short film and acted in a feature.

Both those were American films but this one was clearly shot back home in Thailand. Perhaps befitting a story from a female writer/director, it's told through the eyes of a trio of women: Nim and Bua, who are presumably cousins, and Prae, Nim's daughter, who turns nine as the piece begins. Prae seems to be a well adjusted young lady except that she's afraid of the ghost under her bed, which her mother assures her doesn't exist, of course. However, Nim does take it seriously and, as we later discover in a neat little twist, she ensures that Prae's birthday is spent rather productively. 'Ta' in the Lao or Isan language of northeastern Thailand means 'grandpa' and he's the key to the story. They go to see Prae's ta, paying their respects at his grave, burning incense at the neighbouring Buddhist shrine and pouring water on the ground, offering up any merit they may have earned to him in Heaven. These scenes appear to be primarily background colour and texture but, pay attention, they're more important than they seem.

I enjoyed the attention given to the setting, which was at once utterly foreign and neatly welcoming to me. It also helps ground the film before it shifts into a long flashback to when Nim and Bua were young, Ta was still alive and a possessing ghost is very much part of the picture. The story moves easily from grounded drama into ghost story, though without having to conjure up horror tropes. The actor playing Ta, Chamnan Suwannaruang, is completely believable as a down to earth exorcist, conquering not with faith and verses from a holy book but through strength of mind and inner peace. It's unsurprising that Nim misses him; without ever being overt, he seems like a wonderful ta to have grown up with. All the ladies do fine work too, both in the past and the present, impressive given that three of them are child actors without prior credits. Suwannaruang grounds the story though, which is supported well by Isan folk tunes and solid cinematography from Natarich Sawaschaipan. Yet another Thai winner.

Insecurity (2013)

Director: Robert Brink
Stars: Moti Margolin, Lauren Pruden, Suzanne LeGrande, Albert Mwangila, Cameron Goodman, Tony Tavarez and David Pendleton

This film was an official selection at the Filmstock Arizona 2013 round of the revolving Filmstock film festival. Here's an index to my reviews of all selections.

Of all the short films due to be screened at Filmstock Arizona starting tomorrow night, Insecurity is the most obvious sleeper. At first glance, it doesn't appear to be much, merely a ten minute drama about a man who isn't very interesting that would have benefitted from better equipment: the picture is grainy enough to have been copied a few times on video and the sound is highly naturalistic. Yet, everything about it is worthy of a second, much deeper, look, because this is a rough little gem that rewards those who fail to overlook it. Robert Brink, a Tempe native living in New York, appears to be best known as an actor but he wrote, produced and directed this film, earning his first IMDb credits for each of those roles in the process. It's clearly his picture, though he benefits from strong contributions from his lead actor, Moti Margolin, on screen, as well as Jeff Wong and Soham Mehta off it, as the cinematographer and editor respectively. Nobody else lets the side down either.

Margolin plays a security guard called Mario, who wouldn't appear to be anyone of consequence. He's not the brightest bulb in any pack, average enough to fade into the background. We never find out how many kids he has but my vote is two point four. He appears to be a decent man, working extra shifts to supplement his income and support his family, but he also has a slight edge to him that suggests that he might enjoy a little too much the moments of power over others that working security can bring. The reason he's our lead is because he's fed up of merely working at an ivy league school and is attempting to learn, of all things, Roman history there in between shifts. He's up against it, not just because he has to struggle with the work but because everyone else believes he'll fail. 'You should audit,' his professor repeatedly tells him. He 'should be grabbing up overtime,' according to a colleague. Even his wife, who says she understands about his 'fancy book learning' tells him, 'There's always air conditioning school.'

Yet he remains driven, less by all that negativity and more by the words he reads. Those that resonate most with him come from Edward Gibbon, who wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the eightieenth century. 'We improve ourselves,' he wrote, 'by victories over ourselves,' and that's what Mario is really doing, connecting with his subject in ways that he may not even realise. And that's why he, and Margolin's achingly realistic performance, is so easy to ignore but so magnetic if we don't. Mehta's editing keeps things moving along nicely and Wong backs it up with impressive shots, if not always flamboyant ones. The opening long zoom is very ambitious but it's the little shots that are most important, like the subtle zoom into the print of a book that blurs the text as if we'd spent hours looking at it too. We can tell how personal any discussion is by how far away the camera sits. Don't let this one flow past you, really look into it and, like Mario and his Gibbon, you'll find it very rewarding.

Inseparable (2007)

Director: Nick White
Stars: Benedict Cumberbatch and Natalie Press

This film was an official selection at the Filmstock Arizona 2013 round of the revolving Filmstock film festival. Here's an index to my reviews of all selections.

The oldest film to make the scheduling for Filmstock Arizona, this twelve minute short is a star vehicle for Benedict Cumberbatch, who's having a rather amazing year. In between seasons two and three of the critically acclaimed TV series Sherlock, he knocked out half a dozen pictures, only another short, Little Favour, not being immediately notable. He played the villain in Star Trek into Darkness and the high profile role of Julian Assange in The Fifth Estate, along with others in the controversial 12 Years a Slave and the star-studded August: Osage County. He'll finish it off this month by returning to the part of the Necromancer in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, for which he'll also be voicing the titular dragon. To land a short film starring such a major actor is a solid coup for Filmstock Arizona, even if the piece is six years old. It helps that it's a very powerful film, mostly because of Cumberbatch but also because of the script by Matthew James Wilkinson and the contribution of co-star Natalie Press.

To be fair, while Press does astoundingly good work at the end of this film, she's hardly in it otherwise. There are two leading men and they're both Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays opposite himself. First up, he's Joe, who clearly has a lot on his mind as the film begins. We soon discover, neatly and without the need for words, that it's because he's dying. Sure, he's young and he's smart and he has a beautiful wife and son, but what is presumably inoperable brain cancer doesn't care about such trifles, so Joe has little time left to enjoy any of them. At this point, we find that he's also Charlie, as unruly and unkempt as Joe is composed and neat, especially given the circumstances. It's never stated outright, but Charlie is presumably Joe's twin brother, who has fallen on tough times, apparently because of an addiction to gambling on greyhounds. His life is not looking much more promising than Joe's, but there's a way out and a hint in that direction is where this story takes us.

Cumberbatch is as great here as you might expect from his more recent, more high profile work, even though this was done in 2007. It's never easy to play both halves of a pair of identical twins, because we're inevitably confused between them. Cumberbatch nails this so that we always know precisely who we're looking at, whatever the context we're given. Wilkinson's script is deliberately sparse, eschewing unneeded dialogue for expository visuals and a strong sense that we're merely seeing characters at the moment when one story ends and another begins. The most important stories play out in our minds as we ponder the ramifications of what we see and where they're likely to take the characters on the dark side of the closing credits. This stands alone superbly as a short film, but it could easily be expanded in any number of ways to feature length. I'm almost surprised that nobody's done that yet. Maybe it just wouldn't be financially viable now that the leading men, both of him, are so in demand.

The Things My Father Never Taught Me (2012)

Director: Burleigh Smith
Stars: Burleigh Smith, Bridie Carter, Aiden Papamihail and Isabella Paris Hamer

This film was an official selection at the Filmstock Arizona 2013 round of the revolving Filmstock film festival. Here's an index to my reviews of all selections.

It's obvious from his consistent use of the Windsor Light Condensed font that Burleigh Smith dreams of being Woody Allen. His frequent choice of relationship comedy as subject matter underlines it, though he cleverly describes himself as 'more neurotic and less talented' than the master. He's also taller and less Jewish, but that doesn't affect the talent that shines out of this seven minute short. As The Things My Father Never Taught Me has been screened at over 120 film festivals in 17 different countries, he's also clearly doing much better than most wannabes. Filmstock Arizona will be the latest chance to see this peach of a short on the big screen and, frankly, every chance is a good one. Beyond being astute and funny, it's also a textbook in how to allow very young child actors to steal a picture without driving adults completely insane. Smith is everywhere here but Aiden Papamihail is as strong a foil for him as Jackie Coogan was for Charlie Chaplin.

Smith plays Melvin, who provides almost every word we hear, either as narration or dialogue, as it's all about him. Once he realised early in life that his father couldn't teach him a single thing about women, he proceeded to figure out all the tricks himself, or so he believes. He also feels that this knowledge is so fundamental that he's driven to pass it on to his own son, Mike, who apparently needs dating advice at the tender age of three. It's a good job that Smith dominates the audio, because as strong as he is, little Aiden Papamihail steals the show out from under him routinely, effortlessly and very effectively indeed. It's no shock, given that the overly confident Melvin has a three year old son but apparently no significant other, to discover how this all ends up but we're taken there very efficiently, through a mix of Melvin's dedication to a crazy task, played delightfully straight, Papamihail's scene stealing antics and the up tempo music of the Texas Gypsies. The choice to shoot in black and white doesn't hurt either.

This was my first experience of Burleigh Smith, but I'll certainly attempt to track down some of his other work, including short films like Then She Was Gone and Love Like You've Never Been Hurt, along with his upcoming feature, You Can't Play the Game if You Don't Know the Rules. He's written every picture he's directed, starred in most of them and edited them too, under the pseudonym of Ross Farnsworth. Reading synopses, he's clearly most at home with relationship comedy; that's hardly surprising, given how straight he plays the role of Marvin, who is so often almost right but never quite there. He's great at making a mild idiot out of himself without ever losing believability; he never becomes a cartoon. He works well with Bridie Carter, the only other adult actor really in the film, who returned from his 2011 short, Ragtime. It's his interactions with his son Mike that really shine though, and how he's affected by the other interactions that those set up. This is a wonderful little short on many fronts.

Ritz & Spitz (2013)

Director: Kirby Ann Witte
Stars: Terence Taggart, James Lawrence Sicard, Kelly O'Keefe and Batman

This film was an official selection at the Filmstock Arizona 2013 round of the revolving Filmstock film festival. Here's an index to my reviews of all selections.

While any film reviewed after SuperFuzz is going to find itself inevitably lacking in comparison, Ritz & Spitz is an intriguing short on its own merits. It's another comedy, though this one's live action (albeit with digital manipulations) and it runs three times as long. Like SuperFuzz, it avoids speech, except for one carefully placed word in the tradition of Silent Movie, but uses other sounds and even unintelligible dialogue for effect. This plays it more traditionally though, as it's also shot in black and white and it adds a score. The crisp visuals also make it feel a lot more modern than an old silent film, even with the focus being on a pair of magicians who fit the vaudeville era well. I wonder how this would have played as an homage to the longer, story based pieces that cinemagician Georges Méliès made a few years into the twentieth century. It would have needed suitable aging effects and a few more intertitles than it has, but that approach may have given it a little more oomph than it has.

Ritz and Spitz are stage magicians, but they're very different. Ritz lives up to his name, being slick and assured in his top hat, bow tie and cape. Terence Taggert has the flamboyant gestures down and looks like he inspires the confidence that the audience apparently has in him. How could a magician fail with a moustache like that? Spitz, on the other hand, can't hold a candle to him and probably couldn't afford one anyway if it wasn't a prop. He's a fundamentally lower class equivalent, appearing like nothing less than a scarecrow in ragged clothes, with tricks that are just as lacking. As Spitz, James Lawrence Sicard is embarrassed to be on the same stage as Ritz, but that could all be a deliberate contrast for a double act. Initially the script serves only to highlight their differences, Spitz sabotaging Ritz's tricks and failing in his own, while the effects are cheats; we don't even see Ritz slicing a watermelon in half with a sword to set up a trick. It's not long though before the real magic begins, as things start to get neatly surreal.

It's the surreality that makes this one work. While what we see could easily be read as a well rehearsed double act, it may just be that everything really does go off the rails in a maelstrom of catastrophe. I'm not sure which it's supposed to be, but it's not really important. What makes it so watchable is how far off the rails it ventures and how Ritz & Spitz attempt to salvage it. Surely it's no mistake that the chaos follows a white rabbit, which Ritz pulls out of his hat but Spitz loses inside his. Without this journey into the rabbit hole of surreality, it wouldn't have found Wonderland and would have ended up too long, too slow and too unlike the silent film it half wants to be. It does drag during the first half but the cinematic trickery gets better and better and the story gets wilder and wilder. The wilder it gets, the better it gets and the second half makes up for the first. At least David Kelly's score keeps us interested while we get there. As a sixteen minute short it's fun, but edited down into a twelve minute short it might be better.