Alones
Reviews 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 on demand, I’ll give it a proper review in the “Reviews” or “Home Viewing”, otherwise, I’ll write about it here.
July 1, 2017 – Alone
Still trying to take in all the shorts on YouTube called Alone…
I think there is one line of dialogue in this short film, so why can’t the actor wear a microphone? Or have one over his head? This is another short film that has an excellent camera, but for the love of all that is holy – let’s focus on audio, please. I mean, the guy had ONE line.
That being said, this film starts out with one guy shooting another guy and then who the hell knows what happens? The filmmakers are proud that the whole damn thing is up for interpretation. So I give them points for that ‘cause I was curious as to what was going to happen, and then just as curious to determine what did happen. Since the short was under three minutes, this frustrated me less than sixteen hours of David Lynch not letting me in on anything that’s going on.
The filmmakers have succeeded in getting a lot of talk about the plot in the YouTube comments, combined with the usual people plugging their own YouTube pages and, my favorite, one guy asking if the actors were paid in candy. Nailed it – the actors playing soldiers and tough guys in this movie are kids, knocking out all credibility. With that, also nailing it is the person in these comments who called this a video. It’s just that. A video with kids in it, surrounded by tons of other videos on YouTube, so don’t get fooled by the too-oft-thrown-around phrase “Short Film”.
Here it is. You tell me what happened:
July 2, 2017 – Alone
Here’s another Alone that starts out with someone walking (see picture above). I swear, these Alone movies love it when there’s someone walking – down a hallway, across a field, down a street, and the main character in this Alone does all three! That’s because he’s depressed. This isn’t “A Depression Short Film” like some of the Alones have called themselves, this is “A Bullying Short Film”…so it’s bullying…which has the main character depressed. If you didn’t know he was depressed, check out how he walks. He walks around with his head hung down and shoulders slumped over. All the time. I was waiting for the maudlin “Christmastime is Here” music to kick in and we’d be in the middle of an Arrested Development gag.
But where does this Alone win? They must’ve known that Alone movies get riddled with bad audio, so there’s no dialogue in this film! WIN! Just music (the score is excellent, I’m inclined to believe it’s combined scores from other movies. Honestly, huge apology if not, but it just feels that way. The movie does, however, feel a little too psyched to have punch sound effects. I wish the fight between our main guy and the bully were a little more realistically brutal than have Indiana Jones-type punch sounds.
OK, I’ve pissed on this one enough, it actually is competently acted (a rarity on YouTube) and the ending is quite good. Check it out (but warning, the guy really mopes around A LOT, I wish they varied the lead character’s emotions up):
