Friday, November 21, 2008

The 27 Club? More like the snoresville club.

I can’t remember if we were supposed to write one or two blogs on cucalorus, or just talk about two films. Since I already discussed two in the last blog, I’ll just talk about one more. Sound good? That’s what I thought. Anyways, after seeing two films on friday, I decided to see a third one that night because people just wouldn’t shut up about it. Starting a few weeks before cucalorus up until friday night, the buzz on The 27 Club was noteworthy. I decided to get a ticket, and started to get really pumped on the idea of the film. I had been really sick (bedridden sick) on wednesday and thursday, so after that I kind of loaded up on films for the rest of the festival. So I get my ticket, convince about five other people (all but one who were not film majors) to attend this movie and delay any plans of going out until 11:30 when the film was over. I said, oh I think it’ll be great, I explained how stoked everyone is on Erica Dunton, how the film has been well-received thus far, so I wanted to check out her work. Well let me tell you, I was sorely disappointed.

         I mean, the film was okay, but was nothing to anticipate. I thought the story line was contrived, and flatlined for most of the film. Sure it had its moments, like the story line between the rock star’s driver and the runaway girl, which was cute and fun, but had no real ending. As for the main plot line of the film, I get what she was trying to do, but I think it was a bust. There wasn't even any talk of the 27 club so I thought that was an upsetting title, and I think she just used it to get people into seats. The rock star barely had any dialogue the entire film, didn’t open up to anybody or show any major step towards recovery until the last 10 min of the film when he met some homeless guy and suddenly changed. He explained at that time that he had all these drugs, but hadn’t taken anything for the five days he went on this trip. However, the entire film, there were shots of him sitting in his hotel room staring at the drugs and picking up bottle of pills and coke and what not. The way they shot it made me and everyone else I talked to think he was doing the drugs the whole time, but apparently we find out in the end that he didn’t do anything. He also seemed strung out the entire time, but I guess it was supposed to be him going through withdrawal. I felt like everything to do with the film was like that. It made sense in the end, when it should have been shot differently to show it earlier in the film. There was also no real ending. It was every abrupt and lacked any sort of satisfying conclusion. The guy sings with a choir, goes to his best friend’s funeral (which they don’t show hardly any footage and no dialogue if I recall correctly), flies the choir somewhere (I guess the funeral to sing, but I they were already in new york where I thought his funeral was so I don’t know where they were supposed to be flying to), and that was it. Fin. I just think it was a bit amateur as far as filmmaking goes, and had I been making the movie, I would not have released it the way it was.

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