When the summer solstice arrived, it found me around the house facing boredom as my constant companion, until I saw The Lot. It is a filmmaking reality show from Fox (Tuesday night) where contestants vie for a one million dollar development deal. I have watched The Lot from day one.
This review concerns the latest episode where the last five of the directors showed their three-minute movie, and Wes Craven served as guest host. Good choice. The two regular hosts, Garry Marshall and Carrie Fisher, are also good. The group started with 15 semi-finalists, hopeful directors, making short films in order to win a million dollar deal under Steven Spielberg. And for three Tuesdays, five directors screened movies that will keep them in the competition, as one is voted off each week.
This week the screening of the last five films remained from contestants Zach, Jessica, Jason, Will, and Mateen. But before this was underway, the loser from last week was revealed — Marty Martin. He had the least number of votes and left the show. Marty had style, but no substance, no storyline to speak of in his film shown last week. He had lots of arrogance, but only style to back it up. Dance With The Devil was just not enough to keep him in the competition he hoped to win.The first film screened was a comedy from Will called Glass Eye. It did not make me laugh. It was a silent, black and white and color film. The story was good and it received good reviews from the three judges, however.
The next film, Blood Born by Jason, was a drama, a moral tale. It was unclear as to the message and made the director seem hypocritical. Why? Because he believed one could avoid sex and violence and still make a good film. Well, he starts his film off with a drug use scene and a menacing phone call from a drug dealer! Then it ends with a looming hit (via drive-by) on the lead actor as victim. All this drama occurs after the character has been told by the doctor that his donated blood had been curing people of their terminal diseases. Who was this guy? Wes Craven said that there needed to be a choice made in order for this tale to not look like gratuitous drugs and violence. Garry Marshall said it was plainly not uplifting — was this man supposed to be Jesus or the second coming or both?Sunshine Girl by Zach (the one to beat) emerged as the judges’ favorite film. A young girl steals the sun for fun because she's afraid of the dark. But it is unclear why she is afraid of the dark. The beginning is a bit muddy and misleading. But the middle creates a nice tension and release at the end, which made this overall a good film. And he got “good job” from all the judges. There was a little bit of dialogue but this was not well done.
The female director in this group, Jessica, did a rather forgettable film, The Orchard. It was supposed to be a horror film — not. Just that day I had to severely prune a diseased tree in my yard. And I am always hoping that the tree gods don’t strike me or hope that my hand does not slip while I am making crucial cuts. So there is tension in this work, and potentially horror. But none of this comes through in this dull drama, with no drama, by Jessica. And it was soundly panned by Carrie Fisher who said the only good thing is that it did not go on any longer. Wes Craven, who put horror films such as Scream on the map, said that “horror was about blood, not sap.” He could not find anything good about it, ditto Garry Marshall.
Finally, the only African American in contention, Mateen, showed his film, Lost.
His script was quite good and mature. Oddly the other films were silent, sans dialogue, but not this one. Mateen’s film was a love story. There was a great deal of room for improvement however. But what surprised this reviewer with all the films this week is the obvious lack of technology that could have been employed to help tell the story.
Lost, for example, would have benefited from the film opening with the woman in the story calling her ex-boyfriend from a cell phone while in front of his house. I would have borrowed a red Mustang and placed her there for the first long shot. This was the judges' main complaint about Mateen’s work — too many (all) tight shots (read: soap-opera material). When the jilted lover asked where she was, he could have then run to the window excitedly and told her that he would be right out. Then he could have run around the house looking for the engagement ring (which was revealed at the end of the film) and put it into his pocket, so that the audience could be in on the secret. This would have created a nice tension in both the beginning and middle of the film, instead of more tight-shot dialogue in a restaurant. For the end, when he went to reach for the ring, she could have then revealed “I got married.” The audience would immediately get the hope lost. The last scene: a long shot, as it began, with her driving off alone in the red Mustang. The judges’ basic critique for Mateen was good dialogue, but no real filmmaking — nothing really happened in the film. This could have been remedied with use of easy-to-obtain technology thrown in, and some good long shots pleasing to the eye, offering a break in the film’s dialogue.
The filmmakers/directors are restricted to short films, varying genres. But there is one thing that seems they have not mastered — tension — a clear tension, to be resolved, in a solid beginning, middle, and end of the storytelling. The tension could be introduced clearly or obscurely. The middle should not be muddy but where the tension has become fully developed. This tension can then be clearly resolved in the end befitting the theme of the film. Overall, this week was a curious conjunction of non-message films. To make matters worse, this was unintended. And the quote from E.B. White that Garry Marshall (who likes to use quotes in his critiques) offered summed up the night: “You should be obscure, clearly.”
