48 hour film project

[magid]

Last week I went to one of the screenings of the results of the Boston 48 Hour Film Project. The way it works: 7 P.M. Friday, the teams are given a character, a prop, a line of dialogue, and a genre. They have until 7 P.M. Sunday to write, direct, edit, etc., and deliver a short movie (usually 4–8 minutes). At the screening later that week or next, there's a ballot listing all movies shown in that time slot, and the only valid votes are ones with exactly three movies chosen.

The common elements were:
Character: Wilma or Winston Weatherbee, Gardener
Prop: a scale
Line of Dialogue: "You win some, you lose some."

And the genre varied by team.

There were twelve movies screened together, not all of which made the 48-hour deadline (though my impression is that they weren't far off, either). Although I got rather tired hearing the one line of dialogue time after time, it was interesting to see how a scale was incorporated into each (and that ranged from bathroom and kitchen scales to balance scales, even a dragon scale).

• The Final Performance of Felix Barrows (comedy; Danny Glover's SAAF Brigade Squad) had the machinations of a dinner theater group trying to save their building from developers, mostly by murdering them, in over the top ways. The whole thing was rather over the top.
  
• The Bloody Tale of the Bathroom Scale (horror; Lightning Strikes) had a gentleman and his companion slowly killing off their money-hungry relations by bashing them with a bathroom scale, except for the goth girl niece, who didn't care that he was a vampire. This didn't quite come together for me.
  
• Totally Forked (sci fi; Extraneous Noise) included news reports, man-on-the-street interviews, Skype-like chat, and more, to tell the tale of aliens coming to take over our planet. Bombing it would kill the planet, so they decided to take all the forks away to starve us out. Excellent use of dog (with silly voice) for the alien. Well thought-out, very silly.
  
• A Strange Red (thriller/suspense; Covered in Bees!) had a not-quite-murder-mystery, with a bar denizen found out cold after a night of drinking. Is he dead? Who did it? Included a belly dancer, and a synesthete bartender smelling red. Also, the only use of fast-forward.
  
• The Perfect Daisy (fantasy; Collective Subconscious Productions) was strange. Through a greenhouse door to another world, with strange quests, a dragon scale, and a daisy fed the wrong thing, turning it into a huge carnivorous being. It felt just a bit derivative, though the use of a separate background was unique.
  
• Best Slice in Town (road movie; Godina) was... something. It was sort of about a pizza delivery going strange, with a reenactment of the Tortoise and the Hare in the middle (I have no idea why). I see no need to ever see another movie in its genre, which was "pizza-thong movie."
  
• Pitch and Tone (silent film; Rose & Power) followed a deaf woman as she went to work at a pawnbroker's, and back to her apartment, where her landlady was always gardening malevolently. Until she started killing the tenants.
  
• The Redemption (heist; Banded Light Pictures) was about a cop finally catching a thief, with flashbacks to previous jobs. It was intense, but the plot didn't quite go anywhere. There needed to be something else at the end, though I'm not sure what.
  
• Dig (romance: yeah kinda productions) showed a gardener at a rich woman's upscale house in the woods, who was in love with her employer. Though she was nice to him, she saw only those of her social class, despite their jack-assery. There was a lot shown with minimal dialogue, in ways that impressed me.
  
• Divide by Zero (time travel/doppelganger; The Syndicate) was a black and white (they got the wrong film) movie of a guy discovering a murdered body... that's himself. Nothing too deep about the problems of time travel, just a quiet loop.
  
• Two-Ply (film noir; Barbarillicus Productions) was a fabulous hard-boiled detective flick with the detective investigating who stole his two-ply toilet paper. Incredible amounts of cleverly done bathroom humor to fit the theme.
  
• Modern Proposal (film de femme [no clue why this isn't "chick flick"]; Girl Next Door Productions) showed a woman whose boyfriend took her out for a fancy date, but didn't pop the question as expected. She decides to ask him herself, and enlists her best gay friend to help her figure out the details (showing each scenario and how it fails). Luckily, the boyfriend realizes what he'd omitted before she had to commit to any of them.