MicroCinema Scene

Writer/Actor Chris Sparling’s An Uzi at the Alamo is a very funny and charming film about a perceived and practical loser who’s decided to end his life on his 25th birthday… and he has his family’s full support.  Uzi succeeds at tackling the family-is-too-quirky-to-be-believed genre that Hollywood throws out there on occasion (such as the outright dreadful The Family Stone) and makes this very difficult type of comedy work extremely well.

First, you need a top-notch script that balances a world where outlandish events can occur, yet seems normal enough for the audience to believe it could actually happen to them.  Sparling does this by crafting three dimensional, odd characters wrapped in a quick-paced script that takes us from one strange and humorous event to the next, tying everything together, yet without telegraphing the connections.

Secondly, you need a lead actor who can portray a charming, yet also undesirable character who lives in a current state of incompetence, but with enough potential to overcome his own faults.  Sparling tackles the almost-25 Alec Thames perfectly and nails the role.  From his opening voice-over he brings your right into his outrageously screwed up life and the ultimate plan for his own demise.

Third, you need a large, quality cast including a best friend that is both as odd as the main character, yet also presents our own point of view on the subject.  The cast of the family is littered with very solid acting, from Terri Lynn Harris as Thame’s mother to Bill Bravo as his father, who have been divorced for twenty years and yet each refuses to move out.  There’s also a wacky uncle, his mother’s new husband, his father’s co-worker, his karate-kid obsessed brother, his odd sister and his best friend, played wonderfully by Joe Guarneri, who uses his job as a police officer to pay back all of the teachers who made fun of him during his chubby high-school days.

Lastly, you need a love interest, which is filled by the adorably cute Elise, played by Angeline Holmes, to bring some direction and attraction into Thames’ otherwise confused and unfulfilling existence.

Uzi has all of these elements and more.  The film carries with it numerous laugh-out-loud moments and inspired comedic events.  It’s one of the few films where the trailer actually does the film an injustice, not able to capture the overall wit and comedic timing that is throughout the movie.

The film is not perfect, with odd framing and occasional lighting issues, but the overall success of the script and cast far outweighs any technical concerns.  This is one of the few microcinema efforts that I actually look forward to watching again.  You will too.

Broken, calling itself a “dark, lo-fi comedy about head trauma,” is one interesting piece of filmmaking.  The story unfolds as the fragmented memories of Todd Kellogg, played by Paul Phipps, as he hops through various thoughts and situations, the sum of which add up to his life at the moment.  The film was shot on beautiful 16mm film and, when it is shown in its pristine state, is something beautiful.  However, director Hollingsworth discards the temptation of presenting his work in such a premiere visual way and instead, and rightly so, affects the image from scene to scene with numerous digital effects and layers in order to represent the mental state of the protagonist more accurately.  It’s a daring choice that pays off.

As we travel through the story, unsure of what is real or what is memory, Hollingsworth layers in a mystery of hidden messages that is the glue that holds the fragmented pieces of the plot together.  Without it, the story would be nothing more than a long abstract cinematic exercise, but the on-going mystery, including an ingenious use of “Missing” posters, and the discovery it provides, binds the storyline and ultimately makes the resolution of the film so satisfying.

The cast is very solid, especially Phipps as Kellogg and Dick Boland, who plays Kellogg’s brother.  Their relationship is so real and wonderfully portrayed.  Being the last of eight children, most of which were boys, I felt their conversations, especially the information not vocalized yet understood, to be true and real, even within story told in such a disjointed way.

Broken is a great example of what could be and should be tried at the microcinema level.  It is different and unique and appears to illuminate the director’s vision quite nicely.  It’s definitely worth checking out.

The First Date, created by Anthony Spadaccini and Nate Edwards, is a clever silent film about a bumbling man that humorously struggles on a first date.  When I use the term silent film, it is exactly that, an ode or “remake” or “retake” of the turn of the 20th century silent films.  Shot on video, but in black and white, effected with digital film grain and imperfections as well as a slightly sped-up frame rate, the film does its best to create a modern day silent film.

Nate Edwards fills the Charlie Chaplan-esque role of the bumbling lead that endears himself to Melissa Torrence by foiling a purse snatcher and uses his newfound heroism to convince her to come over to his house for dinner.  Edwards has moments of real talent as the inept beau who’s every attempt to have a successful date are undone by his own incompetence.  His timing is often spot on and his antics quite humorous.  A secondary story about the relationship of the purse snatcher trying to reform his life is far less successful and diminishes any momentum created by Edwards’ date mishaps.

The digital film grain and other effects to age the film actually became surprisingly distracting as the 15-minute short unfolded.  That being said, I am a big fan of filmmakers taking the digital media and trying something they would rarely attempt, with film and making a true old-school silent film on video is a bold choice that is more successful than not.

In the end, The First Date is hit and miss comedically, but an inspired effort nonetheless.

The Plight of the Angelenos is a mockumentary about the struggles of native residents of Los Angeles and what they bring to the world’s human equation (i.e., entertainment).  The short is well-intentioned, but an overall inconsistent satire on the need for entertainment in our lives.  Spliced together with hundreds of stock footage segments, the documentary unfolds like so many of the documentaries found on public television, presenting residents of Los Angeles as a species in the cog of life that fills the entertainment void, which itself is on par with food, water and shelter.

This tongue-in-cheek film presents its ideas concisely, but its humor does not quite hit the mark.  Perhaps the one thing missing most in this satire is a sense of discovery.  The best educational shows like Frontline or on the Discovery Channel often set up their documentary subjects as mysteries that need to be unfolded.  It poses questions at the onset and we watch the edu-tainment unfold like a classic mystery, finally getting the full answers to often complex questions.  Angelenos’ presentation is much more straightforward and its impact suffers slightly, as a result.

For being made on such a micro-budget of $500, the makers of Angelenos certainly get a lot of bang for their creative buck, but the short ultimately left me wanting.

What if the things little kids see in the dark in their room at night are real?  That’s the premise of John Correll’s effectively creepy short Nothing in the Dark.  It appears to have been shot on black and white film MOS with audio dubbed later.  The post-audio work actually increases the unsettling feeling as a little girl, played well by Emma Berwich, tries to convince herself that the shadowy figure in the room is not real.

As a parent, I’ve laid next to my kids in their bed when they’ve struggled going to sleep and when you look around their room at all of their toys and stuffed animals and action figures in the dark, all of which are completely harmless in the light, you can see how they can quickly become something sinister when cast in shadows and half-light.  You realize just how easily it is for a child’s imagination to get the best of them.

That approach works exceptionally well under Correll’s directorial eye as he forces you to look through the little girl’s eyes at the room around her.  As she scans her bedroom with a flashlight passed her dolls and figurines, you’re just waiting for the light to show something different, something just not right.  Eventually it does.

Nice work by Correll to take a very simple idea and create a foreboding sense of anticipation as we, like the girl, try to convince ourselves that there’s “nothing in the dark.”

Four Stars.

When Dee, a successful, yet lonely thirty-year-old woman places an ad in a local paper to begin a discussion group, eventually called The Wednesday Night Save-the-World Society, she sets into motion a comedic tale of varying and conflicting personalities all coming together and impacting each other’s lives forever.

The group of fellow discussion group participants includes a writer, a printer, a salesman, a struggling artist, an idealistic college student, a Goth girl and a bored, wealthy housewife. As the story unfolds you find each of these people is not what they originally appear and, through the course of their meetings, are revealed as their true selves.

The script, co-written by the directors Dave Eisenstark and Fred Burke, does a nice job of showing the differences between the person we present to the outside world and the person we truly are inside. The characters quickly project their social personas and immediate alliances and conflicts are defined, yet by the end of the story they will align themselves with each other in many surprising ways.

For the most part, the script successfully balances the wackiness of the comedy with the real drama of the characters themselves. In the end, the film is at its best in those quiet, personal moments. And through the large number of characters, it allowed the writers to present multiple sides of social and political issues without hinting their own preference for one-sided or the other.

The cast of TWNSTWS is terrific. Ruth de Sosa is wonderful as Dee, expressing an unbridled enthusiasm, yet deep loneliness at the same time. Dwight Hicks is rock-solid as the skeptical owner of a print shop who is not what he appears to be. His initial skepticism hides a greater frustration that eventually surfaces. David Grammer is wonderful as the unsuccessful and financially challenged singer/songwriter/playwright that is always on the lookout for impossibly cheap deals and breaks into his own musical numbers without warning. Other notables include Roger Ranney as the self proclaimed “Dick Head” and Mary Margaret Robinson as the bored housewife that is really struggling with issues that has left her in a precarious situation.

As I watched this talk-heavy film I was instinctively drawn to my theater background, and my instincts were right. This film was originally a play by Spare Change Productions at the Chance Theater in Anaheim, California. The film starts out pushing its intent to be wacky, but really gets its footing about a half-hour into the story when you begin to understand all of the characters.

Good writing, excellent acting and solid direction make TWNSTWS an enjoyable film.

Mysterious animal deaths in a nearby forest.  A missing daughter.  An accidental murder and the downward spiral it takes on the murderer.  All of these are the intriguing plot points of the film Feral, shot in and around New Orleans just before Hurricane Katrina changed the landscape forever.

The story revolves around a poor husband and wife living in a trailer next to the woods.  The husband, Stacy, played by co-director Merrill Capps, and wife Michelle, played by Sheena Dodds, struggle to understand what is gruesomely killing their pets.  One night, while burying their pets in the woods, their daughter goes missing.  They begin an eerie journey into the dangerous woods in search of their daughter, but it abruptly ends when Stacy accidentally shoots and kills his neighbor.

Distracted, the couple must now hide the murder from the police, who have now joined the hunt for their daughter.  Add in a few more jaunts into the daunting woods and a potential Bigfoot sighting and you get the overall jist of Feral.  Feral has the potential to be an effectively creepy film; however, some basic plot holes in the script undermine any momentum the film begins to muster.

One of the struggles low budget films and new writers must contend with is the existence of a plethora of high-quality crime shows on television, such as Law and Order, that clearly illuminate the expected process and understanding of how the police work.  They set a very high standard and its imperative that low budget filmmakers understand and recognize the audience expectations on police procedure.

When the police enter the Feral storyline they are more Mayberry RFD than Without A Trace.  For example, they make a quick search for the missing daughter, but quickly dismiss their ability to find her stating with simplistic certainty that nothing can be found in those woods.  Huh?  Did I hear that right?  Anyone who watches the news in a post-Elizabeth Smart and Amber Alert world realize that police and volunteers would quickly line up to methodically search the woods for a missing girl.  Such an omission in Feral leaves one scratching one’s head and immediately pulls you out of the film.

The fact that the parents so quickly give up looking for their daughter is another inconsistency.  Anyone who is a parent would know you would not sleep and would effortlessly give up your life for your children if it meant their safe return.

Unfortunately, these and other logic issues effectively distract the audience from the fine performances given by Capps and Dodds.  Their pain and the building pressure of their accidental murder are wonderfully portrayed by the actors and the filmmakers use the wooded locations to great effect.

In the end, what is a promising premise with a talented cast is undermined by a very uneven and, occasionally, unbelievable script.

Two Stars.

One of the freedoms that microcinema avails the filmmaker is that one can make off-the-wall, unique stories that would not normally fit into the mainstream theater.  On The Cutting Room Floor, written and directed by Jaz Garewal, is such a movie, with varying levels of success.

The story is primarily about a young and successful screenwriter, Nik Schiltz, played by Jonathan Northover, who unexpectedly dies with one unproduced screenplay.  Several studios are eager to purchase his last screenplay, but the screenwriter’s widow has left very explicit instructions on how the purchase could occur… the studios must bid on the script without reading it first, they must shoot the script exactly as written within three months of purchase date and they must release the film.

Studios clamor for this unwritten script and the winning bid comes from Jonathan, played by Joe Jones, who was also the Schiltz’s mentor.  Upon reading the script the studio finds itself with a horrible product.  With no option but to shoot it, they decide to hire a new director, Baker Ildon, played by Sam Hoffman, and use him as a fall guy when the film is released.

And this is when things get pretty odd.  Upon viewing the initial cut of the film, studio execs are disturbed by just how bad the film is, so they conjure up a Golem to enter the film and re-write it/re-create it.  The Golem goes on a tear, killing numerous main characters, turning a teen comedy into a horror film.  There are other odd sub-plots as well, such as that the director had secured a loan from Hamas to shoot his own movie and now Hamas wants their messages put into this studio film, and there are dim-witted white supremacists after the director’s wife.

Eventually there is a confrontation between the terrorist group, the supremacists, the studio heads, the director and others.

If that is at all confusing, let me state that the story is much more complex than that.

I’ll give Garewal credit for putting such an ambitious project on video, but it falls prey in a number of areas that most microcinema efforts struggle.  With such a large cast, acting performances are hit and miss.  You have high quality performances by Jones and Northover that are offset by average to amateurish performances by a number of other actors.  Production values are hit and miss as well.  Some locations are right on the money, while others do not meet the requirements of the script.

The biggest challenges, however, appear to be in the script, which appears to change focus from one potential movie to something completely different, then back.  During the film, many characters refer to the high-priced screenplay’s biggest problem is that there are no main characters in it and that it lacked focus.  The same could be said by the script for On The Cutting Room Floor.

I wish that Garewal would have picked one or two simple subjects included within the complex On The Cutting Room Floor story and created a finely-tuned screenplay from just those few elements.  Make a film about the studios having to bid on the last script of a dead screenplay with extraordinary requirements attached.  Or, make a film about a Golem entering a film and rewriting the story by killing off many of the main characters.  Or, make a film about a struggling director who gets hired only so that he can be the fall guy when things go sour.  Any one of those ideas would make a very interesting story.  Putting all of those ideas into one film makes it difficult for any of the subject matters to be effectively realized.

Simplifying On The Cutting Room Floor would have made the scope of the story more focused and the film more successful.  It’s an ambitious effort that falls short of its overall intentions.

Two Stars. 

Confinement is a top-notch microcinema sci-fi action version of the classic tale The Most Dangerous Game, where humans become the hunted.  Written, directed and starring David Stewart, the finely crafted script, co-written with Eric Thornett, who also helms the jobs of Cinematographer and Fight Choreographer, weaves a twisting and fast-paced plot.

We follow our lead protagonist, Peter, played by Stewart, who wakes up to find himself alone in the middle of the forest.  We join him in his journey as he tries to uncover where he is and how he can get home.  He later befriends a fellow captive, played well by Bette Cassatt, and together they overcome numerous obstacles in attempts to secure their freedom.

What’s great about the story and the ambition behind the project is that there were many points during the film where I felt it had reached its creative apex, only to be outdone in the next scene.  The story successfully builds upon itself, each character, each step in the journey, leading to a very satisfying climax.  They also do a wonderful job of realistically utilizing the surroundings to incorporate them into the story with caves, tree forts, traps and hand-fashioned weapons.

Considering the financial limitations facing the filmmakers, they create a unique world where you accept it as real and this allows you to become enveloped in the story.  So few microcinema efforts of this scope are able to achieve what they set out to do.  Confinement is one of the rare exceptions to that standard.

That’s not to say that the film is flawless.  It is a microcinema effort, after all, so there are challenges with special effects, sound effects and the acting is weak at times, but the energy of the film masks most of its sins and the fight sequences are excellent for a project of this level.  The fights, choreographed by Thornett, are tightly fashioned and fast-paced and the stunts are excellent, generating true moments of real excitement.  Stewart and Thornett have an excellent eye, finding numerous unique locations, framing shots nicely and editing is a brisk immediacy.  The score, also composed by Stewart, adds greatly to the mood and urgency of the piece.

It would be interesting to see how more effective Confinement could have been with a greater budget.  Stewart and Thornett don’t use their financial limitations as a crutch, however, they simply throw enough raw energy and creative force at the challenge and end up with a very good film.

Four Stars.

Two Dollars is a story about two men, deep in debt and only two dollars to their name, who cross paths with a gangster, his sidekick, a hitman, a homeless woman and two detectives as they try to resolve their money woes. Like Finitsis’ other work, Truant, the production quality of this project is sloppy and below average, with inconsistent audio and camerawork. However, the script for this story is geniuinely funny with a lot of wit and an appropriate amount of political incorrectness. The scope of the project is also quite ambitious, as the cast is large and the locations are many and varied.

One of the funnier moments of the story involves a makeshift sword fight between two overweight characters who are quickly winded and end up calling “Time” like so many kids would do. Other memorable characters include Adam Curren as the overzealous Detective Stanley Penndington and Matthew Lister as Richard “Slippery Dick” Slipton. Curren, who was also very funny as the kneeless Dweedle in Finitsis’ Truant seems to be a good, raw talent that should continue to grow as an actor. He fully commits to his character and, even though the characters and/or events are often extreme, he never comes across as “acting.”

Some of the actors are miscast, such as Steve Pieroni as Jacob, who never quite comes off as the idiot he’s meant to be. I hope that Finitsis takes a lot more time and care in the future in his production work. After all, the only thing we have to look at is what he allows to be put on the screen. Anything that interferes with the success of the scene and/or movie needs to be addressed.

Finitsis has a lot of fun with this project as the characters wear odd wigs and the comedy is broad. The script is funny and everyone seems to be having a good time making the film, but the production value of the project undermines the effectiveness of the comedy.