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Reviews
Spinnin' (2007)
Inept
I saw this film in a festival and I have to say it was one of the most annoying films I have seen for a while, and I am including student works which I see on a regular basis.
Why? For a start, the subtitles were all over the shop. Sometimes in the widescreen black, sometimes on the picture itself. Sometimes the spelling was incorrect, sometimes it was obviously all a bit hard and the subtitles were just not there at all. The projectionist was forced to show the film quite far off centre vertically so that some of them could be read at all.
The music choice was terrible, and childishly handled. No fades, no sound bridging, just starts and stops. In the scene where the young girl dances for the young boy at the party she was obviously dancing to a completely different piece of music. He could of at least chosen something with a similar beat and feel. In some dance sections you could hear the director calling out the moves to the cast.
The script was awful. He seemed to think that if you throw in a couple of weird moments, it would make the film enigmatic. In fact, it was just annoying and pointless.
As an editor, I was driven to actually groan a couple of times at the disastrous unmotivated editing.
I could go on. There was plenty wrong with this film, but at about the three quarter mark I realised that it must have a redeeming last two minutes, which has made it popular at festivals, and I wasn't willing to let something like that make me forgive the previous 108 minutes of crap. So I left.
Perhaps if the guy who wrote it hadn't also produced, directed, cast, shot, recorded the sound and edited it, someone on the crew could have pointed out his problems.
So I'm calling it unmitigated rubbish. And the reason I'm so angry about it is that I'm sick of the fact that any film that discusses AIDS or gay parenting seems to be instantly forgiven all its technical disasters. I don't think it's good enough. Our stories deserve better.