I saw this film today at Frameline in San Francisco. I grew up in Tennessee and my grandfather was a Baptist preacher, but unless you were a fundamentalist/devout churchgoer I doubt you will get moved by anything in this film.
I have a new theory that my enjoyment of a film shown at Frameline is inversely proportional to how much the director in their introduction compliments the audience on how great a city San Francisco is. If a film is good it needs no introduction and they should be done away with at festivals so there is more time for Q & A.
The camera/lens combo they usually used had a shallow depth of field and what should have been in focus was either often not in focus and or the focus puller was slow to focus. Often they focused on a different actor than I wanted to focus on at the time. Frustrating. This footage should all be scraped and they should start over. Should have just used a different lens with deep depth of field if they were not skilled enough to do it right. They were trying to be too artistic but did not know what they were doing.
The casting was terrible and the acting was almost always very bad too. There were only 2 or 3 actors that were any good. There were way too many characters in the film, and it made no sense to do that with a small budget. I could not keep up with who was who and did not even care to. The congregation was the most diverse one imaginable for the gay characters to be so closeted. They did not look like people who would be married to each other. I could not figure out what the message was any way the lead who is questioning his attraction to men was still making out with is wife, drunk or not. I had no empathy for these characters. They were not believable in my world. You don't go off to NYC form South Carolina as a youth and come back unchanged. This film had a multitude drawn out scenes of unimportant events that 99.999999% of editors would have cut out because they did not advance the storyline. the 91 minutes seemed more like three hours. I kept looking for the progress bar at the bottom of the screen (like on Youtube) hoping to see that it was almost over.
Apparently the budget for this film was no budget and they could not only not afford lights but could not afford a bounce card either. Looks terrible. Under lit not by choice apparently but because they didn't know, despite obviously shooting it in digital. I have never seen outdoor vegetation rendered in such unrealistic looking colors. I doubt they had a budget for color correction and boy did they need it. This film looked like they messed up the camera settings on everything they shot. Overexposed shots and underexposed shots were the norm. The audio is hard to understand cause it was not miked properly and they did not de-ess the voices so be prepared for very harsh on the ears audio. Poorly edited, poorly shot. The director was one of the lead actors and he should stick to acting. Film-making involves a completely different and huge set of skills and he does not have any of them except maybe, maybe a little promise in scriptwriting, but he needs to let someone else have final cut. Why is it everybody thinks they are a filmmaker just like everybody thinks they are an architect.
Everyone I talked to about this film afterwards (all women) thought it was as painfully slow as I did. The audience I was in had several of those people that will laugh at anything, ugh, which made it all the more unbearable. Simpletons love this film. Everything was so predictable except the ending which was non-existent.
I have a new theory that my enjoyment of a film shown at Frameline is inversely proportional to how much the director in their introduction compliments the audience on how great a city San Francisco is. If a film is good it needs no introduction and they should be done away with at festivals so there is more time for Q & A.
The camera/lens combo they usually used had a shallow depth of field and what should have been in focus was either often not in focus and or the focus puller was slow to focus. Often they focused on a different actor than I wanted to focus on at the time. Frustrating. This footage should all be scraped and they should start over. Should have just used a different lens with deep depth of field if they were not skilled enough to do it right. They were trying to be too artistic but did not know what they were doing.
The casting was terrible and the acting was almost always very bad too. There were only 2 or 3 actors that were any good. There were way too many characters in the film, and it made no sense to do that with a small budget. I could not keep up with who was who and did not even care to. The congregation was the most diverse one imaginable for the gay characters to be so closeted. They did not look like people who would be married to each other. I could not figure out what the message was any way the lead who is questioning his attraction to men was still making out with is wife, drunk or not. I had no empathy for these characters. They were not believable in my world. You don't go off to NYC form South Carolina as a youth and come back unchanged. This film had a multitude drawn out scenes of unimportant events that 99.999999% of editors would have cut out because they did not advance the storyline. the 91 minutes seemed more like three hours. I kept looking for the progress bar at the bottom of the screen (like on Youtube) hoping to see that it was almost over.
Apparently the budget for this film was no budget and they could not only not afford lights but could not afford a bounce card either. Looks terrible. Under lit not by choice apparently but because they didn't know, despite obviously shooting it in digital. I have never seen outdoor vegetation rendered in such unrealistic looking colors. I doubt they had a budget for color correction and boy did they need it. This film looked like they messed up the camera settings on everything they shot. Overexposed shots and underexposed shots were the norm. The audio is hard to understand cause it was not miked properly and they did not de-ess the voices so be prepared for very harsh on the ears audio. Poorly edited, poorly shot. The director was one of the lead actors and he should stick to acting. Film-making involves a completely different and huge set of skills and he does not have any of them except maybe, maybe a little promise in scriptwriting, but he needs to let someone else have final cut. Why is it everybody thinks they are a filmmaker just like everybody thinks they are an architect.
Everyone I talked to about this film afterwards (all women) thought it was as painfully slow as I did. The audience I was in had several of those people that will laugh at anything, ugh, which made it all the more unbearable. Simpletons love this film. Everything was so predictable except the ending which was non-existent.