Short stories

Interesting films, but I wouldn’t really call them great.  The acting isn’t the best, production is done with average gear, and there didn’t seem to be a budget.  I lived with a film festival movie screener last year, so this just brought back memories of bad films.

I started off with Soldiers.  First off all, the film uses an Explosions in the Sky song, which is cool, but it is the same song everybody else uses in their own personal films.  It is such an overplayed song.  And I don’t think it fit well into the scene.  But I understand the emotion they were trying to convey with the instrumental music.  As far as the shots, I liked the one where the soldier pushes the main actor towards the grieving mother.  There were a lot of over-the-shoulder shots, which makes the audience feel as if they are actually in the scene.  I also liked the shots from the mother’s general point of view.  You can see the other soldier in the background and he never says anything, but you know that he wants to tell the main actor that the mother can’t see them.  In the end, I guess it was a touching film, but it just felt amateur.

Roof was my second film.  Roof utilized a lot close-ups when actors were speaking, which puts the audience right in the moment/ right in the faces of the action.  The first minute made me feel really tense and anxious, which I believe to be attributed to the close-up shots.  You also don’t get to see who the actor is talking to, which was another nice touch.  I forgot to mention, but the film’s final product is in black and white, which adds more emotion to the piece.  It really makes you pay attention the details in the actors’ faces since there isn’t much other detail in the film.  The music at the end was also a nice touch.  It made the scene feel a lot more safe, even though there was a sense of doom approaching.