Firebird 2015 AD (1981)

Director: David M Robertson
Stars: Darren McGavin and Doug McClure

It’s always dangerous for science fiction movies to name the years in which they’re set, unless of course they’re Back to the Future Part II, in which case people will wait years for viewing parties ‘in the future’ of the movie. This one doesn’t just name the year, it flaunts it in its very title, which is especially arrogant. It turns out that its vision of the future (now our present) isn’t entirely outrageous, as this 1981 film built on the energy crisis sparked by the Iranian revolution two years earlier to set up a US in which gasoline is banned but ten states allot supplies anyway in defiance of federal orders. I applaud such an ecological subtext underlying the plot but laugh at the idea that the government would come for our cars. That’s a wild right wing paranoia fantasy to rank right below the one that has the United Nations coming for our guns, but hey, if they believe that, it doesn’t stretch the imagination too much to grasp that they might buy into this one too. Maybe this movie is doing the rounds in survivalist bunkers underneath Montana.

While the film came out in the early eighties, the stars are all seventies mainstays. Darren McGavin, who many might remember from A Christmas Story, still two years away, is still firmly camped out in my mind as Carl Kolchak in the original version of The Night Stalker (let’s forget the remake), which racked up two TV movies and twenty episodes by 1975. Here, he’s a burner (someone who drives illegally), who rebuilt an entire Firebird from black market parts and keeps it in an abandoned mine in the middle of the desert. On the other side of the law is Doug McClure, who spent the second half of the seventies dominating the fantasy genre in pictures like The Land That Time Forgot, At the Earth’s Core and Warlords of Atlantis. He runs a government department here, who ride around the desert on dirtbikes looking for burners to kill. They’re terrible shots, as they show by utterly failing to take down a burner with machine guns at point blank range. However they do have a psycho nutjob on staff who thinks he’s an Indian but can still aim.

McGavin is Red, for no apparent reason, and he’s a well adjusted sort of lawbreaker. We can’t forget that he’s a lawbreaker, even if he’s obviously the hero of the story, because his son keeps reminding him. ‘It’s against the law!’ he cries. ‘You’re wasting limited resources!’ Why his son is even there, we have no idea, because the kid’s mother kept him out of his dad’s life completely until the moment he stumbles onto his underground lair and is immediately recognised. Yeah, continuity is not this film’s strong suit. Folk wear helmets, they they don’t, then they do again. Even the colour of their overalls changes on the fly, which is so unlikely a continuity error that it makes us wonder if the filmmakers knew it about all along and just hoped we didn’t notice, like the famously flimsy tombstones in Plan 9 from Outer Space. Naturally we’re with Red, as McGavin is his usual endearing self and Red breaks the law for reasons as wildly antisocial as racing his friend Indy around Silvermine county for imaginary championships and gas.

Certainly we’re never on McClure’s side, even before we find out that his character’s name is McVain and he’s a lawman who’s going beyond the law. Mostly it’s because everything we see is in complete isolation from civilisation and so we can’t buy into the importance of what’s going on. Sure, Washington DC gets a few mentions here and there, but we never actually go there; we spend the entire film driving around the middle of nowhere, which turns out to be Canada rather than the US, the stark landscapes we see being Drumheller, Alberta, better known as Dinosaur Valley. Even if we buy into the ecological grounding for the story, with nothing on screen whatsoever to back it up, there’s no reason for us to buy into the DMC, the enforcers of the government’s policies, doing what they do here. Maybe back in the cities, where millions of cars make a serious dent in the gasoline supply, but never out here where there are more DMC agents than burners. What good are they possibly doing? They’re wasting more gas than they could ever save.

To be fair, there’s dissent in the ranks. The token chick in McVain’s DMC team questions the legitimacy of their work and highlights the bill coming up in Washington that might put them out of business entirely. It would appear that the DMC aren’t supposed to be actually killing people, but McVain is more interested in protecting his insane brother, Dolan, the one who strips off on the top of mountains, daubs himself up in warpaint and whoops and hollers like a stereotypical Native American from a hundred years earlier. Fully half the team seem to be eager rapists and McVain himself has an unhealthy obsession with the Firebird for no reason to which we’re ever made privy. There are even suggestions that the DMC may ambush an important senator working on repealing these laws, just to keep themselves in business. This hamfisted approach gets quickly annoying, because there was no reason at all to make this good guys vs bad guys. It wouldn’t have been difficult to paint both sides in shades of grey. It might have been harder not to!

Some of this is fun. I liked the general idea of the film, with its amiable ‘55 year old juvenile delinquent’ as an endearing lead. McGavin is a lot of fun and he works well with both George Touliatos, as Indy, and especially Mary Beth Rubens, as Indy’s tomboy daughter, Jill. They don’t get many scenes together, as she’s shuffled off quickly into a routine romance angle with Red’s son Cam, but she sure works better with Red than Cam. Given that Cam is intensely annoying for the entire picture, that’s perhaps a given, but it mostly isn’t his fault. This was the first screen appearance of Robert Wisden, who didn’t act again for another four years, but he’s gone on to a successful career in film and especially on television, with his last film role being as Richard Nixon in Watchmen, at the other end of the budget scale to this film! I wonder if I enjoyed this, as bad as it is, because all the good guys are so nice. Red and Indy and Jill are just really nice folk, the sort you’d want your car to break down in front of. They’re feelgood characters.

Unfortunately they’re stuck in a really bad film and it’s bad for a whole lot of reasons. There’s the false advertising, the picture really not being ‘One Big Exciting Blast of Speeding and Exploding Cars!’ as the tagline would have it. There are a few scenes where people drive around the desert a lot but only one exploding car until the finale, which does have a number of explosions but is so poorly constructed that we don’t really care. There’s the horrendous characterisation, which affects the DMC team and Cam the most, but really touches everyone in the entire movie. Not one character is really believable and no-one has any grounding in reality; only Jill has any connection to the world at large and that’s just by having a job which she apparently doesn’t show up to. Nobody’s motivation makes sense, especially McVain, who must have been a real puzzle for Doug McClure. I think he just gave up trying in the end and just picked up his paycheck, because there was nothing of any substance for him to really connect to.

With the technical side capable and the actors generally decent, if often struggling with the material, the problems all come down to the script. There were three writers credited, which is three more than might have been expected. Barry Pearson had written a number of films before this, but apparently poured all his imagination into his other 1981 credit, the underrated Bloody Birthday. Maurice Hurley debuted here as a writer, though he had directed Lance Henriksen in a snowmobile movie almost a decade earlier; he went on to write a lot of television, including shows as well regarded as The Equalizer and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Biff McGuire is far better known as an actor, mostly on television but also in movies as important as The Phenix City Story, The Thomas Crown Affair and Serpico; his only other writing credits were for a couple of TV episodes back in the fifties. Why these diverse talents came together to foul up this script, I have no idea but it’s a textbook example of how not to write a feature film.

It starts with an interesting idea but never follows up on it. It sets up a social science fiction story which unfolds far away from society. It raises a number of intriguing questions but refuses to answer them. No plot strand is ever followed up, let alone wrapped up. Characters change motivation at the drop of a hat. Nothing ever makes any sense. In fact, while we’re enticed by Darren McGavin into breezing along with Red, we can’t ignore how nothing makes sense and the stupidity of it all eats at our brain until we begin to think about how wrong the script is and then we’re lost. The more you think about this, the more the whole thing just falls apart. The story really wants to be about a bunch of patriotic ‘terrorists’ saving a senator from the clutches of a renegade DMC team, but it doesn’t even raise that particular subplot for over an hour, then, literally as it begins to actually happen, the end credits roll and the film’s over and done. Those three screenwriters drove their script off a cliff and all we hear is McGavin’s laughter.

Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? (1969)

Director: Anthony Newley
Stars: Anthony Newley, Joan Collins and Milton Berle

Index: Weird Wednesdays.

Anthony Newley was a major star in 1969 and had been one for long enough that his ego had apparently decided that it was time to ejaculate all over the filmgoing public. This picture, which he wrote, directed, scored and starred in, is surely remembered today mostly for its unwieldy name, which Chicago Tribune readers voted ‘The Worst Movie Title Ever’, but that title is only as pretentious as the film it heralds. I’ve racked my brain but can’t come up with anything else as remotely self-indulgent as this movie. I applaud Newley’s desire to experiment with the cinematic medium, but this was never going to be anything more than a bizarre footnote in an otherwise highly successful career, not least because the many boobs lent the film an X certificate and so it was banned from advertising itself in many American newspapers. After all, he had played the Artful Dodger in David Lean’s Oliver Twist, co-written the theme for Goldfinger and racked up a dozen hits (two number ones) as a singer. This project reeked of professional suicide.

As it turned out, Heironymus Merkin didn’t end his career, though it did contribute to his divorce from his third wife, Joan Collins, who plays a major role here as Polyester Poontang. Perhaps part of that had to do with the casting of their four and six year old kids in an X-rated movie. The majority surely has to do with what he says about both him and her as real people in a thinly disguised autobiography that has Collins playing herself. Given how absolutely stunning Joan Collins was in 1969, how he chooses to reject her is important; it demonstrates how utterly wrapped up in himself Newley must have been at the time. What would he have been like if the Oscar nomination he received for co-writing the score for Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in 1971 had become a win? But, as decried as this film was by the critics and the filmgoing public, it actually made money at the box office. And hey, wife number four soon showed up in its wake and stayed for eighteen years. Somehow things worked out for Anthony Newley.

At least he did have a wicked sense of humour, because the plot, if this picture can be said to have such a thing, is astoundingly autobiographical, as wild as it is. He starts out only a day past forty years of age and, as such, confronting his mortality. His response is, of course, to gather the detritus of his life onto a beach from whence it will be shipped to the Heironymus Merkin museum so that the world can know the truth, because that’s what the rest of us will do. In front of his mother, played by Patricia Hayes, and his kids, played by his kids, he attempts to tell his story in film in a variety of styles, which bewilder as much as enlighten. For example, the first is some sort of flashback sequence, depicting him as a marionette in thrall to Uncle Limelight, played by Bruce Forsyth trying to be Jason Robards as he stalks the boards of a half built theatre set belting out a musical number. It just gets stranger from here, with the aid of simple animation, dramatic narration and the constant interruptions of George Jessel as a wise-cracking angel.

For all that Merkin (and yes, he named his own autobiographical character after a pubic wig) wants us all to know his story, he leaps quickly forward to his rampant womanising years, visualised in subtle style by staging a long line of women in front of his tent, so he can lean out and order, ‘Next!’ There are moments of seriousness, such as the coverage of Merkin’s lack of a father and the childhood death of his firstborn, both autobiographical details of Newley’s life, but he treats himself with such scorn that we can’t feel for him even then. His second marriage, which lasted seven years in reality, is turned into a shotgun affair because she showed up pregnant, only to be quickly discarded after the child’s burial. Merkin puts on a magnanimous air, standing aside so she can leave with a truer love, but then flounces around in delight at his escape from boredom. And how seriously should we take the narrator’s question: ‘Oh, Heironymus Merkin, how many thousands of theatre lovers have you pleasured with the enormity of your gifts?’

At least at this point, Newley’s autobiography and Merkin’s meet in the form of Joan Collins, an audience member who interrupts his performance of Shakespeare to insightfully point out that the film she hasn’t been watching is clearly all about him. Is this a family discussion or character development? Who knows? Given that we’re soon stuck watching three critics discussing the film so far, while scriptwriters scrabble at their work and Merkin puzzles between the two sides, we wonder just how much of it reflects what the ego of Newley was really trying to do. The suggestion is that he’s soul searching, attempting to discover his real identity at a crucial point in his life, sparked by the work of Federico Fellini, whose pictures were often this wild but never this disjointed. Maybe it was here that I started to appreciate Newley’s honesty, as he accepts that his picture is masturbatory filmmaking, only to suggest that The Birth of a Nation and Mutiny on the Bounty were better pictures but suffered for the lack of good songs and pert tits.

For all the weirdness, and this film is full of the stuff, the oddest moment might just be the most telling, in which Newley the director threatens Newley the actor with the sack. While we’re watching him screen his life story to his family, we’re also watching him construct it. Newley may be admitting schizophrenia just as he admits paedophilia, without pressure from Goodtime Eddie Filth, the take on Satan played by Milton Berle, who guides him poorly throughout. At the very least it appears to be an attempt at suggesting that Merkin isn’t Newley, or perhaps is only a single aspect of his personality. So we ride into Chapter IV, ‘The Dream of Humbert Humbert or Snow White Meets Attila the Hun’. The studio don’t want this scene to be shot, let alone seen, which naturally makes it rather interesting. It begins by introducing Mercy Humppe, the other title character, played by Playboy centrefold Connie Creski, only to morph into an astrological dance sequence with Newley naked and Collins singing Chalk and Cheese. I feel for his therapist.

And, as Merkin can’t decide between Mercy Humppe and Polyester Poontang, we can’t help but wonder about the movie’s title and whether this whole project was an externalisation of Newley’s thoughts at the time, a sort of cellulloid mid-life crisis. If it’s really an honest soul-baring plea to keep his wife at the cost of his sexual obsessions, it’s a bitter irony indeed that he promptly lost her with this film cited as one of the reasons why. I can’t blame her, of course. How else was she supposed to interpret the choice of her husband of seven years and the father of her children to cast her not only as herself but also as the lady to which he, whom she has already personally identified in the film as playing himself, cannot commit? And why? Because the devil made him do it! It’s less a plea for forgiveness and more an admission that he hasn’t been faithful to her and has no plans to ever do so. Oh, and he’s going to make this completely obvious to everyone including their kids. Daddy loves mummy but, look, there’s Hope Climax! Woohoo!

If it wasn’t for the fact that he had major work left in him, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and its Oscar nomination still two years away, I’d interpret this movie as an attempt to derail his own career, the only argument being whether he did so deliberately or subconsciously. It isn’t just the title and the weird choice to write a script that relentlessly bashes his own character, then take the role for himself. It’s also in the frequent diversions from point that go as far as a fairy tale that casts Yolanda (of the dance couple Yolanda and Veloz) as a princess who falls in love with her donkey and spends her scenes with it naked. I do recognise that it ends with a pun that supposedly gives it validity, but no, it doesn’t. It’s just another opportunity for Newley to highlight that his sexual shenanigans take precedence over his marriages. This is honest, but it’s very sad indeed. Naming the princess Trampolina Whambang could have been genius but we’re too concerned for his mental wellbeing at this point to really notice.

Today, the film wants to be forgotten. It’s acutely a product of its time, when films were released once to theatres and almost never found their way back in front of eyeballs again. Heironymus Merkin did find a very brief release on VHS and DVD, but is almost impossible to find today; and I do wonder what Newley, had he not died in 1999 roughly when the insurance tables that spark this film suggest, would have felt about people like me seeing it almost half a century after its day in the spotlight. Most people would be acutely embarrassed, but this film suggests his ego was vast enough to crush any embarrassment that might creep up to be acknowledged. Roger Ebert’s contemporary review suggested that it might be the first attempt to make a personal film in the English language to sit alongside those of Godard and Fellini. I’m not going to argue but when Fellini juggled, he kept all his balls in the air. The last word here goes to the Presence: ‘Gonna be one of the all time greats,’ he says. ‘Definitely Hall of Flame material.’

Ouroboros (2014)

Director: Alexander Broderick
Stars: Amanda Melby, Nancy Mercurio and Steve Briscoe

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

Ouroboros (at least the one marked VI for 2014 at IMDb, because everyone and their dog are apparently making movies called Ouroboros) is a major release from the Digital Video Program at the University of Advancing Technology in Tempe, so precisely nobody will be surprised to discover that it looks absolutely gorgeous from the swirling O that immediately appears in the middle of the screen to play its role in the opening credits and then the beginning of the film itself. There’s so much visual effects work, every bit of which looks slick and professional, and it’s so well integrated into everything around it that we actually wonder if Amanda Melby is real or yet another digital creation. She’s playing Dr Faye O’Neill, in a future America of 2035 where the military has partnered with her lab to build Star Trek-style transporters using quantum entanglement technology. Given that the US military has just partnered with companies in the UK and US to build Star Wars-style hoverbikes, I just wonder if 2035 is too safe an estimate. Who knows?

Well, 2035 looks pretty damn good, if this is anything to go by. It isn’t all digital, because the costumes of Nola Yergen are as amazing as ever, but most of it is computer generated. As an IT tech, I tend to despise Hollywood’s attempts to visualise user interfaces, not being knocked out by any cinematic interpretations until an indie short called Restitution in 2013. The students at UAT clearly spent a lot of time thinking out how they wanted to present current hot tech topics like the Internet of Things and instant synchronisation between portable and fixed devices. There’s a lot of handprint authentication here, minor AI and a host of TLAs to go along with the military designations: TBL, QTM, SEC and the like. Digital effects date and these will be no exception, but they look pretty damn fine right now. Unfortunately, while they might drive odd discussions amongst film fans who work in IT, they certainly don’t drive this story. They just sit there and look both awesome and busy while the story tries to steal some focus back and, eventually, fails.

I’ve reviewed a lot of UAT films over the last few years and, while visual effects are always a strong focus, inevitably given that they’re made by a Digital Video Program, there are usually stronger stories to sit in front of them. I’m thinking varied films like Red Sand, Screaming in Silence and Flight of the Melvin, with common ground in having strong stories as well as strong visuals. The story here is a mishmash of tropes that I’m not sure even makes sense in the end. It’s a time travel film, a parallel universe film, a futuristic technology film... and yet it has to wrap itself up in under sixteen minutes. That’s insanely ambitious and, frankly, this needed a lot more time to allow the various themes to evolve naturally. I could see this script being expanded out to feature length and finding substance in explorations of what appears here only as wild dialogue (like ‘It’s an Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Bridge!’), especially as even lines that outrageous are used appropriately rather than as random scientific gibberish, but it just doesn’t have that luxury.

If, in a parallel universe, this might have become a deep and scientifically accurate feature, it’s actually a surface scratching short that seems to be constructed entirely out of Hollywood stock moments, because Hollywood never wants to go deep and scientifically accurate. It just wants to reuse memorable moments like a scientist being confronted by a future version of themselves, or the revelation that one action made the universe split and now the entire timespace continuum is falling in on itself. We get a whole collection of these moments here, none of them explored beyond the usual because of the time constraints. Only a deus ex machina moment, quite literally for a change, goes beyond that and it gives Steve Briscoe some opportunity to act. If this could be viewed as a sixteen minute edit of an imaginary ninety minute feature, the work of Briscoe, Melby and Nancy Mercurio finds some power. Certainly, each of these actors finds a way to do more with their material than it deserves at this length.

Fortunately, there’s more than just visual magic and good acting to recommend Ouroboros, and I’m not just talking about the neat conceit of having the background doctors be called Tennant, Smith and Baker (Tom, I hope, not Colin). Many of the other technical jobs are performed as capably as the visual wizards, just less obviously, from the cinematography of Annie Winn to the sound editing of Gwyneth Christoffel and Nick Francia; Christoffel also edited with Reginald Riley. The casting is top notch too, especially with Nancy Mercurio tasked with playing an older version of Amanda Melby; I honestly wondered on my first viewing if the latter was playing both roles with different make up and I couldn’t quite get that out of my head even once I knew better. So this is the slick and professional sci-fi yarn we’ve come to expect from UAT, just one that’s as hampered by time as is its leading lady. Because of that, the weak point is clearly the script, but maybe it will provide the spur for UAT to stretch itself and produce that first feature!

Focus (2014)

Director: Matt Chesin
Stars: Julia Severance, Christopher Bradley, Erus Harrington and Mike Rolfe

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

There’s a lot going on in a short amount of time in Focus, a fourteen minute short made at ASU’s School of Film, Dance and Theatre early in 2014. It’s usually described as a drama, under which banner it’s won awards, but I’m screening it at LepreCon 41 in a science fiction set with a time travel theme and it could easily be categorised as fantasy. The drama is in the emotions that the story arouses in the viewers and characters alike, while it moves into genre territory to allow them to happen. It gets ruthlessly emotional by the finalé, but I think it works because it’s never, erm, focused on a single subject. The story is framed around one girl, Sloan Beck, but she’s not the only recipient of that emotional buildup and it covers more than just one issue even for her. Maybe this is why I wasn’t as fond of this on my first viewing, but it built well each successive time through. The script is strong, written by Christopher Bradley and developed by Jeff Lynn, Brian Kiefling and director Matt Chesin; it just takes a couple of viewings to grasp it all properly.

Sloan is a precocious young lady, way ahead of the rest of her photography class but taking it seriously and finding a lot of fault in her work. She’s naturally horrified to find that her dad has pawned her laptop and her camera lenses, not only because it’ll affect her schoolwork but because all the pictures she had to remember her mother are now gone. Dad is a broken but barking Christopher Bradley, looking awful and sounding believably worse, but he’s only here briefly to set up that heartache and set Sloan on the road to a local photography store to find a new used lens. This is important because, when she connects it to her camera and experiments with it in the desert, it highlights more than was there at the time. How she reacts to this discovery and where it leads her, you’ll need to find out yourself because that way lie spoilers I’m not willing to expose. Suffice it to say that there’s a big picture here that hasn’t yet found its focus and I honestly wasn’t trying to throw out photography pun after pun but they just happened.

Julia Severance is decent as Sloan and she has some very good moments indeed in what I believe is her debut on film, but she does seem to be trying too hard for much of it. It wouldn’t have mattered in a less well cast piece, but there are points, especially when she’s interacting with others, where she could have been more natural. Christopher Bradley is resonant in his brief appearance and Mike Rolfe is excellent as a character who is almost the exact opposite: a father figure who is smooth where Mr Beck is abrasive and compassionate where he’s ruthless. Erus Harrington impressed me too as a young man believably out of time. He’s shot in colour for the most part, but I remember his role in black and white because he feels so close to the kids who mixed capability and innocence so well in movies from the thirties and into the forties. The opening scene could have begun an old Monogram mystery movie with child detectives solving the case that the adults couldn’t.

Technically, this excels but watching the credits afresh highlights a lot of good names that I’ve seen on a lot of good credit lists. Cinematographer Jason Ryan, who keeps the camera notably moving throughout, is especially racking up a heck of a portfolio, but he’s not alone in that. However, Kendall Humbert, who edited the film with aplomb, apparently hasn’t done anything before this, at least according to IMDb. I’m sure that will change soon. The only negative aspect on the technical side is that there’s too much wind in the outdoor desert scenes, a curse that’s particularly prominent in Arizona filmmaking but one that’s not horrendous here. We can still hear everything we want to hear, but that wind could still have been a little less prominent in the mix. At the end of the day, this comes back to the script, which is deceptively full of clever little details. A cynic might find fault with the emotional manipulation but, even though I’ve seen it all, it caught at my throat too and I’m certainly not complaining at how well it did so.

Thrasherland (2015)

Director: Joshua J Provost
Stars: Casey Likes and Cara Alvey

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

If Logan Must Make Star Wars was what this year's Home Grown Shorts set needed to lighten the notably dark tone, Thrasherland is what it needed to wrap things up. It's a strong bookend to Grace of a Stranger, a very different film indeed but another one tied to both hope and skateboards. However, instead of two adult actors to tell its story, it relies on one child actor, Casey Likes, with very little support, and frankly, as strong as the sentiment of the short is, it would have failed if he hadn't have been up to the task. The good news is that he's excellent, especially at the beginning but also throughout the twelve minutes that it runs until a conclusion that sits well not just for Thrasherland but for the whole Home Grown Shorts set. I've mentioned the programming of this set a number of times as I've reviewed the films that played in it, because I've been learning the fine art of set programming on my Apocalypse Later mini-film festivals at local conventions and this set, unlike many nowadays, really shone from that angle.

Casey Likes plays Carpenter, a thirteen year old kid who's unhappy that his family won't be able to go to California this year on holiday. Sure, he cares for his little sister, Charlie, who's in hospital for a reason we aren't let in on but which we assume is serious. However, he comes across as the usual petulant youth as he pouts at the lack of holiday. He doesn't stamp his foot when he shouts, 'That's not fair!', but that's only because Joshua J Provost, the writer and director, didn't want to be quite that stereotypical. Life sucks for young Carpenter but it's clearly not as simple as him being selfish. There's a great line early on when his mum suggests that he go see Charlie: 'I don't like to see her like that,' he says, highlighting that he cares but can't give voice to his feelings in terms that his mother would understand. So, when he packs for the road, we know it isn't as simple as just running away from home. The rest of the story fills in the gaps, as he takes a journey whose meaning is eventually made clear through a fantastic and touching plot device.

I happened to sit close to Provost at the screening of Bread and Butter and talked to him about the film of his that would screen later in the festival. While Thrasherland details a journey taken by Carpenter, it also represents a journey for Provost. It took him nine years to make the film, which was originally aimed to be a feature. Eventually he realised that it wasn't going to happen, just like Carpenter's California holiday, so he turned it into something that would, namely this short. I got a real kick out of it, though I wonder what the impact would be if it were to be extended to feature length. It relies on a restrained introduction, that strong lead performance from Likes and a great ending. What we see on the journey is more important to the character than to us, though I have to admit that I enjoyed seeing these sights on the big screen, as my better half and I saw them earlier this year when driving to north Hollywood to take part in the shoot for Flight Fright. We stopped at the Cabazon dinosaurs and the wind farm this side of the mountains too.

In many ways, it's an ethereal piece that often slips away from dialogue into a jangly score as Carpenter makes it further down the road. Provost does drop some hints early on, but then it's just the highway; we do know where he's going, because it doesn't take any knowledge of the road to grasp that, but we don't quite know why and we have to wait it out with Carpenter before Provost opens it up and brings it home. Given that the wait constitutes the majority of the film, which Carpenter either makes it through alone or shares with people we don't see, the technical side of the picture is often in focus. I enjoyed some of the camerawork, like the shadowplay on the bridge, but found some shots too handheld for my liking. The impressive choice of locations is strung together capably by editing, but it's Likes who always keeps us going, the determination on his face only occasionally lost to a fear that he's doing the wrong thing. I bet Provost had the same looks over nine years, but Thrasherland is definitely the right end to his journey.

Logan Must Make Star Wars (2014)

Director: Nathan Blackwell
Stars: Logan Blackwell, Brian Blackwell, Craig Curtis, Shay Alber, Kellen Garner, Bob Caplan, Lauren Henschen, James Hoenscheidt, Christopher Hoenscheidt, Darren Ito and Josh Kasselman

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

While Stolen Afternoon was only five short films earlier in the Home Grown Shorts set at the Phoenix Film Festival this year, it felt like an aeon. The Class Analysis, Duty and Fish Hook are hardly light viewing and the documentary, Fighters Move Forward, didn't exactly avoid the darkness either. So, by the time Logan Must Make Star Wars showed up in the set, the audience were overdue for some laughs, especially given that it was a Saturday morning. I knew it would play well because I'd seen the film before; even though I missed its original screening at last year's A3F film challenge, I keep up with Squishy Studios and Nathan Blackwell kindly allowed me to screen it myself in the Apocalypse Later short film set at LepreCon 2014, a year end wrap up at the Jerome Indie Film & Music Festival and a small charity event for Oakwood Care. It played well every time but it was so precisely the perfect antidote to all the dark material in this set that it surely won't ever play anywhere quite so well as this again.

Anyone who's seen the work of Squishy Studios, from Masters of Daring to Zombie Team Building via the Voyage Trekkers web series, knows their sense of humour and that's very much in evidence here, as they add the Star Wars universe to the list of sci-fi staples that they've lampooned. It won't surprise any to find that Logan is played by Logan Blackwell, but the setup is the sort of genius that Squishy Studios is known for. We're not given any explanations of how this happened (perhaps because they could easily constitute a prequel), but Logan plunges backwards in time to 1974 and accidentally kills George Lucas. To avoid an unimaginable future without the Star Wars trilogy (props to Blackwell for not mentioning more than three films), he has to make A New Hope himself, merely without any money, actors or props that he can't find himself. That's mirrored in Logan Must Make Star Wars itself, which is populated by Voyage Trekkers props and characters and a beard for Logan as transparent as those of the Monty Python crew in Life of Brian.

What we're here for, though, isn't realism, it's the Squishy Studios brand of humour, which has a habit of poking fun at culture in a deceptively light-hearted way. I'm hardly going to call this the deepest short in the set, but there's a little more going on here about both the art and business of filmmaking than might immediately meet the eye, culminating in a wonderful cameo by Josh Kasselman as a Roger Corman-like producer, all ready to snap up stock footage for another cut and paste job. The dialogue is as sparkling a highlight as we've come to expect, but not only through choice of words. Sure, Logan's glorious opening lines to potential backers are, 'So, we start on the fourth movie, OK?' but Lauren Henschen's outrageous Georgia peach accent for Princess Leia never ceases to make me laugh, even on my tenth time through. Logan gets the truest line in 'I guess the dialogue's always been bad,' but James Hoenscheidt gets a gem in the reworked cantina scene as Han Solo arguing with Greedo.

While Logan Must Make Star Wars is surely just a scratch on the surface of the Star Wars universe, a five minute short film to compare to the two seasons of Voyage Trekkers making affectionate fun of Star Trek, it crams a surprising amount of story arcs into such a brief running time. We start with a big fall with the death of George Lucas (for the time, folks; this is 1974, remember, when he was about to become great), but there's a big rise, another fall, a second rise and eventually a great finish. That's as many story arcs as the entire Star Wars trilogy. I'd love to see more of this sort of material from Nathan Blackwell, but it's hardly his focus right now with the long awaited Voyage Trekkers feature in pre-production. Maybe there will be another 48 hour film challenge that falls into a free timeslot so the Squishy Studios crew can turn this into a trilogy. After all, by the end of this short film, Logan may have made Star Wars, but he hasn't followed up with The Empire Strikes Back yet. At least he can hire another director to do that, right?

Logan Must Make Star Wars is available to watch for free on Vimeo and YouTube (the latter is longer):

Fish Hook (2014)

Director: Nickolas Duarte
Stars: Ryan DeLuca and Paul Hickert

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

I'd seen many of the Home Grown Shorts at this year's Phoenix Film Festival before, but Fish Hook was a new one on me and it was the one that I knew I needed to see again. It's a real oddity: a picture that's all about impact, which we feel in our gut far more than we see on the screen because this is as ephemeral as anything I've seen. If you scribble down every fact presented, it'll be a very short list indeed. We only meet two of the three characters in the story; beyond names, we're never told who anyone is or how they connect to anyone else. What happened in the past is skirted around with practised skill; what happens in the present is brutal. None of this really tells us anything at all. Yet, at the same time, we're given such impressions that we believe that we know a whole heck of a lot. We know who all these people are, what they did in the past and why they do what they do in the present. We look at all the things on screen but effectively see the unseen hanging in the air between them and watch it manifest in our minds.

That's clever filmmaking, but we have to wonder if we got the right picture. Perhaps that's the point. The director and co-writer, Nickolas Duarte, may have had a completely different vision of the story than I do or you do. He could make three more films about the same subject from different perspectives, then tie them together into an episodic feature and call it Rashomon. When the credits rolled on the big screen, I had a good idea what was going on but wanted the film to start afresh and let me check my theory. After a second viewing, I'm relatively sure that I have a crystal clear vision of the big picture, but I'm also well aware that it's entirely fashioned from my personal interpretations which could be completely off base. I would recommend this to any university film class as it really ends with an unspoken suggestion that the entire audience should immediately form groups and dissect the film frame by frame to check their own interpretations and figure out what it's really saying.

This makes a synopsis very difficult. The film opens with sinister imagery: drills, saws, blood spurting into a sink. Davey texts Brandon, but Brandon doesn't respond. We watch him not respond, instead taking a glass and balancing it on the edge of a table, playing with it until it inevitably falls. This abstraction sets the stage admirably for the personal conflict to follow. The text was about Mr Mike and Brandon's reaction is to eventually go to see him in his workshop. They talk banalities. Well, Mr Mike does; Brandon keeps his mouth mostly shut, letting the heavy air in between them speak for him. There's more hanging in this air than exists otherwise in the workshop, a sword of Damocles with a fraying thread, a vast shared McGuffin as hard to remove as a fish hook. I know what Mr Mike says to Brandon but I also read its meaning, which is another thing entirely. I don't know if Mr Mike tries to hug him, wrestle him or protect him. There's just so much history here that it's threatening to erupt from Brandon's body and leave him a shell.

And when it does erupt, the sound kicks in beyond the ambience that's been droning quietly behind it all. 'My body is a cage,' sings Daniel Vildosola, who composed the wonderful music that is so relevant that it always had to be original. The cinematography of John Sears keeps the violence as impressionistic as the script, shooting so closely that we see blurs that only occasionally manifest themselves into recognisable clarity. You know, like a fight really is. Ryan DeLuca does a magnificent job as Brandon, screaming at us in silence until Duarte ramps up the volume to eleven. Paul Hickert is almost as good, a sort of Willem Dafoe next door who seems to be one thing but might just be another; even though he has more dialogue, he's still acting mostly with body language, which tells its own story. Once I post this review, I'm going to ping Nickolas Duarte, who wrote the script with Drew Grubich, and ask him what he believes he said. I wonder if it will match what I heard him say.

Duty (2014)

Directors: Rob Burson and Victoria Rincon
Stars: Rob Burson, Aimee DuMars, Sandy Owens and Robbie King

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

Another flawed thirteen minute Arizona short, Duty has the opposite problem to Fighters Move Forward. That documentary featured too few people saying too few things, so that it never really finds where the real story is. This human interest drama has too many people too quickly focused on where we're going, so that the real story is heavily telegraphed in the first scene. I'm careful to avoid spoilers and know that synopses should only be detailed up to a point; that could be ten minutes in or sixty, but here it's scene one. We're in small town America where the cops are good guys and the sheriff isn't being investigated by the feds, but the first thing we see is Lance stealing money from the evidence locker. IMDb explains that we're 'in the midst of the financial crisis of 2008-2009' and we soon discover that it's dragging this cop down. He can't afford to cover his daughter's meds and the bank is getting ready to foreclose. He's pursuing a few odd avenues to solve his financial problem, but none of them are advisable.

Duty has two names all over its credits, so it would seem safe to see the film as theirs. Rob Burson wrote the script and took the lead role for himself, produced the picture and co-directed it with Victoria Rincon, who also shot and edited the piece. Mostly they do good work. Burson is a decent lead, able to elicit our sympathy even after that opening scene. Lance is a good man, but it isn't just the financial crisis that's causing his problems; it's also his male chauvinist attitude, which we're never quite sure we should read as his alone or endemic to the role he plays in society. His wife is a good woman too; in fact, everyone in the film has our sympathy to at least some degree, even Crazy Willie who acts up at two in the morning and waves his shotgun around. I've seen films where I couldn't care about anyone, as important ones as Gone with the Wind, but I'm not sure I've ever seen one before where I cared about everyone and found that a problem. If these people are all so damn likeable, how come nobody is helping them?

While Burson has the screen time, Aimee DuMars is just as good as his wife, Julie, and so's Sandy Owens as the chief. The acting is strong throughout, except for Lance and Julie's screen kids who are obviously so happy to be in a movie that they can't stop grinning, a problem but a forgiveable one. I like Rincon's editing more than I do her camerawork, but she makes everyone look good. She merely likes to keep her camera handheld, presumably for a grittier feel, but the approach is overdone nowadays and has lost its impact. She finds some strong shots though, especially towards the end of the movie; the very last shot is superbly framed and the one soon before it when Lance handles the point of no return is pristine. The score is another plus, from Rincon's brother, Brendan, meaning that technically this is very capable. The script is clearly the weak link, not because of what it says or where it goes but because it's so inherently predictable, telegraphing every move like this is a pantomime rather than a dark drama.

The first time I watched Duty, at last year's Jerome Indie Film & Music Festival, I felt that the script was a little too simple to boot but, watching afresh, at the Phoenix Film Festival and again here at home to put this review together, I've changed my mind on that front. While this is about a good man finding himself doing bad things for good reasons, it's far more than that too. It's as much a commentary on the macho mindset pervasive in the police force, even in a small town like this one with a capable female boss, and the self-destructive stupidity of those from which they protect us, as it is about the hard times brought to good men and bad by people a long way away and unseen to everyone who matters. Duty is duty to all the characters in this film, but the word means a different thing to each of them and it shapes how they choose their actions. There's a lot of depth here that I didn't see first time through and I wonder how it plays to different people. While there are questions here, I believe we need to find our own answers.

Duty can be watched for free on Vimeo.

Fighters Move Forward (2014)

Director: Jake Lee

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

The Home Grown Shorts set at this year's Phoenix Film Festival started very strongly indeed with not one but three superb and very different films: Grace of a Stranger, Stolen Afternoon and The Class Analysis. It had to drop the standard sooner or later and it turned out to be here, with a documentary called Fighters Move Forward. It's not a bad film and there are certainly good bits in it, but even at only thirteen minutes, it's too long; I found it repeating background shots pretty quickly and it just can't find enough subjects to interview. Fortunately, the focus of the piece, Pete Chavez, is excellent on camera, so it does have a firm foundation, even if not a heck of a lot to build onto it. Given that the whole thing is about boxing, I could switch metaphors and suggest that it's found a good stance already but still needs to learn how to punch. The other catch is that, like the Best Documentary Feature winner, Angel of Nanjing, it comes over more as a promo piece than a documentary. It's certainly a good cause but a film needs more than that.

In fact, while director Jake Lee quickly puts Chavez in front of the camera to explain to us why we're here and why we should care, it takes him three minutes to move on to someone else. The positive side is that Chavez must have run through this spiel many times because he comes across well and quickly covers a lot of ground. He started Chavez Boxing Gym back in 2004 to some decent success, but soon found kids who needed the environment he was providing but couldn't pay for it. He let some in for free but couldn't do the same for everyone he'd like because he was running a business not a charity. Phoenix magazine's article on the gym made the difference, bringing Chavez to the attention of a reader who suggested that he start a non-profit organisation, even bringing in a pro bono lawyer to get him a 501(c)(3) status. Now he runs the Chavez Boxing Foundation too, which helps more kids who need Chavez to mentor them, not only to succeed in the gym and the ring but also in life. It's why we have a movie.

By the five minute mark, when Chavez finally brings up something more than just why he's there, we've only heard from one other person and he isn't as good in front of the camera as he presumably is in the ring. This doesn't bode well for the movie, even if it has to be why we've been focused almost entirely on one speaker, but it's here that things get interesting, as a conflict develops between Chavez on one side, an upstanding citizen who runs a clean gym, lives his life as an example and practices what he preaches, and local gangs on the other, who see him as a threat to their future. Some break into his gym, vandalise his equipment and graffiti death threats on his wall, but Chavez goes looking for them, finding some in a nearby park in Chavez Boxing Gym shirts that they clearly stole from him. He confronts them too, which escalates into a fight, with him presumably outnumbered, though we're never told how many. This is so stereotypical a bad action movie storyline that we're taken rather aback and it's why we keep watching.

Of course, it doesn't end up quite how it would for Van Damme, Rothrock or Lundgren, but that's not the point. The point is that it's refreshing to know that there are actual people like the heroes in outrageous action movies who we enjoy but never consider realistic. Chavez has far too much screen time and that hurts the film's credibility; over the entire running time, there are only two other people who speak to us and both of them are recipients of scholarships from the Chavez Boxing Foundation. The only objectivity comes from a brief news clip and that's not enough. I wish we could have had heard from people in the local community: politicians, neighbouring business owners or even former gang members. The biggest gap is surely the family of Melyssa Gastelum, one of Chavez's boxers who died in an accident and gave her name posthumously to that scholarship fund. Why couldn't Jake Lee find these people? Fortunately, Chavez himself is believably sincere and I hope this flawed film still helps him and his work.

Fighters Move Forward can be watched for free on Vimeo.

The Class Analysis (2014)

Director: Webb Pickersgill
Stars: John Henry Whitaker, Gerald Dewey, Fouad Hajji, Armando DuBon Jr, Doris Morgado, Paul Thomas Arnold and London Kim

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

There's an irony in The Class Analysis following Stolen Afternoon in the Home Grown Shorts selection at this year's Phoenix Film Festival, because the latter was made by Aaron Kes and T J Houle, who took over as program directors at IFP Phoenix from Webb Pickersgill, who directed the former for IFP award-winning filmmaker Jim Politano, who settled for producing this one. Traditionally, Politano's films, like Love Sucks and The Sisters of St Mary's, were poor technically (given that they were made on budgets close to zero with Politano himself as the entire crew) but rich in dialogue and humour. With enough money to make a 'real film' on a 'real budget', as he would put it, he hired Pickersgill and a strong cast of California actors (and Arizona actors who took that one road to Hollywood) to create the hardest hitting short I've seen in quite some time. While it was inspired by true events that anchor it to a very recognisable point in time and space, it extrapolates out easily to any time and any place and will remain timely from here on out.

Technically, we're not where I initially assumed we were after a couple of times through the film. It's just an everyday neighbourhood bar in an unnamed mining town, albeit one with a notably diverse clientele. The man who provides the opening narration, 'Where does nonsense end and wisdom begin?' then walks away from the camera to wait the film out is clearly of Chinese heritage. The barman is a white Vietnam veteran; his doo rag and country music hint at redneck, but his customers are all over the map, as far as class, race and religion. A well-spoken and well-outfitted black businessman chats at the bar with an old friend of Arab descent. Over in a booth, a Hispanic couple chat away in Spanish over food, clearly happy but perhaps also a little worried about the fact that she's very pregnant. And, to stir this melting pot, in walks a big Aryan Brotherhood biker with profanity tattooed on his knuckles and a mighty thirst. When the cast is this diverse, we know there has to be a reason and we know roughly what's coming, right?

Well, we get that but more so. The spark is a nothing moment, as they tend to be, as the barman fails to hear a drinks order from the men at the end of the bar and the businessman's polite but testy reaction is escalated by the biker. Suddenly it's on, with the biker bringing up the first racial slur and the black man hurling the first profanity. Jim Politano's story was adapted to the screen by Ioannis N Skiotes and he has no intention of holding back at all, so it's hardly comfortable viewing. The hatred that rapidly surfaces is equal opportunity; while we might assume the biker is going to be the bad guy and someone else, if not everyone else, is going to be the politically correct good guy, that's far from the case this time out. He's certainly ready and willing for a fight, but the businessman is overly sensitive and just as ready to react. His friend keeps out of it until his religion is brought up and then he's straight into the fight. Everyone is touchy about something, it seems, not least the barman who attempts to break it all up.

The film succeeds for a few reasons. One is that the writing is blistering, leaping around believably from college loans through the Crusades to modern day Bosnia. These characters hurl out whatever comes to mind and the majority of it is as valid on all sides as it is inappropriate to bring up in a bar. The acting is another, because, as much as this is a war of words, we can easily believe it becoming something more. Gerald Dewey, who won Best Actor for the year's IFP challenges for his work in Politano's Flight Fright, is even better here. John Henry Whitaker is note perfect as the biker, successfully avoiding the stereotype of stupidity and violence by infusing his character with intelligence and bitterness both, then letting the latter out slowly and easily like a provocateur who enjoys what he does. Paul Thomas Arnold and Fouad Hajji are just as strong but less obvious in roles that are quieter until, well, they're not. Armando DuBon soon gets his chance to join in and is immediately up to the high standards already set.

If the third reason is the golden oldie country music that wafts through the bar, as innocent as the chatter isn't, the fourth is the first twist, which of course I won't spoil. Suffice it to say that, as I'd seen the picture before and knew where it was going, I paid a lot of attention to the audience. It was clear that the deluge of vehement abuse and profanity had the audience shuffling uncomfortably in their seats, especially one this early in the morning and which included a bunch of kids there to support other films. Yet, almost nine minutes in when the first twist hits, it felt like they didn't just stop shuffling, they stopped breathing too. I don't believe I found a quieter moment during a screening any time during the Phoenix Film Festival. The script is tough and it's wordy but it knows when to shut up and let the background roll over everyone. It's not the only twist but it's the key moment and it's superbly handled. Instead of watching what the actors do, we watch what they don't do and it's even more powerful.

I have to add praise for London Kim, the pilot in Flight Fright, who brings the picture home with suitable gravitas, and the other actors who have less to do but nonetheless do it very well indeed: Doris Morgado and Lino Dumont especially. Fortunately the crew doesn't let the side down either, but they mostly keep a lower profile, succeeding not by thrilling us with their mad skills but by proving what mad skills they have by not making their work stand out above the rest of the production. Most notable were the camerawork of Rich Robles and the editing of director Webb Pickersgill, who was also responsible for the visual effects, but everything is strong. I was surprised when this didn't win for best Arizona short, because it seemed to be the obvious choice. Perhaps the judges, along with the audience, found it a little too disturbing to call out with an award. I'm just happy it played and played well and had people talking afterwards. As many actors happily returned for Flight Fright, Politano's next Hollywood film, his future is clearly a strong one.