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Reviews
The Graves (2009)
The 80's called, they want this movie back.
Let's start at the beginning. After the beautiful co-stars endorse the director/writer's real life comic book, twice, we are treated to a screen hogging banner advertising a website. Needless to say, the credibility deficit was pretty humongous at this point. What follows is not only cliché hack and slash, it's old cliché. Let me guess: the writer/director has a mullet?
Seriously, if you can get around the obnoxious self promotion and style fax paux, you still won't find much of anything redeeming. The characters seem lumbersome and unmotivated, probably because they are, and the edit does little to take the edge off some seriously dry performances. Normally 'big character' actors like Todd and Mosely seem to waiting for direction through most of their scenes.
Autumn (2009)
Why The Hate?
If this movie had come out in the day of Evil Dead, I'm willing to bet a lot of horror fans would have forgiven its obviously substandard technical aspects. The almost uniform loathing of this little indie is no doubt a sign of how low a tolerance audiences have for truly independent films. Independent does not mean pre-sold to lionsgate, who agreed to fund a huge share of the budget therefore allowing the filmmakers to hire experienced DPs to shoot on brandy new Oakley Red packages. No, no. Often, this is what independent looks like, requiring us viewers to look beyond the technical and into the heart of the story.
On that note, Autumn has an interesting approach to the Zombie genre in that the zombies start out very benign and not much of a threat at all, becoming more and more of a danger as the movie marches on.
The "Live together or die alone" theme isn't so awfully new to this genre, but Autumn carries it well. Aside from the threesome we spend most of our screen-time with, the other characters quickly become foot-notes. It's almost jarring when they show up again just to illustrate that they ultimately died horribly. It made me wish the screenwriter had employed the good sense to trimming those characters and devote more time to fleshing out the core.
For me, that was where the true failings of Autumn came into focus. There was almost enough character development to elevate the movie above typical entries into the zombie genre, but not quite. It's clear that there is a great story with some really interesting character work laying beneath the veneer, but ultimately the A.D.D. inspired beat choices win out.
Still, I would watch Autumn if zombie flicks are your thing. There are enough twangs of originality to make it worthwhile.
Roman (2006)
Disappointing
Roman would have made an excellent short film, if it was made outside of Hollywood, by people who knew nothing about film. Oh, wait, did I say film? I meant video. Strangely there is no attempt to escape the camcorder look and scratchy open mic sound. The compression on the incidental sound effects (cars passing, doors closing, etc.) has such an irritating level of attack... I mean... yuck. The lack of attention to technical details is just atrocious. The lighting is two-dimensional, the blocking is repetitive and is all angled either too low or too high.
In the sense of story, there is potential. You don't, unfortunately, get the sense that Roman is time bomb where 'the girl' is concerned, which is unfortunate. His big mistake with the girl really has no rhyme or reason. I mean this was shot on video folks, what was stopping you from getting enough takes to reach an appropriate level of intensity. Even Kristin Bell was operating well below her A-Game in this pivotal scene.