Moviemark DVD Indie Shorts Project Vol. 1 (2006)

Posted on Feb 21, 2007 under Fantasy, Horror |

Written and directed by Paul von Stoetzel, Daniel Heisel, Anthony Thurman, Jose Rosete, Jason Stephenson, Shawn Hunt, and Richard Marshall
Starring
- Delilah Davis
- Molly Hainline
- Jose Rosete
- Michael Johnson
- Michael Passine
- Joshua Logsdon

When Student Filmmakers Attack!

If you’ve watched much Hollywood product lately, you might start to assume that the general disdain for storytelling is a result of the corporate movie machine, grinding creativity and narrative artistry between its mighty capitalist gears. Sometimes, it takes a compilation like this to demonstrate that the general lack of heed given to story in an ostensible narrative artform isn’t just something inculcated on the shiny streets of L.A. Just about everything put together on this disc has that distinctive filmschooly vibe about it (note: I have no evidence one way or another whether anything here was made at film school or by students, though if I do find out one way or another, I’ll edit this line out before posting). The directors are very devoted to Image and Juxtaposition and Composition and, above all, with Saying Something, but most of them have only the faintest inkling of the storyteller’s art as it relates to plot and structure. Thus, most of what we have here comes across as exercises and trifles, rather than actual films, i.e., actual complete cinematic narratives.

“Asleep in the Deep”

The longest short on the disc is a thrice-removed adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn,” as rendered by punky rebellious student types. Our main character, Elise (Delilah Davis), wanders an urban wasteland, thinking the poignant and deep thoughts of the “keeping it real” homeless outsider, until she meets someone who gives her a line on an empty apartment. (Actually, an empty unrefurbished loft.) The only other occupant of the building is an old black violinist (Benny S. Cannon), and in his verbal silence they strike up a friendship of sorts.

**Sure it looks cool, but it only keeps out the really big-ass mosquitos.**

Director Paul von Stoetzel is an unfortunate victim of the philosophy that Depth is achieved by throwing disparate and unrelated elements together and letting the audience bring its own wisdom to bear on the random bits. The whole film is seen in microcosm in one of Elise’s poems which she triumphantly reads to Zahn: It’s a string of strong but separate images with no scheme linking them, or even a hint that such a connecting scheme was even intended beyond the voice of the poet itself. Shorts don’t have the leisure to waste time, but it’s still half of the movie before Elise meets or even hears Zahn; up until then, she wanders, and talks to other homeless philosophers about how outsiders see soooo much more of what’s really going on. And we get to see stepdancers outside a club. The elements presented here seem almost to have been chosen (if consciously chosen at all) because of their lack of narrative connection.

The Old Ones don’t appreciate “Turkey in the Straw.”

Unfortunately, Lovecraft was nothing if not a plot monkey, and thus we have a couple of nods to the imagery of the original short story — Zahn playing madly while looking out the window — but the story is so fragmented that if the viewer doesn’t already know the plot, he has no chance of understanding even the structure of what’s supposed to be going on. All we see on screen is that at an almost random moment, Elise takes fright and runs away, then delivers to us a passionate monologue of Big Words Without Meaning.

“Indebted”

This just in: There is sorrow in the world, nay, even misery! I, as a student director who has barely grasped this, must proclaim this to the world as a new and previously undiscovered Truth!

That’s pretty much the rationale behind this second short, clocking in at 15 minutes . Ramon (writer/director Jose Rosette) is a working shlub with unpaid bills piling up around his ears. His once-girlfriend (Dona Wood) keeps him from his daughter, and only swears at him and berates him if he calls. Why, it’s enough to make a man angry at God, and suicidal to boot.

Portrait of the Artist.

I don’t mean to denigrate the very real pain of both financial ruin and personal isolation. The problem here is that Rosette presents us with a situation which is so run-of-the-mill as to be utterly banal. Even a story with universal appeal has to be presented in such a way that the audience will be interested in the character. Here, though, Ramon is the boiled-down essence of his species. Even the dailogue with his ex is so threadbare that one can hardly imagine real people saying such things without boring themselves to tears.

Yes, I know. Serious Art is supposed to deal with Serious Problems. But fifteen minutes of “Boy, Ramon’s life sucks in completely unremarkable ways” doesn’t begin to deal with anything; it simply mistakes depression for art.

“Midnight Snack”

A guy gets up in the night for something from the fridge. A guy with a monstrous face bites and kills him. His wife discovers the body and screams at the monster. The end.

If only he’d just run out to Whitecastle, all of this could have been averted.

Hey, I know it’s hard to fit a complete story into five minutes (though it would be easier if those involved thought they needed to make the credits crawl last quite so long). But this wasn’t even an attempt at storytelling. It’s barely a narrative. What we have here is a scene, one without much time to establish a narrative hook to engage our interest.

“Boxed In”

Well, at least this one tries for narrative, in the old-fashioned “Twilight Zone” fashion. Caroline (Molly Hainline) is introduced to us as a debt-addled criminal who shoots a man through his kidneys to get his wallet. What she also gets is a puzzle box from a yard sale which assembles itself in front of her eyes, and suddenly… it’s a young Sammo Hung! No, wait, it’s a silent Asian guy (Michael Liu) who stands stock still while communicating with her telepathically. She easily takes it in stride when he offers to give her anything she wants, but it turns out that the power to fulfill her selfish desires traps her rather than frees her…

“So are you really Hung? Wait — that came out so wrong…”

It’s a good concept, though nothing new. But the staging and editing leave something to be desired; our granite-faced pseudo-genie looks less like an inhuman avatar and more like a lost foreign exchange student too embarrassed to ask for directions.

“The Locksmith”

Very likely the best of the bunch, and not just because it’s far and away the goriest. Michael Johnson plays a locksmith (named Smith, naturally) with a fairly harmless hobby: He makes himself extra sets of keys at every residential job, then prowls through the households of attractive women, sniffing underwear and tasting toothbrushes. (I said it was relatively harmless. I didn’t say it wasn’t creepy.) Despit his gut feeling, he lets himself in for the evening at the house of Faith (Geneva Conoway) and creeps through her unmentionables. But Faith and her date (Chad Hallonquist) come home earlier than expected. And what Faith thinks is the perfect end to a perfect evening is something that neither the locksmith nor the date were expecting.

“‘Spooky’? My hobby? As if!”

Like I said, it’s easily the best of the bunch. While Smith is perhaps no more sympathetic than some of the other characters in this collection, the novelty of his “hobby,” as well as his self-reflective internal monologue about its merits, make him an intriguing protagonist. And the story doesn’t simply proceed in a straight line to an inevitable conclusion; each scene contributes by changing the direction of the story, reversing our expectations and upping the ante. Director Jason Stephenson actually knows something about story, and wanted to tell one.

Somebody’s a little confused about the expression “washboard abs.”

“Souled”

Two chunky brothers (Joshua Logsdon and Ron A. Blair) continue running their dead parents’ farm, far past the point of financial viability. In desperation, with tempers flared, the older brother looks to folklore and goes down to the crossroads to make a deal with the devil.

There’s a lot to like here. The camera work is lyrical; the brothers are perfectly cast, with their girth lending them visual appeal (that’s not the same thing as being handsome) and their accents giving just the right hint of backwoods to render an appeal to the devil at the crossroads plausible.

“really? I’m allergic to hay too!”

On the other hand, ten minutes isn’t enough running time to waste on scenes that are unfocused or disconnected from the main story, and it certainly isn’t enough to leave the situation hanging ambiguously. Somewhere along the line, some of the information that director Richard Marshall thought he was conveying got left out, with the result being that the ending lacks a sense of resolution for the audience.

“The Depression of Detective Downs”

Well… it’s different, I’ll give it that. The story of a police detective battling depression while trying to find an abducted child before she turns up dead? And told in animation that looks like it was done freehand in MS Paint? Yeah, that’s different. But it’s far too much story material to hope to deal with in under seven minutes; all we get is the barest of sketches, both of the detectives inner demons and his experior quest. And the animation’s far too crude to do much more than show people standing around blinking while the narration fills in the gaps.

**Alas, Crocket and Tubbs: The Animated Aventures never moved past the pilot stage.**

The Grand Summation:

The filmmakers here cover a range of skill levels in the technical aspects of their craft. But what all of them need to do — even the better ones — is come to terms with the concept that cinema is, fundamentally, a narrative art form, and that therefore all of their cinematographical tricks need to be focused on telling a story. For some of these directors, that would first mean finding a story to tell. I wish them luck, and I wish them improvement before they put their films out in front of an audience again.