I watched the trilogy again now that I'm advertising it. Overall, it's quite good, but there's enough flaws in each film to drag it below the 4-5/5 range. I'd give it a 3.5/5, though it's almost a 4/5.
Other people might like it more than me, but it's definitely not an embarrassment.
For a set of first features, it's very accomplished. It's a good mix of DIY indie and a bunch of older styles (like the cel painting or the orchestral music).
If you'd never seen a musical, and had no idea who Stephen Sondheim was, I think that the film would still work well. It's highly aware of film technique, but the techniques are mostly in service of the story.
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The music is really good, and it feels like a 21st Century piece that's in dialogue with the past, the present and the future.
Structurally, it works very well. As a piece of queer cinema, it's very understated, though it's still explicit about sex. Something that gay teenagers could watch and feel like it's adult, while also not being condescending to them.
M rating imo. PG-13 in the States? - So, what are the flaws? Some shonky camera operating in the films. A sprinkling, but enough that it's a noticeable flaw. If It Were Real and a few of the Some Kind of Love monologues are ungainly compared to the groundbreaking stuff that we did. Despite the editing being something that's totally fresh and new, there are definitely some shots where we didn't have enough coverage. That's why shots often linger in Portrait of a Knight, and why there's a few cheaply done angles in Some Kind of Love. I'd also say that These Words Are Meant For Someone is the most confident of those films, despite being the arty middle feature. To be fair, it was made in 2022 from footage that we'd shot in 2017, so I was much more experienced by that point. I had literally thousands of Deep Style AI images to choose from in These Words Are Meant For Someone, so it wasn't hard to find some that matched Manny's poems. I have to admit, though, that I wasn't aware that the image for Time would match up so closely to that poem: that's one of my trademark subconscious inspirations. Portrait of a Knight and Some Kind of Love both take around 5 minutes to get interesting. That's perfectly fine: the rule of thumb in movies is that one has about 20 minutes to make the audience invest in the story. Ideally, one sets up a mood, then there's an inciting incident, and that's pretty much what we did.
It's not as awesome as a film that's compelling from start to finish, though. Formally, these fragmentary vignettes and 'acts' are quite strikingly new - though it's actually just a 1940's technique - and something that I guess comes from being a millenial and growing up with short viral videos.
To contrast, Damien Chazelle is a firm believer that the opening of a movie should really grab people, and that's why Whiplash opens with that sizzle reel thing. I watched a commentary he made of that for the NY Times. I like his films, but I'll point out that La La Land was actually shooting when we were shooting Portrait of a Knight. We were comparing ourselves to it, but were fairly confident that we'd made better story decisions after we saw it. Having real singers and actors, rather than movie stars, helped us as well. Emma Stone's an alright singer, but Hannah's definitely got more chops. Style-wise, I'd say being a New Zealander is why my stuff has a more detached quality, despite the stirring and romantic music. Some Kind of Love is totally tactile, however, and that's Manny's thing: his films are always tactile. As for my future: well, the masala film is coming along, but I'm quite keen to dip my toes into horror and sci-fi with the short films that I've been writing. Dave Roil is talking about more fashion films, so that might happen, and I've got music videos that I'd like to do.
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