Yelling Fire in an Empty Theater

Yelling Fire in an Empty Theater proves a few things to me as a filmgoer and filmmaker: story and character development is key, the actors' performances are critical to an Indie, and the audience absolutely cares how a movie looks and sounds nowadays. This film relies greatly on its screenwriter's abilities because the script is good and I became invested in the main character's journey. The performances for the most part are solid even though at times the movie lags in the timing of the longer dialogue sequences. The look and sound of the film are utterly terrible to the point of being distracting. I'm confident that there wasn't a single professional film light or mic or camera used for a single frame of the movie. It was muddy and distorted, autofocusing during under-lit night scenes, blown out during any interior daytime scene where a window was visible. The sound went from blaring loud to inaudible in what I believe to be an unmixed soundtrack. Dogme style filmmaking irritated me to my core in the 1990s because video cameras looked like garbage compared to cinema cameras, and constant handheld imagery was nauseating to watch. Today, there's zero excuse for that kind of final product. An entire feature film can be shot with an iPhone on a gimbal stabilizer and a condenser microphone for next to nothing. No-budget Indies don't need to look and sound terrible anymore, so it's hard to be forgiving of this movie for... well, looking and sounding terrible. Story + performances + visuals and sound are a winning combination for any movie, big or small. This film, however, disappoints tragically in the latter.