The Confidence of a Mediocre White Man
Apr. 16th, 2019 06:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beehammerThe film festival rolled through town again this year, which of course meant the usual slate of promising indies that hit the mark and intriguing indies that turned out to be fucking terrible*.
The worst of the latter was a solid, frustrating waste of 85 minutes where everybody but the writer/director did their damn jobs. The actors were perfectly fine, for their ages and limitations. Costuming did what they were asked. Cinematography was good. Music was good. And yet, here we were, watching a thing that made no sense and went nowhere and seemed intent on punishing us for watching it.
The audience was small enough that you could hear everyone getting itchy as scenes dragged on, see the phones come out as people checked the time, see people leaning forward in their seats as something interesting was--finally!--happening. (It didn't pan out, which then had people whispering about how the movie just... wasn't going to explain that?)
Nothing connected. Nothing landed. The whole project was stillborn. I mean, I've seen worse movies, but they were at least actively trying.
And there's a quote from Jordan Peele about Us that came to mind about 80% of the way through, about how you don't necessarily have to show all of your own mythology, but you have to know it. If you're just pulling things out of your ass, the audience will know, and the audience will stop trusting you and tune out. This director absolutely did not have a cogent mythology for what he was trying to do. None of it cohered or came together at all.
So of course the director was present for the screening, and of course there was a Q&A afterwards. The guy in the seat next to me actually muttered, "I've got a question--what the fuck?"
He did not, of course, actually ask the director what the fuck. He might have, I suppose, if the director hadn't been deeply flattered by the MC, whose terrible taste led him to really love the film, and then taken the microphone and proceeded to tell us all about how everything wrong with the film was a very deliberate choice he made.
His favorite part about making films is getting the pace right! By which he meant he'd fucking weaponized it. He wanted a natural rhythm and feel to the teenage actors' performances, so he only let them read as much of the script as they needed to do their own scenes. Possibly this was also because some of them would have asked awkward questions about why the script didn't make any sense. The entire weird little hook of the film started off as someone else's in-joke. He was pleased as punch that he'd managed to cast a bunch of former child-stars in nameless roles with no lines, serving as human easter eggs in case someone made it that far into the film and managed to recognize them. Even the story about how the director had discovered the band that did the heavy-lifting in the score was flattened out and dull, a story told by a friend and writing partner now related to us third-hand.
The man was utterly impervious to the audience disengagement which, by the time the credits rolled, was total. He was immune to the sulky glares and bewildered looks he was getting instead of questions. He was eager to start on his next, equally horrible, film. He was up there, having just made and confessed to delighting in a crime against film, and he was living his best goddamned life. A board whose job it was to pick out good independent film had accepted his entry! People came to see his thing! More people would probably bankroll his next project because the last one didn't devolve into a coke-fueled shoot-out! When he looks back on it in a week or two, it's going to be the time he went somewhere because he's a director and people asked him about the creative choices in a movie that he made and people paid to see!
So if that guy gets to do that, without even putting on shoes with laces or a shirt with buttons, there's no reason for you to sit there agonizing over whatever it is you want to make and show people in case it's not good enough.
It's good enough, I promise you. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it's good enough.
*Unfortunately, this time around the indies that were terrible were largely not terrible because of their inexperienced crew or tiny budgets or all the other things that will buff out with time, if everyone keeps working.
The worst of the latter was a solid, frustrating waste of 85 minutes where everybody but the writer/director did their damn jobs. The actors were perfectly fine, for their ages and limitations. Costuming did what they were asked. Cinematography was good. Music was good. And yet, here we were, watching a thing that made no sense and went nowhere and seemed intent on punishing us for watching it.
The audience was small enough that you could hear everyone getting itchy as scenes dragged on, see the phones come out as people checked the time, see people leaning forward in their seats as something interesting was--finally!--happening. (It didn't pan out, which then had people whispering about how the movie just... wasn't going to explain that?)
Nothing connected. Nothing landed. The whole project was stillborn. I mean, I've seen worse movies, but they were at least actively trying.
And there's a quote from Jordan Peele about Us that came to mind about 80% of the way through, about how you don't necessarily have to show all of your own mythology, but you have to know it. If you're just pulling things out of your ass, the audience will know, and the audience will stop trusting you and tune out. This director absolutely did not have a cogent mythology for what he was trying to do. None of it cohered or came together at all.
So of course the director was present for the screening, and of course there was a Q&A afterwards. The guy in the seat next to me actually muttered, "I've got a question--what the fuck?"
He did not, of course, actually ask the director what the fuck. He might have, I suppose, if the director hadn't been deeply flattered by the MC, whose terrible taste led him to really love the film, and then taken the microphone and proceeded to tell us all about how everything wrong with the film was a very deliberate choice he made.
His favorite part about making films is getting the pace right! By which he meant he'd fucking weaponized it. He wanted a natural rhythm and feel to the teenage actors' performances, so he only let them read as much of the script as they needed to do their own scenes. Possibly this was also because some of them would have asked awkward questions about why the script didn't make any sense. The entire weird little hook of the film started off as someone else's in-joke. He was pleased as punch that he'd managed to cast a bunch of former child-stars in nameless roles with no lines, serving as human easter eggs in case someone made it that far into the film and managed to recognize them. Even the story about how the director had discovered the band that did the heavy-lifting in the score was flattened out and dull, a story told by a friend and writing partner now related to us third-hand.
The man was utterly impervious to the audience disengagement which, by the time the credits rolled, was total. He was immune to the sulky glares and bewildered looks he was getting instead of questions. He was eager to start on his next, equally horrible, film. He was up there, having just made and confessed to delighting in a crime against film, and he was living his best goddamned life. A board whose job it was to pick out good independent film had accepted his entry! People came to see his thing! More people would probably bankroll his next project because the last one didn't devolve into a coke-fueled shoot-out! When he looks back on it in a week or two, it's going to be the time he went somewhere because he's a director and people asked him about the creative choices in a movie that he made and people paid to see!
So if that guy gets to do that, without even putting on shoes with laces or a shirt with buttons, there's no reason for you to sit there agonizing over whatever it is you want to make and show people in case it's not good enough.
It's good enough, I promise you. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it's good enough.
*Unfortunately, this time around the indies that were terrible were largely not terrible because of their inexperienced crew or tiny budgets or all the other things that will buff out with time, if everyone keeps working.
