darngoodwriter Reviews

Effigy (2013 Video)

The Making of Effigy

[10/10 · 30 October 2013]

(First published on blogcritics.org) Opening e-mail is usually pretty uneventful, but that day in August was different.

I saw an ad for the "The 2nd Annual Debra Hill Fellowship presents Producers Guild Weekend Shorts Contest". Heck of a long name for a shorts contest.

I'd heard of competitions like this before and they intrigued me. The goal is to make a short film in one weekend. It was a time commitment but I have lots of time. (Some people call my current situation "being retired". I call it working on my third career as a writer/filmmaker.)

What about resources to make the film? My daughter Leia and her boyfriend Allen Hodge had recently connected through a an old high school friend with Studio School TV guru Josh Quillin, who was opening a studio nearby in Upland, California. I talked to him and he was interested. (The prizes we could win were pretty impressive). So, I had a studio, cameras, lights and post-production support. Leia would do still photography and Allen was set to be our cinematographer. What about actors?

For several years I've belonged to the Alameda Writers Group (it's named after the street in Burbank where you'll find NBC and Disney studios). Luckily for me, the September meeting featured show-business career coach Shawn Tolleson and so the audience included a lot of her actor clients.

I pitched my project to the group. "I'm going to make a short film. On Friday afternoon at 3:00 p.m,.the Producers Guild will send us a subject and three elements that must appear in the film We'll need to write, produce, edit and upload a five minute film by Sunday at 5:00 p.m. I need writers, actors and technical people. The rules say no-one can get paid."

Work your buns off for 2 and a half days for free! How could anyone turn down an offer like that?

To my surprise, by the end of the meeting, I had volunteer writers, actors and staff.

When the big day came, Josh, his wife Katie, Leia, Allen and I were there by 8:00 am. Would anyone else show up?

My co-writers – G. Alan Green and Laurie Lusk — arrived in the early afternoon. We waited for instructions from the Producers Guild. Nothing. Check e-mail. Check their Facebook page. Back to the e-mail. Twenty minutes of this. Finally, the ether spit it out.

The assignment was inspired by producer Debra Hill's The Fisher King. The setting was to be a city or town. Required story elements were a Grail, a Hat and a Doll.

The instructions explained: "Each of these objects plays a key role in The Fisher King. Entries in the contest must include all three of these items in some fashion. Furthermore, at least one of the items must have a central or important function in the story." Thematic elements, at least one of which was required were "A Quest", "Redemption" or "Reality vs. The Imaginary"

We set up a whiteboard, brainstormed and before you could say "Robin Williams," we were halfway through the script. Then, when Laurie tried to save it, something went wrong with her computer and we lost the file. Start again.

Meanwhile, Josh and Katie coordinated the nitty-gritty of the production. Sign-in sheets, releases, make-up artists, caterers, extras, signs and manning the phones so everyone could find us in far off Dual Edge Studios in Upland. They also arranged for additional technical crew.

Actors started arriving in the late afternoon. We did table reads of the script, and rewrites in real-time. It was dark by the time we offered parts to actors. I had to turn away a couple of volunteers.

Saturday morning, we started make-up at 8:00 a.m., and Josh and Allen coordinated locations with the Upland PD and business owners. We scrambled for costumes and props. By late morning we were shooting. Josh and Allen shot the script and got plenty of "coverage" — the same scene with different angles and framing — as there would be no-time for re-shoots. We finished shooting late Saturday — it begins to get a little fuzzy here.

I finished the contest paperwork and Josh edited most of the night. Leia came up with the film's title — Effigy.

The editing was finished in time on Sunday afternoon, but when we tried to upload the film to the contest website, it kept crashing. I filed an incident with the contest help desk and got a waiver of the deadline. I finally got the film to upload about 10:00 on Monday morning.

Did we win one of the prizes? No.

Was it worth it? Yes.

Filmmaking is a craft. One improves one's craft by working at it. We all improved. Filmmaking is also about people. Getting to know and work with our cast and crew may have been the real reward. I'm looking forward to working with many of them again.

And, it was a heck of a lot of fun. I'm glad I opened that e-mail.

Good Neighbours (2010)

Great quirky film noir a la Coen brothers

[28 July 2011]

Article first published as Movie Review: Good Neighbors on Blogcritics. 'http://blogcritics.org/video/article/movie-review-good-neighbors/'

Take three freaky characters with tenuous grips on reality and stick them into an aging apartment building in a rundown neighborhood of Montreal and what do you have? Good Neighbors. You also have a film noir mystery which rivals anything the Coen brothers (Blood Simple, Fargo, No Country for Old Men) have ever done.

Written and directed by Canadian filmmaker Jacob Tierney, Good Neighbors is based on the 1982 book, Chère Voisine, by Chyrstine Brouillet. Tierney first read the book when he was in high school, and decided to take it to his producer father, Kevin Tierney, with whom he had collaborated on the comedy The Trotsky.

"Jacob told me about this book a long time ago," recalled the elder Tierney, "and I said, Jacob, I really don't want to make a movie about a serial killer. And when we finished shooting on The Trotsky, I sent him a note saying, 'I'll produce any project that you want to make.' And he told me: 'this is the one.'" The producer overcame his initial reluctance upon reading the novel. "I actually found it way funnier and way more diabolical than just being a book about a serial killer. Don't get me wrong, it's still a pretty sick little tale – but there's great fun to it in a perverse way."

Good Neighbors stars Jay Baruchel, Scott Speedman, and Emily Hampshire. It also stars three cats, Mozart, Tia Maria and Balthazar who are instrumental in moving the story along.

At first, I was annoyed at not being able to figure out who the protagonist was, but I realized as the film progressed that writer- director Tierney was doing an excellent job of giving us three characters each of whom was strange enough to either be evil or something close to it. In no time, you are suspicious of all of them.

Emily Hampshire plays Louise, a waitress in a Chinese restaurant, whose fear about the possible presence of a serial murderer in the neighborhood comes to dominate her life and the lives of those around her. She has trouble relating to people, and is the creepiest cat lover in film history.

Louise communicates her fears to her neighbor, Spenser, a disabled housebound man played by Scott Speedman. Spenser's lean, swimmer's body seems out-of-place, trapped in a wheel chair on an upper floor of the apartment building. His personality flashes back and forth between a way too friendly smile and a barely controlled rage. But, after all, he lost his wife in an auto accident, or so he says.

A new neighbor, Victor, moves in – played to geeky perfection by Jay Baruchels. Victor is as socially inept as they come, but apparently good at heart. Of course, he does tell his brother that Louise is his fiancée, before he's told her she is.

As the violence escalates on the streets outside, the three of them bond – as much as their flawed psyches allow – in an effort to come to grips with the threat of the serial killer. But, the strangeness doesn't end with the lead characters. Co-workers, policemen and other neighbors all have their quirks, and you'll find yourself being suspicious of nearly everyone at some point, at least until they too become a victim.

The twists and turns come at you rapidly in the third act and I found myself hoping for just one more when things wound down. But that wasn't because I thought anything was missing, I just didn't want the mayhem to end. Good Neighbors - murder, betrayal, cats, a few laughs and lots of blood - is available now on demand. It will open theatrically in New York on July 29 and in Los Angeles on August 5. I'd see it in a theater – being trapped in a dark room full of strangers will add to your enjoyment.

The Art of Getting By (2011)

Article first published as Movie Reviews: The Art of Getting By on www.blogcritics.org

[10/10 · 17 June 2011]

About two thirds through this film I began to recall The Graduate, the 1967 Dustin Hoffman classic, which was a key artistic moment for my generation. I believe that The Art of Getting By, a Fox Searchlight film which opens in limited release Friday, June 17, 2011, can be of equal significance for this generation and to the careers of young actor Freddie Highmore (Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, Finding Neverland, August Rush) and writer/director Gavin Wiesen.

Highmore plays George, a senior at an expensive, private high school in New York, in possession of enough angst and depression to make a roomful of beatniks look like a multi-level marketing pep-rally. His biggest problem with life is that it ends. What good is trying, if you're just going to die eventually?

George lives out his dark world view by just getting by. As the story begins, he has managed to make it almost all the way through high school without actually doing any work. Even in art class, the one subject that interests him, he doodles instead of completing the assignments. Highmore plays what could have been a totally unsympathetic character with a charm and vulnerability that makes it impossible not to root for him. George's self-pitying life takes an unexpected turn when he takes the blame for one of the school's prettiest and most popular girls, Sally, when she is about to be caught smoking on the roof.

Sally, played by Emma Roberts (Scream 4, Valentine's Day, Nancy Drew), whisks George into her life of hip parties. As they skip school together to go to galleries and museums, they become best friends. George begins to fall for the flirtatious Sally, but is clueless about how to let her know.

A second wild card comes into George's hand when he meets a school alumnus on career day, Dustin, played by Michael Angarano (One Last Thing, The Forbidden Kingdom). Dustin is making it in the trendy New York art scene. He mentors George about careers and girls and serves as an inspirational, if often inebriated, role model.

George begins to envision himself as an artist with Sally as his muse, and then things start to go wrong. He discovers it's hard to deal with this new reality, when your life has been based on just getting by.

The Art of Getting By is the first feature film for writer/director Gavin Wiesen. It is a remarkable film on many levels, including story, acting, and cinematography. Not only do the main characters – George, Sally and Dustin – feel real, but so do nearly all the supporting characters. Writers are told to give all their characters personality, but sometimes try to do this with an eye-patch or a Southern accent. In this case, however, with remarkably efficient use of dialog and action we meet a group of supporting characters who possess almost the same depth as the leads.

We meet George's mom, Vivian, played by Rita Wilson (It's Complicated), a New York business woman who struggles, unsuccessfully, to understand her son, while trying to protect him from the problems she is having with his step-father.

Sally's mother, Charlotte, played by Elizabeth Reaser (the Twilight series), is a mirror image of George's mom, having turned her teenage daughter into her best friend and being almost totally focused on her own future, rather than her daughter's.

At George's school, he is both championed and prodded by dedicated educators. His principal, played by Blair Underwood (Full Frontal, Rules Of Engagement, Gattaca), uses a carrot and stick approach to keep George moving. His art instructor, played by Broadway staple Jarlath Conroy (True Grit, Kinsey, Heaven's Gate) sees George's real talent and gives him an artistic challenge that leads to one of the climatic moments of the film. They both confront him about his lack of initiative and its consequences.

Underwood and Conroy take what could have been cliché "dedicated teacher" roles and bring to them to life in totally convincing ways. Another important character in the film was New York. Director Wiesen brought his own experiences growing up in New York City to the film, illustrating how New York's melting-pot milieu trickles down to high school, providing good and bad distractions. The city's energy permeates everything and capturing that was the job of Director of Photography Ben Kutchins.

Kutchins got the job because of his experience in the New York indie world. "When I'm not shooting, I'm wandering around the city looking for things that I haven't seen in movies," he said.. "Everyone knows what the Empire State Building looks like and what Times Square look like, but I'm always looking for that obscure corner that gives you a new feeling. Gavin and I shared a lot of secret locations that we had been storing away over the years." Seinfeld fans will recognize "the restaurant".

As the ending of the film approached, I feared that like many recent films, it would leave us hanging. I believe that G.K. Chesterson's famous quip, "The purpose of an open mind is like that of an open mouth, which is to close it down on something solid," also applies to film. I was not disappointed, and the ending again reminded me of The Graduate.

I believe in writing balanced reviews. I saw this film with my daughter, who was born more than a decade after The Graduate premiered, so I had a youthful perspective to add to my old-guy ranting. Both of us tried to find something wrong with this film that I could include in this review. Neither of us could. It's close to perfect. I'm looking forward to seeing more work by writer/director Gavin Wiesen.

The Art of Getting By does a lot more than just get by, it delivers.