Notes from Melanie

I'll be honest, a lot of the gags here are pretty hackneyed and the plot is just a conversation in which the only real pay off is that the main character learns to steal ideas from his love interest rather than existing movies.

That said, the camera work is spot on and the acting (particularly from Newberry) is so good that you actually briefly believe these characters in this weird roller coaster of a script that bounces back and forth from emotional-to cheesy-to funny.

The gags are each various dressings for over the top Flickinger cameos and they are pretty funny the first couple of times. If the script didn't rely so much on them, they might have retained their humor throughout, but unfortunately it does, and they don't.

In the end, Stuckman will likely go on to bigger and better things and this weird entry will just be a footnote.

I liked the bits showing the fake movies. The Melanie character seems perpetually outraged which made it very hard to watch. I like Stuckmann's reviews plenty and he seems to do camerawork very well, but he's not great at writing dialogue. He's a talented guy, so I'm sure he'll improve with time.

So, Chris Stuckmann is making movies now. Is good? well no not really, but is it bad? Yes, but for fixable reasons.

The idea of a screen writer needing to finally make a jump to making respected movies is one that can feel emotional to people who are writers, and in that lies the biggest issue with this movie. The script feels like it's tailor made for writers (which is an obvious stand in for Chris) and not much else. All the emotional scenes lose any sense of emotion when it revolves around characters you don't feel connected to. On top of that we go over 3 distinct feelings between the two characters that feel rushed given the short run time of the movie. If you've seen the movie you know these moments.

As for the good parts. The camera work isn't bad. It's nothing stylized or experimental, but for a low budget short film it works. The editing is solid leading to some fun moments from John as the D movie actor. The sound work isn't bad either, giving what could have been really bad audio to this film we actually have well recorded audio, so that deserves props.

I loved Chris for his videos for many years. So I want to see him get somewhere with his career, but that being said I think he should pick either being a film writer (in which he need to work on opening up his writing to a larger demographic and saving his passion projects for when he's finally made it) or being a film maker (in which he shows a lot of promise but really needs to find his style) and find a writer for his ideas.

Going into this I thought, "Well he seems to know a lot about movies so this should be decent." Well turns out I was wrong. This movie is horrible. The first problem is the tone. It's like some kind of weird back n forth from awkward comedy to the serious path of a struggling film maker which is obviously Chris Stuckmann's film-making path put into this movie. I wouldn't mind the comedy if it wasn't spoken by two mediocre actors with no chemistry which points back to bad directing.

Last problem is its almost all handheld cam and if you pay attention hard enough you can see the camera shaking like someone is having a panic attack mid-scene. Really not needed and again bad directing choice. Only good thing I'll say is Flickinger's performance because it seems like he really wanted to show out for Chris. Other than that bad.

The acting was alright. The only thing I liked was the b movie guy that made me chuckle a few times. The rest was just meh, felt long because I had no interest what these two actors were talking about. Just my opinion.