Just a headstart for those who haven’t heard of this movie, visit the website. More about how to watch the movie here. Also, this movie is not to be confused with A Four Letter Word.
How does one review an Independent film? Amongst the ones that I have seen before, Before The Devil Knows Your Dead and Once are the most prominent ones. Mind you independent doesn’t necessarily mean a finished good with seething amateurish features; it is purely a qualification on the production part of the business. BTDKYD looked like any other studio production, where as in Once, one could see the so called independent flavour. That Four Letter Word is somewhere near halfway on the path to getting to Once.
The story involves a bunch of six friends, one of whom wants to make a movie, for amongst many other reasons, impressing a girl. Since there are six of them, there are a lot of threads running around and I don’t want to give the movie away. But the main theme is the battle between clarity and indecision. Clarity that we seek to have in our life in the manner of having a plan and indecision that we always seem to have irrespective of having a plan to execute or not. At the end all the characters seem to overcome this confusion and take seemingly meaningful steps forward at decisive junctures of their life. And of course, the movie making guy gets his girl after all, with a little help of a mad guest star. The BGM filled in very well, especially the final few minutes. The title credits and the accompanying rap song were amusing. The acting, apart from Cary Edwards', seemed a bit choppy. It had the action-take-cut feel to it, didn’t seem natural for much of the time.
One major issue that I had was the ending and it is something I felt the same with Welcome to Sajjanpur. Why do we need happy endings? Why the scrummy final 1minute prologue type thingy to tie loose ends? I would have certainly preferred to see the climax as it had ended in reality, but then again one would say that after all films are just another way of escaping the reality.
All in all it was an okay movie on the face of it, but considering the efforts of the people involved, in spite of their lack of experience in actual movie making, its worth a watch. And since God is the script-writer for this movie, He has subsidized it for us to watch it for free.
Last week I became a member of The Little Theater. It screens only independent and foreign films. It has 5 screens( I saw 5 ) each one characteristically , little. No legroom at all. But the decor of each screen was remarkable( though Spot Cafe is another league altogether). Each of the walls had these vintage posters, with archaic font-types, which I felt was very amusing( Don’t ask how. Not all visual pleasures are traceable down to logic ). I look forward to watching many more movies at this theater as, part of the deal with the membership being able to watch a dozen movies for free. Effectively I shall be watching those movies for a highly subsidized rate.
Now to the movie. Plot - Domino Effect. One detail goes wrong in a plan that is not well thought out and the rest of the movie depicts how that affects a family. One scene I liked in particular was the father - son talk after the mother’s death. The elder son feels that he had always gotten to see the rough side of things and that his father always favored his brother. The father feels that he should have been more considerate to his son. The dialogue that follows and the slap that ends it, that for me was the defining moment of the film. Much of the movie shows the emotional support systems of the two brothers , which also fall apart eventually. There aren’t any comic scenes in this heavy drama bar one, wherein the wife/girl friend decides to leave him , but has to ask him money to go to her mothers. Excessive use of firearms ( I am not comparing with action flicks ) was one thing that was hard to digest, but the ending I felt was appropriate. The father has his revenge, after his final words to his son.
It was made out to look like a very dark film with the plot and the intentions of every character involved, but I felt that it was coldly natural of everyone involved to have behaved the way they did. The best part of the film was the camera work, where in zooms were extremely slow and letting the scene run into silence for excruciatingly long periods which kind of lets you soak in the drama.
I keep getting this from people - " That movie made me think a lot". The same was happening with me once I came out of Little. About what, I do not know even now. May be I was brooding over the following lines.
“May you have food and raiment, a soft pillow for you’re head;
May you be 40 years in heaven, before the devil knows you’re dead."