Stolen Afternoon (2014)

Director: Aaron Kes
Stars: Mae Broeske, Cord Nash Skvarek, T J Houle and Aaron Kes

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

Given that the Home Grown Shorts set at this year's Phoenix Film Festival was packed full with impactful dramas that ran the gamut of homelessness, racism, terrorism, suicide, debt, addiction, abuse, revenge, murder and a runaway child, it might surprise that it was the two comedies that got the most reaction in a verbal way from the audience. Logan Must Make Star Wars clearly benefitted from being a break in this apparently relentless assault late on in the set, but Stolen Afternoon was second up and its predecessor, Grace of a Stranger, was calm and polite with its impact. Yet it played wonderfully and sold huge. I heard an 'It's funny!' from a young kid way down at the front and an 'Oh my God!' and a 'That's amazing!' from the folk sitting next to me. All those were during the film; there were a bunch more during the credits. It could be seen as an even greater accomplishment because director Aaron Kes made this in a mere 48 hours for the A3F film challenge in 2014, where it won the Audience Favourite.

It's a pretty simple story, as they go. T J Houle, Kes's partner-in-crime at the rival local film challenge, IFP Phoenix, plays the unnamed mother of an unnamed baby daughter. She's clearly highly capable but the phone rings with news that Carla has had a relationship crisis and needs to be picked up from the side of a road. What are friends for? Well, as Carla is the only character in this film to have a name, clearly she's important enough for her to leave her baby daughter behind for a few hours with her similarly unnamed brother, who's staying with them for a while on holiday. The bad news is that the only thing that Brother knows about babies is that his sister has one. He's clearly as prepared for a couple of hours in the smelly company of this cute baby girl as I am for the zombie apocalypse, which is to say not at all. Frankly, we'd call his stunning ineptitude into doubt if Cord Nash Skvarek wasn't so funny at being utterly useless. We don't want to imagine how bad things would have got if only Aaron Kes hadn't shown up to rob them.

And there you have it. What follows is utterly ludicrous, of course, but in the best possible way. We aren't supposed to buy into the situation; we're supposed to buy into how true to life it bizarrely manages to be while still remaining utterly ludicrous. There are hints at further depth here, in both of these men finding help in a strange way, but they're only hints as this aims mostly for the chuckle organs. Each of the four actors is perfectly cast and nails the tone of their characters: the matter of fact Houle, the deadpan Kes, the deer-in-the-headlights Skvarek and, of course, the cute Mae Broeske as the baby who obviously had an absolute blast on the set. At least, she did when she was on camera and that's what matters most to us. I value what Houle and Kes do for IFP Phoenix, but I do wish they'd make more movies. This is a gem, a comedy worthy of repeat viewings and yet it's not even my favourite of the two films Kes has directed. Following my all-time favourite IFP challenge film, La Lucha, was an impossible task, but this is worthy.

Grace of a Stranger (2014)

Director: Alex Thomas
Stars: Jaron Druyon, Jessalyn Carpino, James Hesapis, Clay Johnson and Jennifer Sandoval

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

I first saw Grace of a Stranger at last year's Jerome Indie Film & Music Festival and it immediately found a hold. Watching it afresh at this year's Phoenix Film Festival at the frustrating time of 9.05am, I found that it still played well, even though it felt, at the time, like a surprising choice to kick off the set, given that it runs a deceptively relaxed eighteen minutes. A hour and a half later, I understood why and appreciated the skill with which the Home Grown Shorts set was programmed. Grace of a Stranger worked well as the first half of a pair of bookends with Thrasherland, another human interest journey with a skateboarding connection. It's also a hopeful film, so fits at the beginning or end of a set. That it was inspired by a true story adds a little oomph, even if it was written by an inmate of the Arizona State Prison Complex while a student in the Arizona Prison Creative Writing Workshops. Clearly something else went wrong for Aaron Keel after the events adapted to the screen here finished and, sadly, we're not told what that was.

The story follows two men. Aaron is a homeless man who has 'been in kind of a bad way' but who is now turned around and looking for a stable future. He's finding it tough, as we see when he cleans himself up in a Co-Op restroom and applies for a job; the manager can't even process his application because of the lack of contact details: no phone, no e-mail, no address. Unfortunately, given that the only thing he owns that doesn't fit in his rucksack is the skateboard he uses to get around and that's destroyed by a car after he hits a rock in a parking lot, he needs more than hope to move forward. Eventually he finds Bert at BLX, a skate shop which he co-owns with Zack, his unseen partner, who thinks up all sorts of rad (or bad) ideas when Bert's not there. The contrast in problems is clear and so is the fact that Aaron clearly can't afford a new board and Bert can't afford to hire him. The key moment is when Aaron leaves BLX without the board he clearly thought of stealing and Bert finds him a replacement for free, hence the title.

Aaron Keel is real and his two page short story, Acts of Kindness, first published in Rain Shadow Review, the Prison Creative Writing Workshops’ literary journal, can be read for free online at the film's website. It highlights how much director Troy Hollar, who heard the story read aloud on NPR by Erec Toso, a U of A English professor who also teaches workshops behind bars and set Aaron the task to write a piece about an act of kindness, took a few liberties with that story when adapting it to film with Andrew Newburg. It's actually a better, more nuanced story when stretched out from two pages of prose to an eighteen minute short film and it's brought to life very well indeed. It's the dialogue that sells it best, along with the actors who deliver it. Matt Letscher, who plays Bert, is a very experienced actor who many will recognise from a string of major TV shows, like Scandal, The Carrie Diaries and Boardwalk Empire. The awesomely named Nipper Knapp isn't, but he's also up to the challenge and the two of them nail the dialogue.

Hollar brings in a variety of other details and themes to flesh out the bones of Keel's story, which is brief to the point that it could be described as an anecdote. He establishes Aaron's decency through the street mutt that follows him everywhere; he has nothing but he still feeds the dog. He turns the breaking of the skateboard into an accident rather than an act of karma. He uses jazz as an odd but believable bonding experience for the two men, using a Charlie Parker shirt as the catalyst. And he gives the whole story an ending too, as Aaron can give a little bit back to repay Bert's act of kindness, rather than just change his anger into hope. The film is better for the presence of all these elements, even though they're not part of Keel's original story. Hollar doesn't even really retain the core of the story, which is that kindness trumps anger or positivity beats negativity, instead focusing on the idea that there's always hope, even if it's an unimaginable distance away, which is why I much prefer the film to the story, even if it's not as true.

The Mutable Life of Oscar Clark (2013)

Director: Alex Thomas
Stars: Jaron Druyon, Jessalyn Carpino, James Hesapis, Clay Johnson and Jennifer Sandoval

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

One benefit I've found to watching the selections of Arizona shorts at the Phoenix Film Festival is that I'm able to discover films from further afield than just the Phoenix metropolitan area. While that's the hotbed of Arizona filmmaking, it's no monopoly and there's good and/or interesting work coming out of cities like Tucson and Flagstaff. This short film from the latter, successfully funded on Kickstarter to the degree that director Alex Thomas could pay his actors, is unlike anything else I've seen made in state and it remains refreshing today. In fact, it's both a complete story and a hint at what could be, as this is the only film in this particular Home Grown Shorts set that could easily be expanded into something bigger. There's a lot more life in this idea than what Thomas can give us in the short thirteen minutes that this film runs. Put simply, it tells of a character, the Oscar Clark of the title, who discovers that he's fictional when he meets his creator, who has written herself into his story. I love that idea.

I partly love that idea because I came up with it myself a couple of decades ago and wrote a story called The Sound of Shattering Glass, but it's a very different approach to a man meeting his maker. I didn't tie it to film, for a start, as Thomas does here. His take on the idea neatly creates conflict because films are rarely written by one person, this one being a great example, given that Thomas wrote it in collaboration with Clayton Johnson. While I hope they worked together amicably, that isn't often the case in Hollywood, where writers are hired and fired frequently before a project becomes what the studio execs want it to be. Kingdom of the Sun was a romantic musical comedy that, over six years, gradually transformed into The Emperor's New Groove, a wacky buddy flick, as far from the original as can comfortably be imagined. It's why authors are always very happy for Hollywood to option their books, because they get paid, but often cringe when they actually make the film adaptations, because they invariably aren't what they wrote.

Here, Kathryn Flint has written a touching romance between Oscar Clark and his significant other, Olivia, who does share his surname in the end credits even though he doesn't wear a wedding ring. The studio, on the other hand, turned it into a murder mystery, blowing up Olivia at the beginning of the picture and setting Oscar up for the crime. The two men in black he finds suddenly interrogating him under a sinister light found the C4 in his house, his fingerprints on the detonator and the life insurance policy on his wife. Why did he do it? How does he know? He wasn't involved. Why they're willing to torture him to force him into a confession when they have everything they need, I have no idea, but maybe it's because they're a pair of script doctors hired by the studio to mess with Kathryn's vision. Of all the films in the world, this is the one whose goofs can be most easily forgiven. For her part, Kathryn, unable to let go of her creations, writes herself into the script to save Oscar and Olivia and their relationship.

Alex Thomas calls himself 'a musician before anything else' and that's understandable because we hear his work before we ever see it, the accomplished score impossible to ignore as it's suitably overblown for anything but the Hollywood movie the fictional script doctors are keen to turn this into (there's a touch of genius in ironically casting co-writer Clayton Johnson as one of those script doctors, creating his real film by sabotaging someone else's fictional one). After the score, the effects are most notable, partly because there are so many of them, given that we leap around between location and location, aided by the sort of progressions and transitions we usually see in comic books. The final scene is great fun too and it segues cleverly into end credits that are as in your face as the score. Like other dark comic-infused effects-ridden action movies like, say, Sin City, the acting takes a back seat to the concept but it's decent enough, if not particularly notable. It's the concept that shines brightest and I'd love to see a feature version.

Final Flight (2013)

Director: David Jorgensen

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

I've seen Final Flight a few times now and it's an interesting documentary that throws out some glorious moments late on but also misses a few opportunities. The subject is really the experience of flying, but it focuses in on a World War II veteran called Gene Fowler, who flew bombing raids into Germany in B-17s. An avid flyer from the age of fifteen, he signed up for the US Air Corps when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the Americans decided to join the war. Yet, once it was over and he made it back safely from his 33rd and final flight, he never flew again. The film doesn't really cover why, but the blurb suggests it was due to the trauma of the raids. He appropriately quotes a description of bombing runs as 'hours and hours of boredom interrupted by seconds of sheer terror.' Maybe he'd experienced enough sheer terror, especially with flights like the one where he kept losing engines on the way back and eventually landed his Flying Fortress in the English Channel in the shadow of the White Cliffs of Dover.

But, while his last bombing run constituted his final flight for an amazing 65 years, this 91 year old pilot is given a new final flight, albeit as a passenger in the back of a two seater based at Deer Valley Airport outside Phoenix, AZ. Before that happens, David Jorgensen, who may have been the entire crew on this film, sets us up for it. He switches us between a variety of different angles to flying, thus keeping a focus on the activity itself rather than any one particular aspect of it. We hear from modern day civilian pilots based out of Deer Valley, like Tom Johnson and Mike Pfleger of the Warbird Division of the Experimental Aircraft Association, who have picked up a formation flying bug from the military folk and explain how it works. We hear from Fowler, talking about his war experience and thus bringing a much darker aspect to flying. We see a lot of supporting material: personal photos, maps and stock footage obtained from the National Archives. And eventually we get to where we've always been going: Fowler back in the sky.

All this has been interesting but it's around the ten minute mark when we start to move towards special. We start to notice the score building, we watch Fowler strap into the back of a plane and his words begin to move away from his down to Earth, no-nonsense personality to a more abstract form. He quotes John Magee's famous poem, High Flight, appropriately for a few reasons. Magee was another American pilot who served during the war; a year younger than Fowler, he joined the fight early and died in the air just three days after the US declared war on Japan, so almost exactly when Fowler signed up. He wrote High Flight when doing high altitude tests in a new Spitfire, an experimental military bird like those flown in this film, and he described his feelings as he put out his hand 'and touched the face of God'. Fowler has particular closeness to those words, describing them as exactly what he feels about flying. He obviously means that too, which adds poignancy to his decision not to do so again for 65 years.

Those words also feel highly appropriate as the film takes flight and we see something of why they were written. The choice to include at this point a clichéd song like Walking in the Air could easily have broken the film, especially as it's Stephen van Dyck singing rather than Aled Jones, but it works. It's appropriate and it takes away all the words, memories and explanations, replacing them entirely with visuals. All the footage here is capable, as we see landscapes and skyscapes and follow a set of planes dancing through them. Frankly though, all the editing between shots at this point could have been safely ditched to show only the footage of Fowler taken with a rear-facing camera. This entire picture can be boiled down as far as the expressions on his face as the plane in which he's riding rolls, spins and glides and he touches the face of God one more time on his new final flight. As strong as this film is, showing anything but that for the last five minutes still feels like a missed opportunity as, really, it's all that matters.

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.

Perorities (2013)

Director: Colleen Hartnett
Stars: Dakota DuVall, Stacie Stocker and Michael Hanelin

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

Most of the shorts made at Running Wild Films used to be directed by Travis Mills, with most of the rest by the production company's co-founder, Gus Edwards. In 2013, however, a whole slew of other folk came on board to take their turn in the director's chair, a bunch of whom only had experience on the other side of the camera. A few of these films stand out in hindsight for various reasons: Michael Coleman's I Don't Even Know Your Name was an IFP challenge film that won Honda King a much deserved end-of-year Best Actress award; The MacGruffin and Foster, You're Dead set the stage for Kyle Gerkin's notable career as a director, which with the feature, Seven Hours in Heaven, has now eclipsed his acting; and Perorities from Collen Hartnett, which became the first Running Wild short to be selected for a major film festival. It's far from the best thing that the company has ever done and it starts off on shaky ground, but it ends up as one of the most fun little films I've grinned my way through.

Much of that is due to Dakota DuVall, a scenestealing little boy whose lack of technical skill is more than made up for by his infectious personality, his amazing grin and his knack of pulling exactly the right face at exactly the right moment. He plays Sammy, a precocious child clearly enjoying the stuffing out of life even though he's suffering from a medical condition that is never named and never explained. It merely means that his mother, Celia, has to take days off work at the drop of a hat to take care of him, which, of course, puts a strain on her as a single mother and precludes her from having a love life. As she explains to Elizabeth on the phone, as she tries to set Celia up with David Walker from work: 'I don't have time to go on dates. I have Sammy.' He's her priority, so her private e-mail address is going to stay private. Celia is portrayed by Stacie Stocker, an experienced Running Wild hand who is as excellent here as usual, but she's up against a dynamo of a co-star who steals every shared scene from her.

Thus far it's been a little clunky. There's an imbalance in the sound between Stocker and DuVall in the first scene, which is annoying. There's an awkward shot that exists only to establish Celia's obvious worry and it feels out of place. Even the camera isn't as stable as it ought to have been. Yet, it's about to really kick in because Celia's conversation with Elizabeth is only the setup and now Sammy's about to exercise mad skills to make that potential date with David Walker from work happen. The cinematic trick that follows is an absolute blast and it's one that can't fail to elicit a grin from every audience member that's as huge as Dakota DuVall's. It's the funniest thing I've ever seen Stacie Stocker do and she absolutely nails it. As the potential love interest, Michael Hanelin proves yet again why he needs to do more comedy; it's a lot more sedate than what he got up to in The Test Case, but he's fun being PG nonetheless. Their dialogue is also well crafted, with some clever choices of words that mean different things to different ages.

There's a quote from a Frank Sinatra song at the end of the credits that doesn't really apply to the story but does to the tone: 'Fairy tales can come true; it can happen to you if you're young at heart.' This does have its share of technical issues but it gets better and the joy that arrives when Sammy gets sneaky is a technical issue trumping sort of joy that stems equally from DuVall's voice, Stocker's acting and the script by Hartnett, who wrote and directed solo and produced and edited with Mills. While this was the first film she directed, it wasn't the last as she co-directed an IFP submission last year called And Then There Were Monsters and she's continued to rack up odd crew credits. However, unlike Gerkin, she's mostly remained in front of the camera, where she continues to shine, even if tears and red wine are not required props. It feels odd to watch a Hartnett picture that doesn't feature her on screen, but if she comes up with another odd idea like this one, I hope she takes another shot in the director's chair.

De' Lune (2013)

Director: Austin Moede
Stars: Nathan Rehm and Michelle Irei

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

I couldn't help but like De' Lune, even if its ambition surely exceeds its merit. It seems to follow Matthew Stiengrad, a young and dedicated pianist whose overt musical talent compensates for an apparent lack of social skills. When he has a keyboard in front of him, he immerses himself in his playing to the point of losing himself; when he doesn't, like his periodic trips to a quiet bench in the park, his eyes are shut and his fingers are moving just as if he was indeed back in front of those eighty-eight keys. And even though we follow Matthew to find a girl, or rather for the girl to find him, this really isn't about him at all. It's not about her either, a girl called Claire who enjoyed a piano recital he recently gave at the local community college and has a whole bundle of astute questions to ask him. It's all about the music, which makes it a simple but effective piece that merely doesn't go where we might expect it to go. Sure, it could be called drama and the sequel could be a romance, but really this is just an exploration of music.

And here's where it shines. The acting is clearly not the film's strongest point, with Nathan Rehm maybe a little stiffer than he should be as a distracted pianist and Michelle Irei decent vocally but unable to stop grinning her way through the film. To steal one of Matthew's key lines of dialogue: 'It's not about them.' It's all about the music and how it has the power to stimulate our brains into generating connections that transport us. Austin Moede, the writer and director, takes us along with Matthew to a set of these places in montages that are well done and would have been visually striking if only Vermillion hadn't played a single film earlier on in the very same set. Even Kitchen Sink Films can't send their drone up far enough to capture the majesty of creation in the form of stars gliding through the cosmos. Claire asks Matthew, 'What goes on when you play?' This film goes a little way into visualising the answer. It's merely a brief snapshot rather than an exhaustive answer, but it's a fun enough few minutes while it runs.

Vermillion (2013)

Director: Doug Bell

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

Surely the most beautifully crafted piece of video to come out of Arizona or pretty much anywhere else, Vermillion is certainly a whole lot of things. What it isn't is clear: it's not a story, however much the soft tones of Tim Stansell suggest that it will be in the opening narration. What it is is less clear, because it's so many different things at once that it's hard to figure out its primary reason for existing. It's a freeform piece of poetry, mixing the words of director Doug Bell with the startling visuals of Lee's Ferry, where the Colorado River separates Arizona and Utah. It's a test run of equipment, an exercise in composition and editing and a demo reel of technique: time lapse photography and slomo so slow that it can capture the wings of a hummingbird in flight, macro images and long shots so wide that it feels like they haul us into the frame, underwater and aerial footage, silhouettes and lens flare. You name it, it's here, to collate the appropriately named Kitchen Sink Studios collection of images of the architecture of man and of nature.

It's constructed with care all the way to the typography of the end credits and the title screen, composed with custom fonts created in house. The former contain admirable texture and the latter is less like a title card and more like the label of a whiskey bottle, emphasised by having it overlay what is probably river water in motion. This care is constant, every shot framed like a print advert; maybe the film isn't a single story but a hundred of them, one for every shot, the sort of distillations of emotion that we expect to see in TV commercials. I certainly wondered throughout what would find centre stage at the end: the Arizona flag, a bottle of Bud or a Detroit-built penis extension. In the end, it doesn't hawk anything except the expertise of Kitchen Sink Studios which, on the strength of these eight and a half minutes, ought to be in serious demand from companies with deep pockets. Film festivals usually program films that either tell a fictional story or document a real one. This is a rare exception, hard to categorise but easy on the eyes.

And while the visuals will stay with viewers the most, adding the stunning vistas of Glen Canyon to their holiday list, this isn't just eye candy. Sure, every shot is strong and some are truly stunning, like the trout fisherman in silhouette casting into the shimmer of the Colorado River, the mountain goat dancing up a crazy gradient or the drone soaring over the heads of the filmmakers to leap over a precipice, but there's more to making a film than pointing a camera, however capably pointed it happens to be. The score is a well chosen set of three supportive pieces of music, the free poetry in narration adds to the pastoral feel and the editing is superlative. Doug Bell and Brandon Barnard are responsible for the latter, which plays fast early on to ensure that we devour this as impressions, slower as it settles and eventually cuts to the escalating beat superbly. It's hard to imagine a better demo reel than this, but its impressionistic nature means that all its details are quickly forgotten. Unless you fly fish; then this might the best film ever.

Vermillion can be watched for free on Vimeo.

Terminus (2014)

Director: Angel Ruiz
Stars: Angel Ruiz, Michelle Palermo and Carrie Fee

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

As soon as the Home Grown Shorts set finished at last year's Phoenix Film Festival, I sought out the man behind Terminus, Angel Ruiz, to seek his permission to screen it myself. Happily he allowed me to screen it at a couple of film festivals I ran at local conventions and it played well each time. That isn't to say that it's a perfect piece because it isn't and its flaws seem to add up each time I see the film, but none are of any real importance beyond the slightly metallic sound that mars some of the earlier scenes a little. The rest are merely details, down to my realisation on my latest time through that Ruiz must have changed a minor script element between producing his props and shooting his film, so that the closer we watch, the more little details stand out as wrong. The sweep of it is solid though, as are a few different bookends to keep us on our toes, and it remains more accessible and more accomplished than Interceptor, his film in the previous year's festival. Of course, neither are on IMDb, as Ruiz is apparently allergic to credits.

Terminus begins all sweetness and light, with a faux commercial for the company of the title, which bills itself as a people placement service. The recognisable faces of Michelle Palermo and Carrie Fee, with the new one to me of Joran Bean, hawk a company which guarantees results. Then the title card arrives in an ominous red on black with an even more ominous horror tone to highlight that this is a dark story and we need to watch carefully to figure out what's really going on. The title helps that too, as does the fact that the receptionist at Terminus is Glona, the example girl in the commercial who was placed 'in a prestigious company with locations around the world'. Yeah, the one she's advertising! So, as the soft jazz and exotic fish settle us at Terminus HQ, in comes David Keppler in the form of Angel Ruiz himself, straightening his tie before his eight o'clock with the CEO of the company, Diana Silver. Quite why he warrants the CEO for his evaluation, I have no idea; that's one of those odd details that stands out with repeat viewings.

This evaluation is the heart of the story. Silver, calm and professional to the degree that every line feels like it's crafted for another commercial, has him go through three tests. He's confident and flirtacious as he begins, but things soon change and we start to discover the darkness that the title card promised. It ends very well indeed, with a few quick twists that may seem obvious on a repeat viewing but aren't on the first time through; they're all telegraphed but not to the degree that we necessarily know how they will manifest themselves. My biggest problem initially lay in my being a trained touch typist so the third test was a gimme for me, so detracting from one of the twists. I presume it would also have been for the David Keppler who's detailed on the resume on Silver's desk, prompting him to change from a software engineer with a degree to a high school grad with an industrial background. Maybe the former would be more appropriate for a meeting with the CEO. Multiple viewings can be a benefit or a curse...

The acting is solid, though a few lines should have been retaken early on. Ruiz wrote the film entirely so he could hurl profanity at Michelle Palermo on screen and, as always, he's strong in the tougher scenes. He does well in quieter ones here too, mixing well an overt cockiness with a little subtle self-doubt. Ruiz gives himself the story arc, so Palermo has to delve into her character. She gets to drop a lot of hints as to where the story is going and we realise that even if we don't grasp her meanings, so we pay her a lot of attention. The film is worth watching twice just to see her character from the new perspective that the first viewing gives us. Carrie Fee gets little to do except smile a lot as Glona, but she does get to end the film by thrusting her breasts at the camera (completely safe for work, folks). The story trumps the acting though, as the point is to put us in the same seat as Keppler to try to puzzle through what's going on. It's a successful and memorable piece on that front, even if you happen to be a touch typist.

The House on Pine Street (2015)

Directors: Aaron and Austin Keeling
Stars: Emily Goss, Taylor Bottles, Cathy Barnett, Jim Korinke, Natalie Pellegrini and Tisha Swart-Entwistle

This film was an official selection at the 11th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2015. Here's an index to my reviews of 2015 films.

The buzz was strong for The House on Pine Street and the screening I attended at the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival was sold out. It had premiered in February at the Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose, where the San Jose Mercury News called it out as one of the '6 Films You Need to See' from a schedule of two hundred from over fifty countries. Yet, while there are certainly a lot of positive aspects to the movie, especially given that it was made by a pair of recent film school graduates, Aaron and Austin, the Keeling brothers, there are also a lot of negative aspects that challenged my ability to like the film. While the end credits rolled, I found myself puzzling over certain scriptmaking decisions that broke what the film should have been. Most notably, while the Keelings had a strong and innovative idea to bring to bear, they were unable to really integrate it into their script, making the last third of the picture feel like a cheat and the ending much too drawn out. It should have finished twenty or thirty minutes earlier.

The idea is the strongest aspect, backed up by an excellent cast and some very capable crew, but it's not anything I can elaborate on without providing spoilers. Let's highlight instead that the Keelings are clearly idea filmmakers, with the synopsis of a previous film, Modern Ruins, not only intriguing on its own merits but surely influential on the evolution on this, their debut feature. It's a half hour short revolving around a young lady who struggles to stay sane at a friend's party while being followed by a camera crew that only she can see. That sounds like a surrealistic take on this feature, the sort of thing that Luis Buñuel ought to find interesting if he were still alive today, as this is a claustrophobic tale of another young lady who may also be less than sane and who also finds herself effectively trapped both in a potentially haunted house, into which she's just moved, and in the time honoured position of mother, as she's heavily pregnant. The strained relationship between her and her own mother may well be the key to the whole thing.

The young lady here is Jennifer and her husband is Luke. They're from Chicago, in which Jenny would love to still be living, but they're being set up in a house back in Kansas by her mother, Meredith. Jenny resists from the outset but doesn't appear to have much say in the matter, not least because Meredith isn't the sort of person anyone can say no to and make it stick, but also because she had a history in Chicago that is probably best left behind. The suggestion early on is that she had mental problems that affected more than merely herself and details provided later in the film emphasise that. So she's stuck in Kansas, close to mum and with Luke eager to help but reluctant to listen. That's an excellent setup for a haunted house film, which is what this quickly becomes, because Jenny is, of course, the only one who sees things, hears things or encounters things, most of which fall into the usual categories: mysterious knocks that can't be traced to a source, doors that open on their own and things that move about inexplicably.

Emily Goss is a powerful lead, gifted with most screen time by far and able to make it work. I bought into the emotions that raged around and within Jenny, especially because Cathy Barnett is just as outstanding as her mother, Meredith. I was shocked to discover that this picture is only Barnett's second IMDb credit, a full nine years after her first, in which she played the stepmother of the title character in Raising Jeffrey Dahmer, as she carried her part like a former star moving into character roles and demonstrating her true talent. For all that Aaron and Austin Keeling, who wrote, produced and directed the film, are brothers, this is a very female-oriented film, suggesting that their co-writer, Natalie Jones, had a substantial amount of input into the script. Men get very little screen time and, when they do, they don't get much to do with it. When one finally shows up in the script and the house with potential, he's exposed as a charlatan. That a man gets to expound the central idea at the end is somewhat offensive and certainly not appreciated.

While Jenny, and everyone else in the film, is American, I felt that she was portrayed with a great deal of European flavour, not only through her character but in how she's treated by the camera. It's an original story, but it would be believable to read it as an American remake of a French film; that's how focused it is on women and the depths of their characters. Even as what can only be described as the victim of the piece, the lead character who is tormented by the house which she can't escape and ignored by anyone to whom she attempts to relate this, Jenny is still a strong woman fully capable of strong acts. Of course, her manipulative mother is just as strong, which is neatly ironic, given where this really goes in the end. This is a power struggle as much as anything else, merely manifested in supernatural ways, and there's enough depth to explore to provide the basis of a worthy thesis. It's surprising for this to show up in an American horror movie and I doff my hat in respect to the Keelings for making it happen.

The unfortunate flipside to all this oestrogen-drenched suspense is that the men are almost worthless in this picture. Taylor Bottles is perfectly capable as Luke and Jim Korinke does a solid job as Walter Vance, a friend of Meredith's whose self-proclaimed paranormal abilities suggest that he's that one male character with potential, but neither of them really get much to do. Luke, in particular, is written very strangely. He feels like a plot twist always ready to happen but which never does. Sure, he's obviously stuck between a rock and a hard place, but that doesn't excuse many of his actions. If anything, he feels more out of place in Jenny's story than the potential ghosts haunting his house. Compared to Meredith's terminal bitchiness and Jenny's frustration, it's often hard to focus in on the fact that he's even in some of these scenes. He could easily have been cut entirely or reduced to a mere egg donor for a lesbian Jenny and an imaginary girlfriend. That would have made more sense in the bigger scheme of things.

The biggest changes needed are certainly to the last third of the film, which arguably should have been cut too. For the entire running time, we're presented with a situation and asked to fathom whether it's all really happening or whether it's just in the broken mind of its lead character. Both angles are built well, through clever construction of tension by the Keelings (Aaron also edited), strong cinematography from Juan Sebastian Baron and a decent score by Nathan Matthew David and Jeremy Lamb. Everything would have worked much better if we had been left to figure out which we favour, internally as the end credits rolled and verbally with fellow patrons after the screening. There's even a single shot, perhaps twenty or thirty minutes from the end, that would have served as the perfect point to finish. However, it carries on regardless for a protracted finalé that includes an explanation delivered out of nowhere (that isn't either of the two angles we're weighing) and a set of small endings that only serve to diminish the film.

I have to congratulate Aaron and Austin Keeling for putting together and completing an indie feature film in the US that had so much potential to do something different. For all the layers of haunted house cliché we wade through, this is never a conventional haunted house story. In fact, truth be told, it's not really a horror movie at all, more of a drama that wears horror clothing for effect. The first apparition, that shows up tellingly right after the housewarming party that Meredith springs on her daughter, apparently out of spite, is superbly handled; no wonder Walter says that the house has an interesting energy! The addition of a neighbour, Marlene, who drinks when talking about the house, brings welcome cookies but won't set foot inside and who has a pair of daughters with selective mutism, adds magnificently to the freaky feel. There's so much effectively set into motion that I can't help but look forward to the Keelings' next movie, because there's greatness in them. They just need the experience to know what they have.

And, for all that they do so many things right here, it's that lack of experience that wins out in the end. I was caught up in their ride for a long while, but they couldn't bring it home and, in trying to add more to the film, they only managed to throw a lot of it away. What they should have thrown away was twenty or thirty minutes of footage and ended the film that much sooner. This could have become worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as other challenging genre explorations of the female psyche like Wound, The Babadook or, most closely, House of Good and Evil, but in the end it falls apart on itself. People have told me in the past that reviews of mine that I felt were negative inspired them to go and see those films rather than avoid them. I can imagine this one being another such review, so I should end it with a note of caution. I'd recommend that, if you find this review intriguing, you seek out The House on Pine Street, but leave or switch it off when there's a body on the lawn. It'll play so much better that way.