Here's what we saw:
"The Hypnotist"
"2043"
"Limbo"
Mythica: A Quest for Heroes
Blessid
Shadows on the Wall
Given that Blessid was the local production, it's no surprise that it was the most crowded show of the day as folks involved in the production and their friends came. It always makes for a weird Q&A, as some of the questions are fairly obscure for outsiders.
That's festival honcho Garen Daly, director Rob Fitz, and writer Robert Henske. They seem like nice folks.
A lot of talk from Garen about how playing this festival helped Blessid get into some festivals in Europe, which is nice, I guess, although I'm not sure how excited those of us in the audience are supposed to be because of it.
After a rough start, it was a decent enough day. You'd like a four-slot day at a festival to include something more than decent, but better-than-expected doesn't feel bad, especially when it's snowing when you get out and things are going to be ugly all week.
"The Hypnotist"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)
"Person enters dreams of comatose patient" is a science-fiction movie that has been made a lot, and for good reason - it lets everyone involved create some really cool visual stuff, and you can just see a filmmaker's eagerness to show just how symbolic everything is. There are no rules, but everything is full of meaning.
"The Hypnotist" isn't a bad example of one, although it strikes me as being more inspired by video games than actual dream imagery, as Elijah (Brandon Wardell), the inventor of this technique, fights through a zombie-infested haunted house to reach his comatose wife Gwen (Heidi Rhodes), although his own ghosts are chasing him. It feels very mission/game-oriented, right down to a failure sending him back to a spawning point. That does play into the strengths of writer/director Jon Braver, a stuntman who doesn't necessarily put his cast through the wringer, but does seem to have picked a thing or two about directing action up in his time on the other side of the camera.
He and co-writer Will Shivers do a pretty fair job of paying the story down to the bare necessities, too: Once the opening exposition is finished, there's not much time spent on explanation. It's a pretty thin line between the story being perfunctory and efficiently-told, in that there could be more to it but the technique is quite good. Something to build upon if he opts to do more and bigger films, at least.
"2043"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 8 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)
"2043" is another short trying to tell a lot by just throwing the audience into it, positing aworld where, in the aftermath of a 28 Days Later-style plague, human contact is forbidden. Jack (Rowan Davie) has a soul-crushing job aiding in the disposal of those infected who have broken the rule, and pines for Milla (Tegan Crowley), who has no interest in a relationship where there is always a layer of plastic between you and the one you love.
Had this been made twenty or thirty years ago, it might have seemed to be about how the fear of AIDS and other venereal diseases has made people paranoid about physical contact; now one can't help but think of people packed tight together and interacting at a remove, taunting themselves with flesh they will never touch (or Pushing Daisies). Neither is a perfect metaphor, nor is the simple idea of being too afraid of consequences to act; the danger is too real, making the romantic ending seem a little too willfully tragic.
Still, writer/director Eugenie Muggleton and her crew do a nice job of building their world up. It's a grimy, miserable dystopia that kinds of feels like a rigged game - creating such a horrible situation that a soul-crushing authoritarian government is arguably necessary and then decrying how awful it is - but which seems like it has the details thought out well. Davie and Crowley play characters overwhelmed with disappointment and resignation, but do it with a feeling of personal history and perspective.
"Limbo"
* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 8 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)
"Limbo" played directly after two sorts that did impressive jobs of building their worlds despite not having much in the way of time or budget, and seemed to be going for something similar. Instead, this web-series pilot/student film comes off as merely unforthcoming, and it doesn't have the sort of polish to get by on what it does reveal.
The basics of the story are relatively easy to suss out - certain people from our world are capable of traveling to another where people who have mysteriously vanish reside; the lost are beset by horrors and the seekers appear to do what they do for a price. One of these "saviors" enters Limbo, gets separated from his party, and may be trapped there. He and the people he falls in with try and survive and find their way home.
There are a few problems with "Limbo", but the big one is that writer and co-director Ben R. Johnson seems kind of presumptuous in how he doles out his world's mythology. There's something to be said for throwing the audience in and letting them figure it out as they go, but there's something even better to be said for making sure that when danger presents itself, the viewer is roughly as able to consider the circumstances and get invested in the outcome as the characters. Johnson and his cast spend a lot of time referring to things in capital letters, referencing backstory, or introducing new elements without giving the audience something concrete to attach them to. You need that sort of grounding or payoff unless you're making this for an audience that is already familiar with your world, and I'm not sure that this is the case.
Beyond that, though, Johnson and co-director Joshua Demeulle just don't have the resources and practice to pull it off. Nobody has a strong and interesting personality, and the use of black-and-white to represent Limbo simply becomes drab without more color for contrast. The pacing is also a real problem; the presentation at the festival seemed like neither a single 42-minute TV episode built for commercial breaks nor a compilation of shorter webisodes. The focus shifted as if it were the latter, but there was no point, either at a long fade to black or the very end, where it felt like something was accomplished. You need those chapter breaks that feel like some progress has been made even as they make one curious about what will happen next, even if you have planned something much more serial out.
Mythica: A Quest for Heroes
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 8 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)
It may not always seem to be the case, but what an aspiring filmmaker can do today is pretty extraordinary, and not just in terms of there being more compact and affordable hardware available for shooting, editing, and creating visual effects than ever before. There are platforms for showing what you are capable of and developing a fanbase, getting in touch with potential collaborators, and even raising money. Here's the thing, though: Between that and the scaling-up that the big studios are doing, those aspiring filmmakers now want to do more. That's why something like Mythica: A Quest for Heroes has a colon in its title and occasionally looks a little stretched on-screen. Writer/director Anne K. Black has the tools at her disposal to make a decent fantasy movie, but wants to make more, and wants the one she's got to be even bigger.
That's not unreasonable. The world of Mythica is a fairly standard swords-and-sorcery world - a medieval level of technology with a select few able to perform magic, mostly populated by human beings but worth the occasional orc or dwarf showing up - but Black still had to establish the bounds on that magic, the rivalries that drive conflicts in that world, and a whole raft of other things that could swallow one movie whole if not parceled out a bit. If you're going to make bigger plans for the world, you might as well make bigger plans for your characters. The trick, which Black and her co-writers Jason Faller & Kynan Griffin generally manage to pull off, it's making the first installment satisfying enough to encourage viewers to come back because they like what they see, as opposed to just relying on the fantasy fan's compulsion to see any story out to the end.
That includes things which start or feeling like someone else's game of Dungeons & Dragons, which is the case here. The leaders of the assembled party are Marek (Melanie Stone), a club-footed slave who has a natural aptitude for magic, and Teela (Nicola Posener), a priestess who was the only one to escape when her temple was destroyed. When circumstances make Marek a fugitive and no other adventurer is willing to help Teela, they join forces, recruiting swordsman Thane (Adam Johnson) and thief Dagen (Jake Stormoen) to help rescue Teela's sister from the mercenaries and monsters that have taken her.
Full review at EFC.
Blessid
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 8 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)
Sometimes it's hard to give a movie a fair shake, no matter how much it may deserve one. I saw a flat-out great movie with a similar idea just a couple weeks before seeing Blessid, so I wanted it to do more with its premise as soon as it showed its hand. It never managed that, and while I think that its relatively small ambitions do hurt it, knowing just what else could be done shouldn't diminish what it does have going for it.
That would be the performances of the leads. Neither Rachel Kerbs nor Rick Montgomery Jr. is charged with giving a showy, theatrical performance, but each is able to get across a great deal of what makes his or her character tick in gestures and body language. Get the pair in a room together, and they do a nice job of revealing themselves even if they are trying to ferret information out about one another. The older Montgomery is clearly more experienced than Kerbs, and also given material where his Jedediah Cross gets to come across as more than he appears to be, but she more than holds her own, even when not paired with castmates not so skilled as Montgomery.
That's the case for a while at the start, when pregnant, depressed, and even suicidal Sarah Duncliffe (Kerbs) is prescribed bed rest for her physical and mental health. Her husband Edward (Gene Silvers) is the sort of man who thinks he's doing her a favor that merits more gratitude by being married to her, and the ex-boyfriend she was having an affair with right around the time that the baby was conceived (Chris Devecchio) is hanging around a lot when Edward is not around. Cross has just moved into a long-empty house across the street, and initially just wants to be left alone, but the retiree is the only person Sarah has to talk to, and the only one watching when Sarah's symptoms expand to include sleepwalking.
Full review at EFC.
Shadows on the Wall
* * (out of four)
Seen 8 February 2015 in Somerville Theatre #2 (SF/40, digital)
There's a vibe to Shadows on the Wall that suggests filmmaker Benjamin Carland is trying to make a Primer, not just something with big ideas but a small cast and budget, but a tactile feel. Something where all the exposed workings and dense terminology gives the movie credibility, and a feeling of being slightly overwhelmed is something to be pushed through rather than discouraged by. There are moments when he's pointed in the right direction and the audience feels the intended thrill, and if they outnumbered the ones that just didn't make sense, he would have made a fairly impressive bit of low-budget sci-fi.
He starts out with two roommates at a smallish college: Palmer Marshall (Chris Kauffmann) is a socially stunted introvert who books nonfunctional assemblies out of spare parts, and his cousin Chase (Tim Fox), there to have fun more than learn. Despite Palmer's apparent ability with electronics, he needs help to pass his freshman math classes, which is why his parents hire Alice (Nicole Lee Durant), who eventually joins him on working on his latest device, which Chase helps bankroll. And while it doesn't do what Palmer intended, what it does do is extraordinary on its own.
When Carland gets to that point, when the extraordinary starts to happen, it's hard to deny that the movie works. The undergraduate genius making a breakthrough isn't as popular a trope as it once was - the process of science has become less mysterious and the tools more specialized - but it's still a story that strikes a chord because everyone would love to discover something that is less hidden than in a place nobody has looked before. Carland handles the moments of discovery well, speeding things up as the characters learn more, always keeping the next thing tantalizingly close and making sure that, as big as it is, it's something the audience can grasp.
Full review at EFC.
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