Movie Review - That Four Letter Word

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.