FILM REVIEW OF MAMA'S WILL (2010)
Mama's Will is an award winning short film written, directed, and produced by David George Menard (a.k.a. George David Maynard). It won under the category of Award of Merit, at The Accolade Competition Deadline May 28, 2010 - Concordia University (Canada), Mama's Will, short film (written, directed and produced by David George Menard). It also won at the 2011 Canada International Film Festival (CIFF), under the category of the 2011 Royal Reel Award - Short Film Competition Mama's Will - David George Menard. It won a nomination at the 2010 Barcelona Film Festival, under the category of the 2010 Jury Prize - for Best Actor going to the Canadian Actor Tom Rack.
Mama's Will is a singular theme narrative with minimal subtext. It a sliver fable emulating a greater story, that of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Storytelling in the small and the large, both deal with old-fashion funeral rites that trigger real memories of forgotten inheritance disputes, which had occurred in the distant past within my own family, and in other families too. It is a social critique of prototypical North America personalities struggling to survival in the cutthroat world of capitalism. It represents the destructive force of your typical businessman, better still, businesswoman functioning inside the nuclear family and addresses the universal meaning of equality, justice, and morality among people.
Mama's Will exists in an equivalent class of moral power tales. It is a moral imperative for it emulates the myth forming poetry of Ibsen's fairytale play, Peer Gynt: A dramatic poem. It does so by creating an envelop of mystery around the character of the daughter, Jennie Gatlin; for by the end of the movie, we realize that she is a totally different make of character, as compared to the others spanning the breadth of our story. Jennie is more sublime and, above all, unknowable. She is the partial inversion of the pictorial maxim, most famously called "Three Wise Monkeys." She represents two of the pictographs, "hear no evil" and "speak no evil" and inverts the other, "see no evil."
Jennie is not like any of the other characters in this short movie. She is emblematic of the parable of The Chicken That Sees, an old Sikh fable. Her most kind and gentle demeanor makes her character soar within the dramatic space. Her soul is like that of a heavenly bird, flying high above all mundane pursuits and yet she measures and tabulates market values inside a ledger as she helps her Mama regulate the world's business with its property affairs. But greedy pettiness is not her way though her siblings leave their slimy paths within that earthly pit of snakes.
The character of Jennie Gatlin dramatically exists to represent Mother Nature's power to renew herself through the Things That Matter. She is the Oral Mother that subsumes her Uterine and Oedipal motherly counterparts in fabulous parable linked to The One That Sees The Many, an allusion to the mythical bird, known as the "phoenix." If Jennie does have recognizable "avian" characteristics then, truly, within the death bed scene of her mother Beatrice, in which we can recognize the same mythic beauty, a reference to the death of Anse in Peer Gynt, then it is interesting to remark that certain aspects of Ibsen's dramatic works do have 'avian' characteristics, as does Mama's Will.
Mama's Will is a strong moral story, for if members of a family cannot get along with each other, at least long enough to bury one of its dead, then what the hell does heaven have to do with graceful possibilities of hope for our world when people in it have the collective tasks to repeatedly continue to bury its millions and millions of dead? George Maynard DGM/09-04-13
CONTACT: David George Menard (a.k.a. George David Maynard), Post Graduate Film Production Fellow/Termite Cat Productions, The Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University, 1250 Guy Street, Faubourg Building, FB-319 Dept. of Cinema, Montreal Quebec, Canada H3H 2T4 Tel: (514) 848-2424 Ext. 4666 c/o Louise Lamarre.
Mama's Will is an award winning short film written, directed, and produced by David George Menard (a.k.a. George David Maynard). It won under the category of Award of Merit, at The Accolade Competition Deadline May 28, 2010 - Concordia University (Canada), Mama's Will, short film (written, directed and produced by David George Menard). It also won at the 2011 Canada International Film Festival (CIFF), under the category of the 2011 Royal Reel Award - Short Film Competition Mama's Will - David George Menard. It won a nomination at the 2010 Barcelona Film Festival, under the category of the 2010 Jury Prize - for Best Actor going to the Canadian Actor Tom Rack.
Mama's Will is a singular theme narrative with minimal subtext. It a sliver fable emulating a greater story, that of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Storytelling in the small and the large, both deal with old-fashion funeral rites that trigger real memories of forgotten inheritance disputes, which had occurred in the distant past within my own family, and in other families too. It is a social critique of prototypical North America personalities struggling to survival in the cutthroat world of capitalism. It represents the destructive force of your typical businessman, better still, businesswoman functioning inside the nuclear family and addresses the universal meaning of equality, justice, and morality among people.
Mama's Will exists in an equivalent class of moral power tales. It is a moral imperative for it emulates the myth forming poetry of Ibsen's fairytale play, Peer Gynt: A dramatic poem. It does so by creating an envelop of mystery around the character of the daughter, Jennie Gatlin; for by the end of the movie, we realize that she is a totally different make of character, as compared to the others spanning the breadth of our story. Jennie is more sublime and, above all, unknowable. She is the partial inversion of the pictorial maxim, most famously called "Three Wise Monkeys." She represents two of the pictographs, "hear no evil" and "speak no evil" and inverts the other, "see no evil."
Jennie is not like any of the other characters in this short movie. She is emblematic of the parable of The Chicken That Sees, an old Sikh fable. Her most kind and gentle demeanor makes her character soar within the dramatic space. Her soul is like that of a heavenly bird, flying high above all mundane pursuits and yet she measures and tabulates market values inside a ledger as she helps her Mama regulate the world's business with its property affairs. But greedy pettiness is not her way though her siblings leave their slimy paths within that earthly pit of snakes.
The character of Jennie Gatlin dramatically exists to represent Mother Nature's power to renew herself through the Things That Matter. She is the Oral Mother that subsumes her Uterine and Oedipal motherly counterparts in fabulous parable linked to The One That Sees The Many, an allusion to the mythical bird, known as the "phoenix." If Jennie does have recognizable "avian" characteristics then, truly, within the death bed scene of her mother Beatrice, in which we can recognize the same mythic beauty, a reference to the death of Anse in Peer Gynt, then it is interesting to remark that certain aspects of Ibsen's dramatic works do have 'avian' characteristics, as does Mama's Will.
Mama's Will is a strong moral story, for if members of a family cannot get along with each other, at least long enough to bury one of its dead, then what the hell does heaven have to do with graceful possibilities of hope for our world when people in it have the collective tasks to repeatedly continue to bury its millions and millions of dead? George Maynard DGM/09-04-13
CONTACT: David George Menard (a.k.a. George David Maynard), Post Graduate Film Production Fellow/Termite Cat Productions, The Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University, 1250 Guy Street, Faubourg Building, FB-319 Dept. of Cinema, Montreal Quebec, Canada H3H 2T4 Tel: (514) 848-2424 Ext. 4666 c/o Louise Lamarre.