A Day on Bleaker Street (2013)

Director: Bill Wetherill
Stars: Raymond Scott, Jane Fendelman, Colleen Hartnett and Seth Gandrud

This film was an official selection at the Phoenix Film Festival in 2014. Here's an index to my reviews of 2014 films.

This film was an official selection at the Jerome Indie Music & Film Festival in Jerome, AZ in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

This film was a submission to one of the IFP Phoenix film challenges in the 2012-3 season. Here's an index to my reviews of 2012-3 submissions.

I'd wanted to watch A Day on Bleaker Street again for a long time. I saw it at the Phoenix Art Museum in April 2013 when it competed as part of the IFP Breakout Challenge, but was disappointed. At that time, I felt like the audience was being manipulated: set up to believe one thing after another, only to find them all false assumptions. However, the very last shot explained the point of it all, to highlight the old saying that 'the grass is always greener' and point out that whoever is on the other side of the fence might just believe exactly the same thing in return and for as excellent a reason. I knew that I needed to watch the film again with that knowledge, so that I could see it with fresh eyes. Fortunately, while the film lost out to Mission Control and The Face of Innocence for Best Picture, taking home only the Best Actor award for Seth Gandrud, it proved to have legs, playing a number of local festivals and being accepted on its own merits to the Phoenix Film Festival, where I finally got my repeat viewing and enjoyed it much more.

Three of the four cast members are multi-award winning names in the local film scene, so it comes as no surprise that they all provide strong performances here. The fourth is Raymond Scott, who quickly proves as the first person we see that he's up to acting alongside them. We're given no names, but IMDb tells us that he's Jim Morris and he's married to Marlene, probably for many years. Their body language suggests that life isn't going swimmingly, even if they have the traditional house in the suburbs. He doesn't want to get out of bed and clearly needs that splash of water to wake him up fully. He walks with some care as he goes through the morning routine. When his wife joins him, in the welcome form of Jane Fendelman, they only converse in sparse banalities and don't look at each other when they do. There's no physical contact between them whatsoever, so it ought to be safe to assume that they're only going through the motions. Then, as he takes a hose to the front garden, he sees what they used to be.

He sees this in the couple opposite, Anthony and Elise Colletta, who are also emerging from their house to face the morning. She's in a skimpy black slip that isn't hidden at all by her short and elegant gown and she's supping orange juice (or perhaps more) from a wine glass. He's hauling his golf clubs over to his Mustang. They're pretty young things, appropriately played by Colleen Hartnett and Seth Gandrud, who made it this far early on and have their whole lives in front of them. Jim can't help but feel that this insight is a reminder that he's getting old, his wife is getting old and their lives are mostly behind them now. Bleak Street may be a row over, but this is Bleaker Street and it's moments like this that echo that name to Jim. Of course, there's a lot more to this story and we discover that later when Anthony comes home to Elise. That section is shot very loosely, with handheld camera and jagged editing, at least until Elise passes out and the ripples in the piano we hear finally transition from stirring to soothing.

Looking back to that original IFP Breakout screening, I wasn't merely not seeing the point of the film until it was firmly presented, I was seeing the suggestion of a bunch of other red herrings which, for the most part, aren't really there. I must have brought some outside baggage into the screening that day, keeping pointers in my brain from whatever I had been watching earlier or just making inappropriate judgements on the fly about what I was seeing. Watching afresh, it's lot simpler and more focused than I recall and I wonder why I had problems reading it properly. Certainly there's a lot more to the stories of the Morrises and the Collettas, but this isn't that film; it's merely a reminder that, like my own personal experience of this picture, what we see isn't necessarily what's there. Bill Wetherill wrote, produced and directed and deserves much credit for doing so, as do Devin Berko for his camerawork and editing and Shari K Green for her script supervision. This one has legs for a good reason; I'll be seeing it again, I'm sure.

Playtime Strikes Back (2015)

Director: Adolpho Navarro
Stars: Gracie Dufresne, Zoey Cunningham and Adolpho Navarro

This film was an official selection at the Phoenix Film Festival in 2015. Here's an index to my reviews of 2015 films.

This film was a submission to one of the IFP Phoenix film challenges in the 2014-15 season. Here's an index to my reviews of 2014-15 submissions.

The name of Adolpho Navarro didn't show up on my radar until the Phoenix Comicon film challenge last year when his action packed superhero short, Fists in Flight, won top prize. Since then, it keeps cropping up at competition after competition and he's winning a lot of them too, such as this week's A3F 48 hour film challenge. I've discovered that Navarro and N'Raged Media have been making films for a long time and there are a whole slew of them online to check out, so they're a template for other local filmmakers in more ways than one. Another commonality is that these films often feature special effects that would seem to be far more ambitious than would be attempted by anyone in their right mind in a 48 hour film challenge. Isn't it tough enough to write, shoot and score a complete film, edit a trailer and put a poster together, all in 48 hours, without trying to add in special effects? Well, Project Daisy, the Beat the Clock winner last year, incorporated stop motion frickin' animation and Playtime Strikes Back uses puppetry!

And, of course, it uses a lot of puppetry. The story is almost entirely explained in the title, so there's little synopsis needed. Suffice it to say that little Gracie might look sweetness and light but she has a notable streak of brutality, not merely let loose on the deathmatches to which she challenges Ralph on the XBox 360 but also on some of her many soft toys. 'That little beast has a dark side that'll put Vader to shame,' explains the clown on which she vents much of her violence, accompanied with neat slow motion, a neat scream and some neat editing to make it all effective. There's also a raggedy creature hanged from her ceiling fan too, who memorably pleads, 'Please rid me of this harness of death!' Yet some of Gracie's other dolls must either have stuffing for brains or cases of Stockholm syndrome, because they stick up for the little psycho bitch when the clown picks up a knife and pledges bloody revenge. The fight is on with Gracie oblivious in her XBox Live headset and focused on her online carnage.

While the effects make the film viable, it's Gracie Dufresne, who the credits claim is playing herself, who steals the show. She's a natural on camera, her grin utterly appropriate for the circumstances, and she's more than willing to bring the smackdown on that burned and bloodied clown. She also voices Billy, the formerly forgotten dangling doll, though Navarro himself voices the rest. What makes this notable is that instead of merely voice acting over inanimate dolls, he uses an old technique known as Syncro-Vox, first used by Edwin Gillette to allow animals on TV commercials in the 1950s to speak with human mouths. It was popularised on shows from Cambria Productions like Clutch Cargo, Captain Fathom and Space Angel. It saved them a lot of money over regular animation, but I'm pretty sure they didn't work at the speed of Navarro, turning out effective Syncro-Vox work with a greenscreen and software rapidly enough for a film challenge entry. I see him as a mad scientist, doing these things purely because they can't be done.

Of course, the seams have to show eventually in this sort of film, because there are only so many hours in the day to make everything look pristine. Here, they show in the fight between the clown and the doll who sticks up for Gracie; it's great fun, to be sure, with comedic dialogue and decent action, but it's less effective puppetry than elsewhere in the film. Many of the large cast of puppets are of the hand variety and they're worked capably, just like those deemed worthy of the Syncro-Vox treatment, but attempts to manoeuvre the lead puppets through what can only be described as complex fight choreography in the background of Gracie's bedroom while she's playing a deathmatch are just a little too ambitious for this short. I'd say that there are only so many special effects that one man can do with such limitations but I feel sure Navarro would take it as a challenge! I bow to his ambition and his refusal to acknowledge the boundaries others assume. Mostly though, I just enjoy the heck out of how much fun he obviously has.

Playtime Strikes Back can be viewed for free at YouTube.

Sinking (2015)

Directors: Nathan Lawrence and Justin Ehlers
Stars: Justin Ehlers, Kim Gonzales and Berlin Ehlers

This film was a submission to one of the IFP Phoenix film challenges in the 2014-15 season. Here's an index to my reviews of 2014-15 submissions.

It could be argued that Sinking, the IFP Breakout Challenge entry from the joyously named Loneliest Yeti Productions, isn't a film at all; it's a music video. Perhaps the judges saw it that way, as the only award it took home was for its music, a song of the same name by a band called Blind Horse. I like the approach, as one of the traditional failings of film challenge films is the sound quality and that isn't a problem with a short that's entirely silent and backed by (or backing) a song that doesn't need any voice to be in sync. Unlike many music videos though, this one does tell a story with its visuals. It's a sad story, dealing with the loss of a child and the struggle of the parents to continue in their relationship after such a traumatic event, but what makes it really interesting is that it's told entirely in reverse. It begins at the moment at which this couple may have finally found a new start, as she rescues him from an attempted suicide by drowning in the bathtub, an act that we later discover has additional meaning.

Because the story is told in reverse, this is inherently a film to watch more than once. First time through, we wonder what the heck's going on for a while until we realise we're venturing backwards to discover a reason for such a drastic act. There are a few hints that the trigger isn't just a bad relationship, so we're not too surprised when the reason manifests itself but it's still a tough thing to watch when it does show up, even abstracted away from; this isn't aiming for in your face trauma. A second viewing solidifies the story and a third both adds nuance to the emotional impact of the piece and helps to highlight some of its flaws. One odd issue I found is that it took a fourth time through to actually realise how the words tie to the visuals, as each time I watched with the intention of listening I ended up merely watching instead. In the end I had to hide the visuals so I could listen without distraction. Is that the film doing something right or the song doing something wrong? I have to say that I don't know.

A more palpable flaw is in the inconsistency of focus. While the camera remains an agreeably loose thing throughout, not annoyingly handheld but staged well enough to not seem staged, it's loose enough that faces often find themselves out of focus. Perhaps that was a deliberate choice by writer/director Nathan Lawrence or his lead actor/co-director Justin Ehlers for artistic reasons, highlighting the lack of focus that plagues this couple after such a tragic loss, but it doesn't play that way and that feeling could have been accomplished, indeed was accomplished, through other visual elements such as the specific progression of events we're taken through. Ehlers and his leading lady, Kim Gonzales, seem capable enough in what they're doing on screen to warrant us seeing them properly, especially as the film's approach inherently deprives us of their voices. That choice I can live with, because it seems more fundamentally appropriate with each viewing. We really don't need words; this is a quintessentially visual story bolstered by music.

Sinking can be viewed for free on YouTube.

Half Measures (2015)

Director: J Schreck
Stars: Scott Nass and Larry Nass

This film was a submission to one of the IFP Phoenix film challenges in the 2014-15 season. Here's an index to my reviews of 2014-15 submissions.

Half Measures stood out among the early films screened at this year's Breakout Challenge because it was unlike anything I've seen at previous IFP challenges. It's wordless for the most part, an experimental take on camera placement and editing technique, all set within a very cool location, a junkyard for trucks, and with a charismatic but unlikely looking lead in Scott Nass. He's not young and he's not pretty but he does have a strong presence, even with very little dialogue, and I'm stunned that he hasn't got a single credit on IMDb. Based on these five minutes, right down to the very second, horror movie directors ought to be queueing up to hire him because he has the look and the feel that they need, whether as an antihero, a villain or an outright monster. I want to see his last thirty years of output but I'm presuming that's going to translate to searching YouTube for a few local films and making do. He does get dialogue here, though not a lot and only late on, but he's just as good delivering it, ably selling his character's confusion.

The story is so slight as to be almost non-existent. This unnamed character drives through a junkyard on a cart to work on an old green truck. We can guess he's searching for parts but we can't see that as he's mostly hidden under a jacked up cab and we're focused on other details throughout. Here's a panel and some rust, there are pistons, over here we get some more interesting angles. Eventually our attention is concentrated enough on leaking fluid that we know something's will go horribly wrong and, sure enough, the cab falls back onto his left arm. He fights for a while, still wordlessly, until he loses conciousness, or perhaps, dies. The only thing we're missing here is the bubbling of blood to match the bubbling of piston oil, but perhaps that seemed too obvious to director J Schreck, a cool abbreviation of Jeff Schreckler. Then this man just gets up and wanders off because he's moved out of the realm of reality and into something else entirely. Here's where we get some actual story, which could be read a few different ways.

That dominant performance by Scott 'Boss' Nass is what resonated with me most, complemented well by a supporting slot from his brother, Larry Nass, as a sort of gangster devil, but there's more to praise. The feel is built neatly by the combination of a memorable and sparse location, a lack of dialogue to heighten the isolation, imaginative camerawork from Carl Goodwin, an agreeably sun faded desert colour palette and notably strong editing from Schreck which deservedly won one of the film's two awards at Breakout, the other being for sound design. On the downside, I would have preferred a much steadier camera (this isn't shakycam but it's often handheld) and the lighting is inconsistent. Both are relatively minor concerns as they play into the surreal nature of the piece, as does the odd choice to shoot the first conversation in such a way that we assume the two actors were never together and it's only the product of editing. Are these flaws or aids to the freaky feel? Clearly I should watch more Edge Psychotic films to find out.

Fading Away (2015)

Director: Timothy Helmstadter
Stars: Julie van Lith, Maria Patti and Timothy Helmstadter

This film was a submission to one of the IFP Phoenix film challenges in the 2014-15 season. Here's an index to my reviews of 2014-15 submissions.

Another IFP film to run 4:59 and only just squeeze in under the challenge limit, Fading Away has a couple of major flaws but still manages to impress on a few counts, not least that it still managed to wring some emotional response out of me even though it obviously ached to do so. I find that most films which start out with the clear goal of plucking heartstrings and only think about character later in the process, tend to fail pretty miserably; that's especially true of short films, which don't have the luxury of being able to expand into appropriate space. This one is certainly a mixed bag but it does achieve its goal better than most because of the performance of Julie van Lith as Ruth. While this is technically capable, with decent audio and video, it still felt like a lesser piece until Ruth showed up and van Lith quickly drew me in with some believable Alzheimer's antics. I've spent time with people like this and, while many choose to stay quiet to avoid advertising their gaps, some just don't have a clue and sound precisely like Ruth.

She may be starting to come to terms with her memory loss or she may be doing it over and over, but it isn't a new thing for her daughter, Audrey, who is stuck dealing with all the fallout because her brother is in Albuquerque and can't rush over at the drop of a hat. Audrey is clearly fed up with shouldering all the responsibility but she just as clearly cares deeply for her mother. Maria Patti does well as Audrey when she's bouncing off Ruth, but clearly needed a few more takes during her solo scenes to let her monologue flow better. Her biggest problem though, and the biggest problem of the film as a whole, is that Ruth and Audrey aren't believable in the slightest as mother and daughter. Sure, those are clearly the roles they're playing but we don't buy it. Partly it's the ethnic difference, but mostly it's the age difference; sisters is a more believable sell. Unfortunately the script works better as mother/daughter, so that's what they were. Either Tim Helmstadter should have found better aging make up or he should have cast differently.

The other major flaw is the fact that Fading Away is so obviously a much bigger story and five minutes is merely a glimpse into it. The majority of the film is spent in Ruth's front room, as Audrey tries to convince her that she's a danger to herself and suggests that she needs to be somewhere where she can be taken care of. That's not received well, as you might expect, but Audrey has a point, given that her mum nearly burned the house down earlier in the day but can't even remember the fire department being there. Sure, this is a pivotal scene in the bigger story and, perhaps, we might buy into it being a story in itself if that's all we'd been shown. However the earlier scenes of Audrey arguing with her brother on the phone about who gets to do what force us into a much bigger picture and five minutes isn't remotely enough for us to explore that properly. Those scenes should have been cut to focus us in on the real story, with the added benefit of losing the lesser acting moments. Then reshots could be added back in for the feature.

Fading Away can be watched for free on YouTube.

Best Day of My Life (2015)

Director: Jeff Dykhuizen
Stars: Samuel Varghese and Heidi Johnson

This film was a submission to one of the IFP Phoenix film challenges in the 2014-15 season. Here's an index to my reviews of 2014-15 submissions.

There were fourteen films eligible for awards at this year's IFP Breakout challenge and fifteen awards up for grabs but, as sometimes happens, the judges chose to divvy those awards up amongst only five titles, so a few other worthies missed out entirely. The two such examples that stood out most to me bookended the big winner of the night, Flight Fright, which won five awards, if not the biggest prize, and I do wonder if its comedy and professionalism stole some of the thunder from the two films around it, Best Day of My Life and One to Another. In particular, Best Day of My Life is a film that needs space to resonate and that was the last thing it got stuck in the middle of a set of shorts with comedy following immediately after its brutal last line. It's neatly constructed, that last line also being its first but the two delivered in amazingly different circumstances. The shift in tone from blissful embrace to stark isolation in a five minute short is superbly handled, as is the juggling between one recurrent shot and a succession of flashbacks.

It's all about a couple, Freddy and Judy. At the beginning of the film, they're a young couple in love, very obviously so and very understandably so too, given that they're getting married. 'Best day of my life,' he tells her, the pair of them a grinning composition of red, white and black. We quickly move on, though, to the moment when she raises the idea of having a family. After all, it's been two years, eleven months and four days, the precision of her memory important given where we're going; he just knows that it's almost three years. And we keep moving forward, these brief flashbacks always returning to the most impactful moments of their life together, interspersed with Freddy driving through Phoenix suburbia. We're only a minute and a half in when the tone starts to change and it does so with emphasis. Suddenly we're not in Kansas any more, Dorothy, and everything starts to descend into darkness. That it does this so capably without resorting to the usual emphasis points like blood and swearing is very telling indeed.

I wish I knew who the two actors are, but this runs a second under the five minute challenge limit, so I'm sure they didn't feel that there was room to add credits. I presume Freddy is played by Samuel Varghese, who is also presumably the agreeably befuddled lead in Clutter, another interesting Breakout Challenge film from a year earlier. Both that film and this aim to tell unusual but believable stories with a message. Here that message is one that isn't heard often enough, because many filmmakers would shy away from material that could well raise accusations of sexism. Well, domestic abuse comes in many forms and it's not always delivered by a man to a woman; it's merely that society's take on gender roles makes it hard for men to reach out in such a situation and receive help instead of laughter. Varghese does very well in this difficult role, but his co-star is even better. She's Heidi Johnson, who has venom in her tongue and power in her stance and is dangerously believable in this role.

Technically it's a little inconsistent but I'm not convinced that there aren't reasons for that. The structure of the film in its progression of flashbacks is hindered by the restrictive five minute running time and I'm sure would breathe better with a little more room to do so. I'm especially interested to know if the lighting choices deliberately play to the changing tone of the story, as the score clearly does, or if they were, well, just inconsistent. Unfortunately each of these little vignettes is so inherently short as to make that tough to figure out and I really hope that Jeff Dykhuizen and his crew of Grand Canyon University film folk shot more footage that they can edit together into a longer version. This is strong as a five minute challenge entry but it could easily be a blistering ten minute short film. It wouldn't be easy to directly expand, so if there isn't any extra footage, it would probably need remaking to flesh it out fully. It would be worth it, as I know I wasn't the only one impressed by this film, even if it didn't win any Breakout awards.

Best Day of My Life can be viewed for free at Vimeo.

Flight Fright (2015)

Director: Jim Politano
Stars: Gerald Dewey, Swizyzinna, London Kim, Doris Morgado, Tony Bafaloukas and Eddie Deezen

This film was an official selection at the Phoenix Film Festival in 2015. Here's an index to my reviews of 2015 films.

This film was a submission to one of the IFP Phoenix film challenges in the 2014-15 season. Here's an index to my reviews of 2014-15 submissions.

Jim Politano really pulled out the stops for his 2015 Breakout Challenge short, partly because of lessons learned from an earlier film. Back in the 2012-13 season at Beat the Clock, Love Sucks won as audience favourite, deservedly because it's still one of the funniest IFP shorts I've seen. Within seconds, he made the audience laugh; within minutes, he'd offended every woman watching with panache; but he saved the day after the credits by bringing balance to the force. It was wonderful writing, but it couldn't have looked worse visually if he'd tried; without any decent equipment or any crew, it ended up in pixellated black and white. Screening in the IFP finals set at the Phoenix Film Festival against superb films like The Memory Ride, Screaming in Silence and La Lucha, it looked amateur. Flight Fright, by comparison, looks professional, at least once it was exported properly from the master copy. And I know how professionally it was done because, disclaimer, I was there as an extra watching it happen from inside the film.

Flight Fright may well be the first IFP Phoenix film challenge entry to be shot in Hollywood, because Jim booked Air Hollywood Studios for the day so he could shoot on an actual set. The smaller plane we shot on sits right next to the bigger one that was used for Airplane! and so many other films since, including Sharknado 2: The Second One. The cast and crew were predominantly sourced from Jim's previous film, the superb hard hitting science fiction short, The Class Analysis, and it surely wouldn't have taken the IFP judges long to vote Gerald Dewey and Swisyzinna best actor and actress respectively. They're the heart of the picture, even if neither is the most recognisable face on screen. No, that's not me; my left arm was once again my most prominent attribute. It's Eddie Deezen, who most may know from The Polar Express or the Grease movies, but I still remember from WarGames and Teenage Exorcist. He has a cameo sitting next to Jim's lovely wife, Karen, and I'm not saying any of this just so I can get into his next film. Honest.

What we hear of the story unfolds entirely within the plane, as it cruises above the ocean at 20,000 feet. Dewey and Swisyzinna are a couple named Gomez, bickering believably back and forth as he's afraid to fly and she can't believe it, given how tough he acts on solid ground. He's taken nerve meds to ease his anxiety but they're apparently having increasingly quirky side effects, as we see in a succession of shots of regular Politano jewel Tony Bafaloukas doing a succession of outrageous things on the wing outside his window. Both Dewey and Swisyzinna impressed me, and they dominate on screen, but I was even more impressed on set by Doris Morgado, playing the flight attendant to whom Mr Gomez explains, 'There's a man out on the wing having a barbecue!' She's racking up credits in Hollywood, in films as prominent as 2 Guns with Denzel Washington and Snitch with Dwayne Johnson, and I'll be working through a bunch of them ahead of her sure climb up the ladder to success. The rest of them are climbing too.

Of course, knowing Politano's penchant for classic sci-fi, both the good stuff and the truly godawful stuff, it won't be too surprising to discover that this has a consistent Twilight Zone sort of feel to it and he nails it pretty well. Bafaloukas, the inveterate improvising scenestealer from Love Sucks and The Sisters of St Mary's, does his level best to steal this one too but he's hindered by being stuck on the other side of the glass where we can't hear him. London Kim, like Dewey, Morgado and a bunch of extras, a key player in The Class Analysis, is excellent here too but doesn't get screen time enough to do justice to his role as the captain; Eddie Deezen gets much more in his cameo slot, with two memorable scenes with Morgado. Technically this is accomplished, the antithesis of Love Sucks, even if the version screened on the night was annoyingly dark; the strong score sadly not acknowledged in its five awards. It's really all about the idea though, which is what it is: funny and enjoyable but without the substance of The Class Analysis.

The Idea (2014)

Director: Andy Robinson
Stars: Dillon Buffington, Troy Ralph, Jonathan Holdsworth, Chris Avila, Eddie Manteca, Daniela Mitchell, Manuel Pena and Jonathan Boutin

This film was a submission to one of the IFP Phoenix film challenges in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 submissions.

Making movies about making movies is always a dangerous idea but it's also an intriguing one. For half of its running time, The Idea is surprisingly astute and full of superb little details that are worth watching the film a few times to fully catch. Unfortunately, it ends up, perhaps inevitably, as the victim of the film challenge time limit. I get the impression that Dillon Buffington, who wrote the picture in which he writes a picture with two colleagues, could have continued the detail-oriented joy of the first half to a stronger, more natural conclusion and, in doing so, generated an excellent fifteen minute short film. That's not how film challenges work though, so he had to find a way to wrap it up quicker and couldn't find a good way to do so. It's not a bad ending, because it actually describes the evolution of modern Hollywood movies, but it could have been a lot better. Half a great film with an OK ending is still pretty good, but an entire great film would be much more worthy. I hope he makes it.

We're here to watch three men write a movie while sitting on their couch bandying ideas around. That's hardly an engaging sight, so we also get to see what they conjure up in their imaginations, then change to meet what the conjurors change. They start with a guy, make him a mechanic but detour into who he should be with. One wants him to be relatable, so gives him a 'smokin' hot girlfriend', while another has the girlfriend be 'plain and uninteresting' because 'smokin' hot' isn't relatable. Am I mistaken or are both played by the same actress? If so, that's a nice touch. Then they make him gay, leading to a stupid joke that's actually a telling comment about writers with poor vocabularies and then a superb breaking of the fourth wall to highlight that 'sexual orientation doesn't matter'. It carries on like this for a little while, the conflict about conflict leading to conflict and everything seeming stupid while actually being clever. If I read the credits correctly, one actor is even playing another, while the other delivers pizza. Nice.

But then The Idea runs out of time to do the idea justice, which is unfortunate but difficult to see how it could have been avoided. So, if it's inevitably not the film it could have been, what about the film that it was? Beyond Buffington's writing, what leapt out at me was the editing, which isn't credited so I have no idea who to praise. The ideas in The Idea come thick and fast and they could easily have been mired in bad editing. Fortunately they aren't; whoever cut the picture kept them in perpetual motion, even while switching back and forth between the writers and their visions. While the actors playing the writers are capable, if mostly through well delivered dialogue as the rest of the talent required involved looking or just sitting on a couch, those in the imagination shots deserve credit as they had no way to grow, being merely ideas, but did have to absolutely nail each of those ideas in no time flat, sometimes just a second or so. With it all done right, I really want to see this lose its ending and find its full flow.

The Idea can be watched online for free at YouTube.

If Not Me (2014)

Director: Glen A Hines
Stars: Glen A Hines, Greta Skelly, Maya Patron and Deb Blume

This film was a submission to one of the IFP Phoenix film challenges in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 submissions.

Every IFP Phoenix challenge filmmaker wants to make movies or they wouldn't be IFP Phoenix challenge filmmakers. However what they want those movies to be varies just a little. Most want to get their short films in front of eyeballs and for some, the eyeballs of their fellow filmmakers at challenge screenings is enough. Some have a little ambition and want to get their work into the Phoenix Film Festival or another local event. Most would say that they have a serious drive to become a film professional and some may even be telling the truth to themselves. Watching the short films of Glen Hines, it feels like he's building the portfolio he wants to send to the Lifetime Channel so he can make uplifting TV movies until the day he dies. Eva's Light, which caught a lot of attention at the Beat the Clock Challenge last year, was strong in itself, but If Not Me, made for the Breakout Challenge, feels very much like a companion piece to play beside it and build a theme that I wouldn't be surprised to see extend over his next few films.

Both films are underpinned by piano based scores that are uplifting with touches of sadness, though this one later goes overboard with the addition of a song to hammer the sentimentality home. Both films are centred on elderly ladies, one real and one maybe only sourced from reality. Both films unfold through a set of images, often in flashback, to underpin a narrative; Eva's Light was narrated by the woman at the heart of the story while If Not Me is built from an interview about the equivalent woman, who has left us. It could be argued that one ends with death and the other begins with it, but both highlight the passage. Both films have carefully constructed forewords and afterwords; in fact, both start out with words before we ever see visuals, setting the scene before we see it. Both films then find a visual tie to the subject to ground our exploration of them; the photos/memories in Eva's Light and the shrine to remember the old homeless lady in If Not Me. Whether the films constitute a thematic pair or just a beginning is open.

What's most obviously different here is that Glen A Hines, who again co-wrote with Deb Blume and also produced and directed the film, puts himself prominently into it too. He's the businessman who talks to someone, perhaps a journalist, about Maxine, the homeless lady who lived on a bench in the park which he passed every day for a month before realising that she wasn't there any more, presumably murdered somewhere else or he'd have noticed the crime scene tape. Other people noticed sooner, which is why a shrine was put up on the bench for this businessman to notice. This does make a little sense. While most people only see what's there and it takes a Sherlock Holmes to notice the dog in the night time who isn't, the comment here is surely that homeless people are overlooked background in our minds and we often filter them out. Having done so, the businessman is surely as much shocked by what he filtered as by an actual murder. His interview feels drenched as much in guilt as in remembrance.

While If Not Me isn't as strong as Eva's Light, it's still a capable piece. Hines knows how to play with our emotions and he does it well, focusing on the positive in so doing rather than the negative. He's a decent face for the film, though of course it's Maxine herself who steals our attention, playing backgammon with herself on her bench, which she's adorned with the sort of things that made her happy (things that aren't remotely dirty enough). There's a neat use of time lapse photography, highlighting how the world moves too fast to notice little details like Maxine. The shots of her standing still while the world flows inexorably around her in a marketplace are especially potent and deserved much more running time. Greta Skelly is excellent as Maxine, though she never has the chance to speak. Hines provides her background and the film provides her voice. Where this loses out to Eva's Light is in how sentimental it gets, the overblown song an overdone crescendo to a much more subtle short film that deserved to play out on the piano.

Rigged (2014)

Director: Shawn Esplin
Stars: Suzanne Brown, Brighton Weick, Aly Graham, Russel Traher, Pat Kaye, Allison Beauchamp, Dell Herts and Jim McElleney

This film was an official selection at the Phoenix Film Festival in Phoenix in 2014. Here's an index to my reviews of 2014 films.

This film was a submission to one of the IFP Phoenix film challenges in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 submissions.

I always find myself wanting to like Shawn Esplin's IFP Phoenix film challenge entries more than I actually do, mostly because what I appreciate most are his ideas, which tend to outweigh how they're brought to life. I liked the idea behind Shiny but it was too long and too detached, even if Todd Isaac played a neatly quirky sort of Gollum. I liked the idea behind Escape from Zany's Baking Company, probably my favourite of his films thus far, but it was too obvious. I even liked the idea behind Smiling, even if that was about all I did like in that film. I like the idea behind Rigged even more than any of those, not merely the basic idea but how he expanded on it to riff on sports films, detective films, comedies and thrillers all in one. I liked how he played it straight, however outrageous the double entendres. I liked the choice of game, spinning up a corruption scandal in the world of senior bingo. What I hated here was the acting, which is about as wooden as I've seen, enough so that I wondered if it could have been deliberate.

It's much better on the technical side, except for inconsistent sound. Esplin sets the scene quickly with a clandestine action in the dark as a young man passes a set of bingo balls to the local caller. He's kept in the shadows, but she's immediately memorable with huge earrings, long string of pearls and a salacious line to read. 'Don't worry, sweet cheeks,' she suggests. 'I'll be pulling out your balls any chance I get.' It's well lit, so that we see the characters and the bag of balls well but absolutely nothing else. But then we switch to the game itself and a host of regulars bemoaning the magical lucky streak of the young man at the back with performances so wooden that I was almost surprised when the actors moved. Perhaps the idea is that these seniors are merely old and tired and fed up with losing but I don't buy that. Maybe the character investigating the improbabilities for cheating speaks low and monotone to fit into a hardboiled detective state of mind. Whatever, the cast are mostly so devoid of emotion that everything falls flat.

I should add the caveats that Pat Kaye acquits herself strongly, as always, as one of the bitterest players, and Suzanne Brown certainly has her moments as the caller, though she's a little overt, but they merely highlight how far everyone else lowers the standard. What's most frustrating is that the dialogue they're given is otherwise sparkling and worthy of strong delivery. In fact, much of what sits behind the actors is rather good, especially for something with no budget. I liked the little details, like Leonard's hat and tie and Mildred's granddaughter's phone. I liked the background rumble of voices and the score. I liked the detective's glances and the shadows in the line up scene. I liked the Commissioner's speech, which did raise the acting at least one notch. Had the acting been up to the other aspects, it would have had a chance at more than just the Audience Favourite award at the Breakout Challenge in February, which is what took it to the Phoenix Film Festival.

Wrecked (2014)

Director: Kenny Colt
Stars: Kenny Colt, Lolita Gongora and Cody Loepke

This film was a submission to one of the IFP Phoenix film challenges in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 submissions.

In reviewing Blue and Conundrum, I highlighted how they were the two clear contenders for top honours at this year's IFP Phoenix Breakout Challenge. Both would have been worthy winners and both are films that will surely be screened often at local festivals, starting with Jerome next month. I stand by that but don't want to give the impression that there were no other films worth seeing at this challenge. While I wouldn't dare to say that it was a particularly strong line up, many entries contained aspects worthy of note, while a few raised an eyebrow or a laugh (or both). However only a couple of others stood out as titles that are likely to have any sort of shelf life. I've already reviewed Running Wild's Belly of the Whale, a powerful film spoiled only by some poor choices towards the end; now I'm covering the other, Kenny Colt's Wrecked. This one certainly shows some seams, but it's also a mature piece that highlights a solid progression from often seen earlier pictures like Last Call and The Worst Best Man.

Put simply, it's the best thing I've seen him do; perhaps not coincidentally, it's the first straight dramatic picture I've seen him do too. Most of what I've caught thus far from either him or from Cody Loepke, his frequent collaborator (and co-writer and screen adversary here in Wrecked), is rooted in horror, comedy or both, but this one's a dramatic piece with a piano score and not a single line of dialogue. Everything we see plays out silently behind that piano, less concerned with building a traditional story and more about inviting us to interpret one from the visuals. While the movie is only five minutes long, there are two clear sides to it. The literal side shows us snapshots of truth, while happily letting us make faulty assumptions. The experimental side blurs that by providing us with the lead character's perceptions of truth that are flavoured through his experiences. Here, the background mostly disappears as the lead's attention shifts internally for him to look back at memories and forward at fantasies.

This lead is never given a name, credited only as 'unkempt man', and is played by Colt himself. Unkempt Man is clearly not having a great time of it, trying to lose himself in a heady cocktail of drink and despair from the outset. Why is the question of the day and the answer is one that we figure out gradually, as we come to understand both the truth and the perception. I was especially impressed by how thoughtfully the script was constructed, especially with such a short time in which to let things play out. Visually it's interesting too, a very cinematic piece that would be tough to translate into other media. Parts of it are reminiscent of stage performance, for instance, but the entire picture couldn't be staged without, well, wrecking it. The restrictions of the challenge format work to the film's benefit too, as it would have been easy to let this run on for longer but it wouldn't have helped. It's strong at five minutes, lean and mean and cinematically solid. The longer it ran, the more diluted it would have become.

The script is stronger than the cast or crew, but they're stepping up. No dialogue means that everyone has to sell their characters visually, which leads to things being a little overdone. Colt has to carry most of it, having by far the most screen time, and he's not bad, doing particularly well at sustained seething though a little less well at throwing a believable punch. He shows some subtlety in the final revelation too. The rest of the cast have less opportunity in the spotlight so find that they're only able to provide what the script calls for rather than elevating it with something more. On the technical side, the script proves more ambitious than the crew can quite deliver. They do give it a good shot and make it easy to get caught up in Unkempt Man's story, especially as Colt's editing is a strong point, but they can't quite wish away all the seams in the greenscreen, fight choreography and shakiness. Colt and Loepke keep on improving though and I'm buzzed to watch it happen.

Conundrum (2014)

Director: Kristin LaVanway
Stars: Bill Wetherill, Michelle Palermo, Daniel Blunck and Kristin LaVanway

This film was a submission to one of the IFP Phoenix film challenges in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 submissions.

Usually at IFP Phoenix film challenges, regardless of the general quality of submissions, there's a clear winner. Star Babies and After the Beep were certainly that at Beat the Clock and Mystery Box this year, even if Long Way, the audience favourite at the latter, won the still more prestigious Best Arizona Short award at the Phoenix Film Festival. However, there was that rare creature, a tough call, at the Breakout challenge, with both Blue and Conundrum worthy of winning Best Picture; the fight went right down to the wire. In the end, they each went home with three awards, though Blue landed the two most sought after ones, Best Picture and Best Director, as well as a Best Actress nod for Colleen Hartnett. The most obvious win for Conundrum was Bill Wetherill's as Best Actor, but it also won for its sound design and it took home special recognition for Jason Ryan's cinematography. Had it won as the audience favourite, it would have justly moved on to the finals in place of the inferior Rigged, but sadly it didn't.

It's Wetherill we see from the outset, building himself up to the task at hand, which appears to be to rob the trailer in another man's back yard. Unfortunately for him, he's a clumsy soul and the man on whose land he's trespassing has a shotgun ready to aim. What we get is a showdown, a particularly tense one carried not only by Wetherill, who also wrote and produced, but by Daniel Blunck in support. These two work well together, very believably escalating a situation well into the danger zone, accompanied by a nicely timed set of police sirens. There's a back story, of course, to explain what led up to this point, and we're bounced capably back and forth between the past and the present. This editing isn't always as subtle as it could be, though there are some classy moments, but it all works as a whole and Michelle Palermo is decent enough in support in the flashback scenes for them to not break the tension of the showdown in the present. She's not up to the men's standards but her performance is still strong.

The two films are very different. Where Blue is slow, Conundrum is fast. Both are thoughtful films but in different ways: Conundrum overtly sets up a single moment, asking us in the process both what happens next and how it might have been avoided, while Blue more subtly aims at theme, not only letting us find the answers but the questions too. Conundrum is a very male film, with the female character in support, while Blue switches that round, a more feminine piece clearly focused on the female lead and with her husband playing support. However, there are similarities of note. Both are well written, with deceptively simple dialogue. Perhaps the best example here is a simple but pivotal line that arrives as the property owner recognises the man at whom he's aiming a gun. 'I know you,' is all he says, hardly great literature but highly appropriate for the moment and delivered by Blunck with just the right amount of hesitation and confusion. The characters are also delightfully nuanced, especially for such short films.

These two films ably highlight just what the Arizona film community is capable of nowadays, even when working under the restrictions of a film challenge. It isn't just about one good aspect any more, where a writer might write a great script or a director might bring something to life. Both these films are strong in a consistent manner, both in front of the camera and behind it. They both look good, though they have completely different styles. They both sound good, even though James Alire didn't work on either of them, an especially promising observation. They're especially well acted, an obvious commonality being the fact that both winners and some, if not all, of the supporting players being graduates of Kevin Phipps' Meisner program, which seems to produce the winners of every acting award in the valley these days. Most enjoyable to me is that there's depth to both scripts, the single facet that's perhaps fallen by the way most often over the last few years. The future is certainly bright.

Blue (2014)

Directors: Jae Staats and Jason Francois
Stars: Colleen Hartnett and Michael Hanelin

This film was a submission to one of the IFP Phoenix film challenges in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 submissions.

This film was an official selection at the Phoenix Film Festival in Phoenix in 2014. Here's an index to my reviews of 2014 films.

Still best known at IMDb for a feature that hasn't even been released yet, Colleen Hartnett is nonetheless fleshing out her filmography. When filmmakers were asked to stand up and be recognised at the Arizona Shorts set at this year's Phoenix Film Festival, she was representing no less than three selections: After the Beep, Blue and Star Babies. She had another, Perorities, accepted into the Home Grown Shorts set too, but as a director rather than an actor, making her clearly as versatile a lady as she is a busy one. If I dare to suggest that, played together, After the Beep is the best of these four films, I'm not denigrating the others, which are surely an impressive set. Blue is a strong picture too, which is why it racked up a few wins at the IFP Phoenix Breakout Challenge earlier this year, including one for Best Picture over the strong competition of Kristin LaVanway's Conundrum. Hartnett also picked up a far clearer win for Best Actress, by comparison a gimme as she was in a class of her own. Both won for the year too.

Ironically, because it did so well at this IFP Phoenix film challenge, it was directed by the folk behind the valley's other long running film challenge, the Almost Famous Film Festival, more usually known as A3F. Jae Staats is the founder, president and treasurer, while Jason Francois is his vice president, so between them, they pretty much are A3F. It's great to see these two events, surely the two largest generators of new short films in Arizona, connect and do so in such an impressive way. The flipside was that TJ Houle and Aaron Kes, the program directors at IFP Phoenix, contributed a film, Stolen Afternoon, to this year's A3F 48 hour challenge, landing in the top three for comedy and in the opinions of the audience. Clearly these local challenges are in capable hands, especially if I add that a couple of years ago Kes also made one of my favourite local films ever, La Lucha, before ascending from mere competitor to IFP staff. Let's see what 2015 will bring! It should be interesting.

Daring to choose between Blue and Conundrum is a tough and highly debatable call, as there are strong arguments for each film, but I'd nudge Blue ahead because of its depth and resonance. It appears to be very simple, merely following a couple whose relationship is falling apart to the point where it's going to break unless they can find a way to reconnect. Whether they actually do or not is teasingly up for grabs, but the film invites analysis and interpretation without ever obscuring the general flow, so this is a great choice to watch and then sit back and discuss at your favourite local bar or coffee house. You could start by pondering on just how far the title has its hooks into Alex Whitmer's script. There's a lot of blue here, starting with the mood at the breakfast table as Gavin and Alice eat their cereal. Most obviously, it's the colour of his bowl, as his OCD is offended by her not eating out of a matching one. Hers is white and it's clear that the ensuing argument is about a lot more than just crockery.

When Alice asks, 'You know we're talking about bowls, right?' Gavin is but she isn't. She's talking about them, the fact that their mismatch goes far beyond such a ridiculous detail. Their clothes take sides too; she's dressed in white, but he's wearing a blue shirt. Even his eyes are blue while hers aren't. This is the sort of film where we pay attention to that sort of thing. While the script soon focuses on Alice not Gavin, Michael Hanelin's supporting slot is especially haunting, one of his least ambiguous. 'You're not in this marriage any more,' he tells his partner. 'I don't know where you are.' The lines are believably banal, though deceptively so, but his delivery is what sells them, especially as his eyes back them up. Hanelin makes Gavin look completely lost, unable to fathom how they got to this point but also unable to figure out a way forward. When she asks him to, 'Do something, something that proves that you can see me,' his only response is to leave. And, of course, the focus shifts to Alice alone. And more blue, naturally.

Backed up from here only by the technical side, the neat transitions from Staats (wearing his editor hat), crisp cinematography from Joel Kaye and clean sound from Joe Chilcott, Blue becomes a Colleen Hartnett showcase all the way to the finalé. Already grounded as a character through a set of incisive responses and a mildly edgy show of sexual frustration, she gets stronger as a character even as she shows us her weaknesses. Of course she cries, because it wouldn't be a Colleen Hartnett picture without some tears (surely her tombstone will carry a teardrop and a glass of red wine along with her name), but what else she does will imprint this film over a number of others onto our retinae to compare future performances to. This is one of the strongest roles I've seen her play and I've seen plenty, many of which pair her with Hanelin, certainly the most consistently broken screen couple in local film. If there's a flaw, it's in how quickly it all ends, but that's excusable given the time limits of these competitions and hardly major.

Belly of the Whale (2014)

Director: Kyle Gerkin
Stars: Eric Almassy, Stacie Stocker, Greg Lutz, Desiree Srinivas, Bill Wetherill, Travis Mills and Scruffy

This film was an official selection at Filmstock 2014. Here's an index to my reviews of all 2014 films.

This film was a submission to one of the IFP Phoenix film challenges in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 submissions.

IFP Phoenix run three film challenges every year and the Breakout Challenge wraps up the 2013/2014 season. All entries were screened at the Phoenix Art Museum on the 6th of last month and the Running Wild family made out like bandits again. Technically, they only won one of the three Best Picture awards this year, for Star Babies at Beat the Clock, but most other awards went to regular cast and crew. As an example, Catch the Frog, their official Mystery Box entry, won nothing, but Best Picture winner After the Beep had a Running Wild cast and a Running Wild director, Kyle Gerkin, who also directed this film. The same happened at Breakout where Belly of the Whale 'only' landed third place and won for Best Music. It was beaten by Conundrum and Blue, the two big films of the event, both of which won acting awards for members of the Running Wild stock company: Bill Wetherill, who's also here in support, and Colleen Hartnett, who in Blue, reprised her perennial Running Wild screen partnership with Michael Hanelin.

Belly of the Whale is another strong film challenge entry but it ends unexpectedly weakly. We open at a bible study session, which in a Running Wild film surely tells us that something is up; a recurring theme in the 52 Films/52 Weeks shorts that Travis Mills directed in 2013 was anti-Catholicism, though that may partly have tied to the large number of James Joyce adaptations. Barry, the leader of the group, explains how Jonah could have survived in the whale for days, as if he knows from experience. The others clearly don't see what we see, a hard quality in the look between Barry and his wife Kate as he wraps things up for the week. And, as Peter recites the Lord's Prayer to end the session, we discover what's really going on. Tellingly, it's as Peter gets to 'Give us this day our daily bread' that we see Kate feeding dog food to the ball gagged prisoner they have chained up in a back room. It would appear that perhaps Barry was talking from experience if we see their house as a whale of bricks and mortar.

I've seen and reviewed many of these actors before, not only in IFP challenge entries. Mills and Wetherill make up two thirds of the bible study guests, the last participant being Eric Almassy. The hosts are Greg Lutz and Stacie Stocker. Desiree Srinivas, such a seductive and powerful witch/vampire in Helsing, is the unnamed prisoner here, as if Barry's really covering for Abraham van Helsing and setting her free would mean death to everyone. Lutz and Almassy are the new faces to me here and both are solid additions to this company. Technically I've seen Almassy before, in the short comedy Eduardo and Ted, but he didn't register. I'd soon see a lot more of him during the 52 Films/52 Weeks festival immediately following the Breakout Challenge; he was all over those credits like a rash, meaning that while this was the first of his Running Wild films for me, it was far from the first for him. Within only a few days, he became a very familiar face, not to mention a very capable and very versatile one. He'll surely be back often.

The dialogue is deceptively bare once the bible study group goes home, because the tension and action is ratcheted up by a small number of key lines. Almassy gets the first, because Peter is a sharp cop and he comes back to investigate. 'Who's in that room, Barry?' is his line and his delivery is perfect. Stocker gets the next one and she nails that too, with powerful backup in her arms. Finally it's up to Srinivas to bring it home by adding suitable gravitas to a line comprised of only a single word. The first half may be too crafted a setup but it's good and the second half is excellent, but the whole piece really suffers from a poorly thought out ending. I can't go deeper without spoilers, but you'll surely wonder the same thing I did during the finalé. That's followed by quotes from the US State Department's Trafficking in Persons Report, which unfortunately lessens a powerful fictional story by morphing it into a PSA. The message is a valid one and it's why the film exists, but it feels like a cheap thing to spring on us. It deserved better.

Belly of the Whale can be watched for free at YouTube.

3 Men and a Goblin (2013)

Director: Julie Van Lith
Stars: Gary Herkimer, Tim Helmstadter, Patrick Giglio and Bill Wetherill

This film was a submission to one of the IFP Phoenix film challenges in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 submissions.

For a while, 3 Men and a Goblin is just three men and it's a whole bundle of fun until that goblin makes his inevitable appearance. These three are old men, even if they're played by spring chickens like Bill Wetherill, Tim Helmstadter and Patrick Giglio with their hair artificially whitened, and they're a blast as they call each other dumbasses and retell old stories with new details. For a few minutes, this is a riot with ostentatious dialogue delivered with class. It's something of a letdown to discover that the required line of dialogue was something as banal as 'What the heck are you doin' here?' Writer/director Julie Van Lith, with help from Helmstadter, added far superior lines like, 'She was a sword swallower and the love of my life,' 'I ought to slap you till Jeopardy starts!' and even, 'It's OK if you're a back door bandit; ain't no shame in that.' If they got back together for a full ninety minutes of material like this, it would be a sight to see. The challenge would be to have Wetherill laugh so hard he'd fall out of his wheelchair.

Unfortunately just past the halfway mark, the goblin shows up and the film jumps the shark so acutely that I'd be hard pressed to think of a better example. A naked man chases down a hallway on all fours, a goblin appears in negative to spout like Yoda and we're given, get this, an intertitle that explains a plot that's just arrived without being asked. Sure, it sets up a funny ending, but it's really not needed; it could have all been told without the goblin and it would have worked just as well, if not far better. It's almost worth it just to see Wetherill kiss a goat, but... no, it's not worth it. In the end, like the men and their remembered lady loves, we're stuck watching the terrible outcome of what could have been great fun. Their dialogue substitutes for ours. 'Oh, my eyes are on fire!' one cries, before they add in unison: 'Take it back, goblin, take it back!' Hear, hear! Three Men and a Boat needed the boat, but 3 Men and a Goblin would have been far better with a boat instead of a goblin. Now I want 3 Men: The Web Series.

Zombies of Capitalism (2013)

Director: Mikey Campbell
Stars: Kevin Hornsby, Jackson and Jacob Thompson

This film was a submission to one of the IFP Phoenix film challenges in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 submissions.

This may be the most half hearted, pointlessly stupid, waste of a zombie movie I've ever seen and I've seen a heck of a lot of them, given that I've been wading through submissions to horror film festivals for years. A few years ago, zombies wrested the crown of subgenre du jour from vampires, partly because everyone knows a bunch of friends willing to slather on latex for a day's shoot and partly because you don't need acting talent to play a shambling corpse. One of the better reasons that zombies took over the world is because you can write any story you like in a zombie apocalypse and send any message. The walking dead work great as metaphors, so it seemed like every week brought a new one. George A Romero started it, but everyone else caught up and we saw zombies representing gays, blacks, slaves, even domestic help. This film wants to have a metaphor but can't be bothered to think one up. There's a visible point where the cast realise that the Emperor has no clothes and literally bury faces in hands.

Admittedly, director Mikey Campbell and writer Jacob Thompson were saddled with a prop without much potential: a political book. That they found one to include is the biggest success of the picture, but their imaginations apparently deserted them. The best use for it that they could come up with is for one survivor of the fresh zombie apocalypse to decide that it's the best weapon he can find in a garage. It's not even a hardback; he'd have been better off with the fuzzy dice in the car. And then, as if there was no chance of a single imaginative idea anywhere in the room, they make it an instant cure: the merest touch from Gotcha Capitalism and zombies are completely cured in seconds! Seriously, a team made up of people from a community college cinema society couldn't imagine anything more substantial to fit into a zombie movie framework? At least we can see and hear what's going on. Everything's in sync. The opening title is even pretty cool. But the bad smell on this one doesn't come from the zombies.

The Hedge Sculptor 3000 (2013)

Director: Adam Mariner

This film was a submission to one of the IFP Phoenix film challenges in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 submissions.

IFP Phoenix's new Mystery Box challenge certainly seemed to be just that for many teams: a challenge. Rather than provide the usual required line and prop for each team to use, it asked them to write their own to put in a hat and draw out at random. Adam Mariner may have cursed this concept as he realised what he'd been given, but it turned out to be a blessing as his film must have written itself. What would you come up with if you were tasked with making a short film featuring a pair of shears and the line, 'Is my vagina supposed to look like this?' If you're picturing a forty second infomercial with a bubbly blonde Kiwi in a flesh coloured bodysuit, you did precisely what Mariner did and it really is as funny, albeit also as predictable, as that seems. Unfortunately the credits only list the first names of those involved, with no roles to join them, so I have no idea who the young lady on screen is who makes the material shine, but she's perfectly cast for the role and she does a great job.

There's so little here that it would be easy to imagine nobody else did anything but her, but it isn't just the model and her lines, however well phrased and delivered they happen to be. The technical folk only had to match the style of a cheesy pitch and cheesy pitches aren't particularly renowned for their magic cinematography or their stunning sound. They tend to be more about pointing the camera in the right direction and keeping out of the way so that the model can do her job. That's what Mariner's crew do here and it works fine. The artiest they get is to start in black and white and the cleverest they get is to set up some neat pixellation to avoid censure by the networks, even though it's completely obvious that the model is less naked than anyone watching. Of course this means that the shoutouts are for people not shining, which is an odd scenario for a critic to find himself writing up. This was never going to win anything except best use of line, but that was always pretty safe. It's a fun wrap up for a set of shorts.

The Will (2013)

Director: Mack Duncan
Stars: Jermain Byers and Clifton Gray

This film was a submission to one of the IFP Phoenix film challenges in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 submissions.

The CareFree Write entry for the Beat the Clock challenge earlier this year was Wouldn't Be Love, which felt like a good film lost under the weight of serious technical issues. Their entry for Mystery Box has the same feel, though both the positive and negative evened out a little. There's much to like here, but it's less of a film and more of a vignette, tailored of course for a film challenge. The story is the strong part once more, with some agreeable quirks and decent dialogue leading up to a strong but admirably subtle little twist at the end. The downside is the sound, though it's mostly just sync issues this time around. In between is the acting, which runs the gamut from wooden or overplayed to strong or delightful. When I reviewed Wouldn't Be Love, I noted that I should go back to find some of the award winning shorts that CareFree Write have made. I haven't done that yet, but this film underlines why I should, because I like what they're doing, just not necessarily how they're doing it on limited timeframes.

The story here happens in the month between the reading of a will and the allocation of assets; to fit in the required running time, we only follow one of the three surviving relatives of the deceased, Gertrude Elizabeth Merryweather. That's a shame, as I'd like to have seen the other two stories that are told only in hints. There are riders to the will; each of the three beneficiaries are given a suitably macabre task to fulfil. Roger must spend 30 days in a haunted house, Jessica must find Aunt Gert's killer and avenge her death, while Gary must safeguard a cursed object. It's a monkey, a child's toy, to which he's handcuffed for the entire thirty days, and his cursed misadventures comprise most of this short. It goes precisely as well as you might expect, but there's still time for substance. Jermain Byers shows some charm as Gary, but it's Clifton Gray who steals the show as the dry lawyer. Unfortunately he only gets to bookend the piece, but he does it well enough to haul us in and leave us wanting more.