As an aspiring film maker, I see this as a personal achievement, but not a commercial achievement. I'm going to break the film down and review every aspect of it. ACTING: For the most part, much of this movie plays like a soap opera. Some performances are decent and some are annoying as hell. Surprisingly to many, Dallas Page's performance was by the the most compelling and entertaining in the film. STORY: The story was decent as well. I will not reveal many details, but let me say that the scam was well thought out by the writer, and there were some unexpected twists, but in the end it seems like an extremely roundabout way to do a job. MUSIC: The music is exactly what you hear in the trailer. It is very techno-esquire sounding. No real instrumentals. But it doesn't detract much from the viewing experience. It suits the subject matter. PICTURE: It doesn't look bad, but it was filmed at 30p, meaning it looks more like video than film. This is forgivable, but it limits its commercial marketability. SOUND: This is BY FAR the WORST aspect of the film. There is no sound design, whatsoever. The sound is inconsistent from one shot from the next, with loud hisses and pops in one shot and then in the next shot, there is no hiss at all. The sound design really detracts from the viewing experience.
One upside to the sound design, for me as an aspiring film maker, is that it showed me how important sound design is in the final product.
FINAL SUMMARY: This film is worth seeing for DDP fans and aspiring film makers. Aspiring film makers because this is a film shot on a 3.5 thousand dollar budget that received much acclaim, but still is not commercially marketable. Watch this film to see what it doesn't do well to improve your chances of making a commercially marketable film. Other than that, the film won't be worth much to the average viewer. However, I am a huge DDP fan, and his performance was so bad ass and cool at times that I will no doubt revisit this film in the future.
