Tag: short

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

World Of Tomorrow

World of Tomorrow (2015; dir. Don Herzfeldt)—It’s always fun to think up off-the-wall year-in-review argument-starters like “The best movie of 2015 is a 16-minute sci-fi animated short starring two stick figures.” It’s even more fun when such assertions turn out to be true.

It’s difficult to express my ever-expanding, ever-deepening love for Herzfeldt’s lovely and melancholy threnody to the future. I can tell you that it compares favorably with the quietly devastating final scenes of Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. I can also tell you that its Klee/Rothko/Chuck Jones imagery reminds me of Herzfeldt’s description of the digital animation process—“Animating this way at first seemed a bit like trying to read a children’s book in a foreign language: it all seemed vaguely familiar somehow, but was sort of weirdly scrambled.” And I can tell you that its main character falls in love with a rock, a fuel pump and an alien.

At the beginning of “World of Tomorrow” a little girl named Emily (Winona Mae) meets her eponymous third-generation adult clone (Julia Pott). After some brief introductory remarks, the synthetic Emily takes her younger self on a tour of the world to come. It’s a world where poor people pay to experience the nightmare of digital consciousness, botched time travel leads to disastrous cosmic mix-ups, and nobody seems to care because “Our more recent history is often just comprised of images of other people watching viewscreens.”

In a brilliant touch, the younger Emily (her clone dubs her “Emily Prime”) is old enough to understand what’s going on, yet far too young to grasp the ominous significance of her future self’s visit. When her clone describes her own birth and says, “Through this process you will hope to live forever,” Emily Prime chirps, “I had lunch today.” When her clone says, “Now is the envy of all the dead,” Emily Prime says, “OK.” And when her clone says, “The advice I give you now is the advice I remember receiving from myself at your age in this moment, so I cannot be certain where it actually originated from,” Emily Prime remains silent. (Read that line again and try to get to the bottom of it; you’d fall silent, too.)

When the cloned Emily starts talking about meteors and saying things like “I am very proud of my sadness because it means I am more alive,” the future—and, as with all great sci-fi, our future—starts to look dark indeed. The movie ends perfectly anyway.

Grade: A+

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Film Features Film/TV

Fresh Skweezed

On the one hand, short films tend to get short shrift. Aside from a few Pixar animated shorts, they are rarely seen in theaters outside of a film festival setting. But on the other hand, thanks to YouTube, short films have never been more popular — even if most of them are cat videos. Distributors are usually reluctant to take on shorts, which makes it remarkable that one of the best Memphis-made short films of the past few years, Fresh Skweezed, is getting an internet release by Music+Arts on December 16th.

The 22-minute film stars Haley Parker as Maggie, the 11-year-old spelling-challenged proprietor of a trailer park lemonade stand. Writer/director G.B. Shannon created the role specifically for Parker after seeing her act in another short film at the 2010 Nashville Film Festival. “She was fantastic,” he recalls. “She just had a small part, but she stole every scene she was in. She had such great command of the screen, and I think at the time they shot it, she was just 8 years old. So I turned to Ryan Parker and said, I’m going to write something for her.”

Haley Parker stars in Fresh Skweezed.

He came up with the concept for what would become Fresh Skweezed while driving to work at Beale Street Studios one morning. “I thought, ‘A crooked lemonade stand! She’s the flim flam man of the neighborhood.'” He wrote the screenplay over Soul Burgers upstairs at Ernestine & Hazel’s.

“When I first read the script, I cried,” says Parker. He is an amazing writer.”

Parker’s portrayal of Maggie, a tough little firecracker who uses her wits to fight off a bully named Cody (Caleb Johnson), is remarkably poised and expressive. Even with a cast of some of the best screen actors in Memphis, including Lindsey Roberts, Billie Worley, Kim Howard, and Shannon himself, she owns the screen. The audience thinks they know exactly what’s going on in her mind, right up until the script pulls the rug out from under them. “When we started casting the other parts, I got worried,” says Shannon, who co-directed the piece with cinematographer Ryan Parker (who is no relation to Haley). “Did we put too much on this little girl? It’s 20 pages long, and she’s in every scene.”

But Shannon was amazed when she came into auditions with a fully realized character. “I had worked on it quite a bit before the audition process rolled around because I didn’t want to let anyone down,” Parker says. “Maggie was a lot like me. She was easy for me to play, and I really had fun with her.”

The script originally called for a suburban setting, but the crew had trouble finding a suitable place that looked good and would allow filming. Then they stumbled upon a trailer park in Millington that had been evacuated during the floods of 2011. “It was like we had our own sound lot,” Shannon says. “Everything was there.”

Filmmakers love to regale each other with stories of onset disaster, but Shannon says “it was one of those magical shoots where nothing went wrong.”

The film was shot on a few consecutive weekends. “I wished it had lasted longer, because we had a really great time on the set,” Parker says.

Editor Eileen Meyer was brought in for the cut, because, Shannon says, “we wanted a female perspective. She added a couple of elements that we never would have thought of.”

It was during the sound mixing and scoring that Ward Archer’s Music+Arts became involved, supplying music by Amy LaVere, Robby Grant, Rick Steff, and Roy Berry. “Because he has these great artists at his disposal, it’s pretty great how it works out,” Shannon says. “Having that here is pretty amazing.”

The film won both jury and audience awards at its Indie Memphis premiere and went on to play in 18 festivals across the country, winning several more accolades including a Best Actress award for Parker at the Newport Beach Film Festival. After its almost two-year festival run was over, Shannon reconnected with Archer at the premiere of Mike McCarthy’s Cigarette Girl, which was Music+Arts’ first film release, and they worked out a deal to distribute Fresh Skweezed on internet streaming video services such as iTunes, Amazon, and VUDU. Shannon says they are enthusiastic about the possibilities: “If he can keep doing this — having a cinematic sound mixing operation and then releasing as well — it will be fantastic.”

Parker, now 15, has acted in several more films and is currently trying her hand at writing. “I am so proud to be a part of Fresh Skweezed. It’s just been an amazing experience all around — the filming, the production, the film festivals have just been amazing.”

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Film Features Film/TV

Ben Siler: Collected Short Films

“I would like to give you an Easy Riders, Raging Bulls story, something involving violence or drugs,” filmmaker Ben Siler says, referring to Peter Biskind’s infamous book about the wild times of 1970s Hollywood. “But that hasn’t really happened.” Without million dollar budgets and the attendant debauchery, Siler has been working steadily for the past decade on a series of experimental short films and music videos that have earned him a reputation among the Memphis film community as a unique talent.

Katherine Dohan in Ben Siler’s short film ‘Prom Queen’.

“I’ve really respected and been inspired by his work for a long time,” says Brett Hanover, a fellow Memphis filmmaker who assembled and released the best of Siler’s work on a new DVD. “He’s a really dedicated artist, but he’s been so focused on producing his films that they just haven’t been seen. Even when they did screen at film festivals, they were so odd that they kind of got lost in the shuffle. I think they’re much more along the lines of video art, but they’re getting seen by the film community, not by the arts community.”

Siler and Hanover both got their start as filmmakers at the Memphis Digital Co-Op, a film collective founded in 2001 by Morgan Jon Fox and Brandon Hutchinson. At a time when digital video promised to democratize the art of filmmaking, this group of video rebels taught each other to shoot, act, and edit and create new video languages. “The Media Co-Op was a big deal to me,” Siler says. “It was a place where I could show my work, and people responded to it.”

Hanover remembers the early days of the Co-Op as heady and wildly ambitious: “There was a lot of experimentation going on. People kind of found their niche and went into different directions.”

Siler often uses onscreen text to comment on his images.

But Siler, it seemed, was good at everything. He could write, act, shoot, and especially edit. One of his earliest works was “Prom Queen” starring Katherine Dohan, who would later go on to co-direct the award-winning What I Love About Concrete. “It’s one of my favorite Memphis films,” Hanover says. “It’s one of my favorite films, period. ‘Prom Queen’ is about adolescence, but it’s also [about] gender and sexuality and thinking about his own relationship to masculinity. He writes female characters really well. He puts himself in those characters, and draws from his own experience in a way that is very empathetic and thoughtful.”

Siler recalls that “Katherine Dohan was up for anything. I based a lot of that movie on my own history. I’m very proud that it ran on the Library Channel, and it made an impression on a bunch of people.”

Ben Siler in ‘New Moon In The Morning’.

As a performer, Siler is as fearless and deadpan as Buster Keaton. He begins “Latent” tied to a chair rehearsing a scene with actress Melissa Walker where she repeatedly slaps him in the face. “It’s intense,” says Hanover. “Just as a performer, he is incredible. It’s unbelievable how much he’s willing to make himself vulnerable.”

Siler says the deceptive simplicity of his films are the result of the biggest lesson he learned at the Co-Op. “Everyone is in the mindset of the Hollywood blockbuster, but we should be thinking of what we can do on the level where we’re at now and where we might always be.”

Katherine Dohan in ‘Prom Queen’

His music videos, four of which are collected on the DVD, are like editing master classes. For Snowglobe’s “Nothing I Can Do,” he stitches together scenes showing dozens of actors and non-actors doing ordinary things like pumping gas or drinking a beer, until the rush of images becomes overwhelming. “He’s playing with the medium of video, pushing the limits of what we can understand,” says Hanover. “He uses text and video to make us free-associate. It’s poetic. There’s a moment at the end of ‘Fantasy’ when Ben asks his partner, ‘Could you do something specific and small by which I’ll remember this moment for decades?’ She slowly twirls her hair, which may or may not be a response to the question. This is a central tension in Ben’s work — do we direct our lives or do we just assemble meaning from things that are specific and small?”

Siler says he is grateful that these films are getting a proper release.”There’s a lot of personal history in them. I’m happy for people to see the work,” he says. “It kind of shows that anybody can do it.”

Ben Siler: Collected Short Films (DVD) Available at Black Lodge Video or at BrettHanover.com/ben