Many thanks to Joe R for covering for me on last week's offering. Also, many additional thanks to my sister for having a birthday that fell on a Tuesday, so that I had an excuse to take a break from this preposterous show. So! Surprisingly, the show doesn't screw around in introducing the five directors that will be competing against each other tonight. Of course, anyone who's been watching would know that these are the only contestants left for this round, but I still expected the show to try to manufacture some "suspense" anyway. The credits have been pared down again (to...fourteen, oh my God are they kidding here?) and then there's a rewind of last week, which is of course irrelevant since we won't be losing anyone until the end of the hour. Except no! Adrianna boots Marty not ten minutes in, which is both unexpected and well-deserved. Carrie gives him a nicer and more practically useful sendoff than is warranted, and then Wes Craven shows up as the guest judge (okay, I'm kind of psyched about this one) and sees these offerings:
Will: Glass Eye, about a guy who loses his glass eye, only to realize that he can see life in a whole new way. Will tells us that his wife was the producer, production designer, and wrote the vocals for the song. Also, Will's dog is one of the main actors, prompting this line: "You can pretty much do anything you want in this world with a little bit of peanut butter and a lot of time." Given that quote in conjunction with the dog, I'd think that Will's short is going to be the onscreen version of a tasteless urban legend, except this isn't Showtime and he isn't Angela. Will tells us that he has a "one in thirteen chance" of getting a development deal, and not only is he insanely bugging me with the inane compulsory odds-mentioning, but his math is also suspect, given that eight people are a round ahead of him, and also that this show is surely so soon to be canceled. Anyway, over the strains of Will's wife singing Rigoletto, this philatelist puts in his glass eye, but then inadvertently knocks it out in swatting an insect on his face. While trying to retrieve the eye, he discovers that by covering the socket, he can see in color, whereas he previously could only see in black and white. Then wacky hijinks ensue when his dog steals the eye and swallows it, and he waits for the dog to crap it out. A reasonably promising start went completely off the rails, there, as the color thing became completely irrelevant and gave way to a poop joke. Stupid.
Carrie gently tries to suggest that some dialogue might help Will time. Wes liked it but suggests that seeing through the eye should have been the color version, which makes sense but wouldn't have saved the story for me. Wes is being specifically constructive, though, which is nice. Garry obliquely mentions his sister Penny, which is a change from his typical explicit "my sister Penny," and makes no sense, as usual. Also, Wes Craven won't even look at Adrianna, so his stock is continuing to rise.
Jason: Blood Born, about a troubled kid who discovers that he has a miraculous gift. He says he's a Christian guy, which is hilarious, given that the protagonist of his last short got cast out of paradise for uttering a pithy catchphrase. Even the Old Testament and 7th Heaven were more forgiving. Also, Jason has a kid. Anyway, in his film, this guy goes to see a doctor, but the attending nurse tells him he's not on the appointment list. We then get a flashback presumably explaining why he's there, only the sound quality therein is so horrible as to be completely indecipherable, at least for me, although it does seem that the guy is into drugs. Back in the present, he goes to the bathroom and looks all tortured, and then we see he's in a blood bank. Turns out this guy, "Brandon," has been giving blood for a while, and every person who's received his blood has been mysteriously healed of illness. Then, as the doctor's voice-over tells him that he's a gift from God, outside the hospital, some guy drives by and pulls a gun and points it at him, and we don't see it, but we're meant to think Brandon gets killed. I guess the guy was involved with the drugs somehow, but there was still no character development, complete contrivance, and a message, if you can call it that, that's more depressing than northern Scandinavia in winter. Of course, the unintentional hilarity is that it was probably the illegal pills in the guy's blood that cured all those people. Do you think big pharma knows about this?
Carrie's confused by Jason's claim that he doesn't like to use non-Christian things in his films like drugs and violence, given, you know, all the drugs and violence. She does give him the benefit of the doubt that there was an intended moral, but says it wasn't clear. Wes agrees, and calls out the shoddy sound as well, although he thinks it was an intended effect, whereas I thought it was just crappy production. Garry hated it but says it was nice filmmaking, and that's half right, which at least is good for him.
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Zach: Sunshine Girl, about a girl who's scared of the dark. Well, that sounds okay, but if there's a van involved at any point, I'm crying foul. So this girl likes sunshine so much that she reaches out to the sky...and plucks out the sun. She has fun playing with it at first, but realizes that she's thrown the world into chaos, so she returns it to the sky. It's overblown as far as the music and cinematography go, and could also have been much shorter, but it's charmingly simple, and by far the best (really, the only) story so far, and even with the sun-grabbing, it's a departure from the effects-heavy film we last saw from him. Nice job, Zach!
Carrie echoes the point about its being simple, and also says she could have done without the saccharine music, but that she quite liked it. Wes gives kudos as well, although he does point out that the props were confusing and didn't convey the girl's fear of the dark. This Wes Craven isn't missing a trick, although I suppose it's only fair to note that he's probably more attentive to the things that make fear of the dark realistic than the layman. Garry babbles agreement of that last point and name-checks himself in regard to Beaches. At this rate, his project is going to be a revival of The Gong Show. As a contestant.
Mateen: Lost. His films are about real people. Sure, okay. A real person is on a real phone, talking to a real recording. Then he's with a real girl, who apparently used to be his girlfriend, and saw him on TV or something, but she really disappeared because she really needed to "check in with me." Also, she's really married to someone else. It's a really trite-ass conversation. Why is she even there? Why did she really call him? Awful.
Carrie says she wishes more happened, which is a nice way of saying nothing happened, and also mentions that the tight camera angles were soapy, which is true. Wes agrees with me in pointing out that the girl initiated the meeting but did nothing, but then still says he liked it. Eh. Garry says he got it, saying that the girl wanted to tell him how he worked too hard and she wanted to be #1, which he might have known from HER HAVING SAID SO IN THE PAST AND ALSO HER LEAVING. Totally ridiculous. I mean, I can't completely castigate aspiring directors for not being able to write, but it's just another thing that's making this show stupid.
Jessica: The Orchard, which is a horror film "from a tree's perspective." A guy is checking out trees in an orchard, and starts sawing a branch off of one of them. We then get a green-filtered shot of what's supposed to be the tree's point of view, with a bunch of quick, creepy jump cuts. The guy seems to sense something weird, and stops with the hacksaw for a minute, which sends us back to the tree's perspective, with more green filter and quick cuts all over the place, along with creepy whispering that's ostensibly supposed to be the trees' conversation. As the sun grows dim, the guy pulls down a branch, and then he turns to go, and that's it. I...think I get what she was trying to do -- what seems like an everyday task to a man could be scary for a tree -- but what she did didn't amount to horror, rather commentary. I think the idea could be worked with, though.
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However, horror does get served as Carrie rips the film to shreds, and I hated Jessica's first film, but I don't think this is quite deserved. The other judges hated it too, but if I'm being honest, I liked it better that Jason's or even Mateen's. At least the tree didn't drone on about how the hacksaw guy worked too hard, you know?
The judges all liked Zach's movie best, so I guess there's some agreement here. So week, they'll be showing six "original comedies," which means half the field will be competing, and I can only hope they'll up the number of people taking the Greyhound home. Well, I really hope that it's canceled and I won't have to see it, but I'm sure that's too much to ask for. Or is it, Wes Craven?
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