Here Lies Joe and Digital Edition
Review by Paul Preston
Welcome to Today I Watched…, a series of posts documenting my new challenge – watch a movie a day for the rest of my life. Keep coming back to TheMovieGuys.net to find out what I watch each day…and get my take on it.
When I see a movie that’s a new release in theaters or for home viewing, I’ll give it a proper review in the “Reviews”, otherwise, I’ll write about it here.
April 20, 2017 – The Fate of the Furious – catch the review of the eighth go-round for Vin Diesel & Company at the REVIEWS category of TheMovieGuys.net.
April 22, 2017 – Here Lies Joe
A solid short film effort from director Mark Battle. Here’s one of the first shorts I’ve seen since starting he movie-a-day blog that nails all technical elements to a T. The sharp and consistent cinematography, the pacing, the lived-in locations, all work. Here Lies Joe is about a suicidal man who attends a support group and meets Z, a free-spirit young woman. Z comes across sarcastic, but is she really suicidal? Spending a day together reveals a lot, and Battle shows us much of what’s uncovered, as opposed to spelling things out in an over-written script. Dean Temple and Andi Morrow give authentic performances as Morrow has a Harold and Maude or Joe Vs. The Volcano effect on Temple. This is a complicated and worthwhile adventure to take with two interesting characters.
April 23, 2017 – Digital Edition
Well, here’s an interesting movie. Digital Edition is a documentary account of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution moving its newspaper format from the daily print edition to just what the title suggests. It’s most interesting because the change involves journalists that have been associated with the Journal-Constitution for decades. You often think of the newest technology being only in the hands of Millenials, but Digital Edition tracks the move to the web through the eyes of young upstarts and baby boomers. It’s going to help your experience if you know nothing about the internet’s various modes of getting you news (from websites to social media), because the film will break each of them down, so if you already know Instagram, you’ll get to know it again.
The testimonials with Journal-Constitution staff are informative, but you know that thing where they’ll shoot testimonials with two cameras? The second camera here is a direct profile, which is odd, and for a short that focuses on getting with the times, the subjects are wearing microphones with giant windscreens on them as if it was the 1970s. Again, odd. But none of this really effects the message, that you’re never on auto-pilot in the news business and to resist change is to die. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is hardly #FakeNews.
Digital Edition from James Kicklighter on Vimeo.
