Love: The Movie

Adam Bertocci's latest short film has a more professional feel than most of his earlier works, not to mention more humor. With the Lola Rennt/Star Wars crossover "Run Leia Run" and the one-man blackout short "Sparky", Bertocci provided many laughs and showed a great sense of satire, finding humor in movies and in everyday life. With "Love: The Movie", he returns to both sources, comparing making a movie with falling in love. Although the film might be funnier to a filmmaker, it should be entertaining to anyone. The dialogue is clever, the performances by the cast are excellent, the musical score is quite good, and the ending is everything we've come to expect from Bertocci. If this film has any flaw at all, it is only that it is too short. We can't wait to see what Bertocci could do with a feature-length film budget and resources.

You just have to like a film made by "Guy in His Basement Productions"! And so begins this cute little short film all about how to make a movie about love.

The film is a documentary, of sorts, explaining how to make a good film about love versus how to make a bad one. The film is very tongue in cheek and has a lot of cute insights into what things you should do and avoid. The style is so clever and insightful, that you can't help but like the film. Heck, one of the first things I did after seeing it was to see what else these folks have made--that's a sure sign that it's a good film. Fortunately, Adam Bertocci (the writer/director of LOVE: THE MOVIE) has gone on to several other projects I am going to soon check out for myself.

Clever and insightful--Adam Bertocci and cast have a great future ahead of them.

I have revisited this short recently to redeem my opinion of the writer of "dingle." The structure of this is what the viewer should take from it as the actual content is just naive motivation speaking on art and love. Adam creates this self-awareness between the characters and viewer deconstructing the elements of film-making "folding" us into the project. This is most effective during the "story" section. Playing off this structure provides the film with its humor (a far cry from the American Pie-esqe frat boy humor in "dingle"). Unfortunately Adam did not allow the two main characters to play around with the viewer's self-awareness and make this a truly deep project. The two "love" birds stayed in character the entire film never giving the actors a chance to play a character within a character. Expose them, give them freedom to explore that space between the realities of their characters and the actor/actress we know they are. We never get the feeling the actors are involved in the creative process.

Another problem with this is that fails to follow the story formula that is being commented on. If you are going to engage the idea of the love movie and add another level to it, you need to hit the story arc that audiences are familiar with: boy meets girl, they fall in love unexpectedly, miscommunication breaks them apart, and a public setting profession brings them back together. This failure disconnects us as viewers and weakens your structure.

Love is a cinematic notion. What and how we love is for our culture based in ideas that have been informed by movies. We long to feel in relationships like we did while watching romance movies. Film DOES have the power to shake our emotions but you miss the point that films define for us what love is.

Additionally, the direction is boring and standard. Little to no camera movement or interesting camera angles. It fails as cinema in that sense. There is nothing cinematic about it as far as the camera is concerned. The editing is decent and works to bring this film to life. Finally, the writer needs to avoid the preaching about art and love. The last section where Adam's surrogate talks about what "love is" exposes a certain naiveté that is laughable. Every moment in a relationship is not the greatest feeling of your life. It's a mixed bag, a notion your film avoids. Adam, forget about the preaching, it is not important or needed. We as the viewers don't need this 7th Heaven moral lesson or pep talk. Keep developing innovative structure ideas and fill it with material that annotates the structure or vice versa, then you will have something that moves. Despite this shorts failings, I applaud its originality in the way-independent often disappointing NP2K film world.

Having watched "Love: The Movie" I'm not to sure what to think of it. Even though I was entertained by it, it overall left me an empty expression.

Even though the intentions were good, the movie was just pointless to watch. The story is not really clever enough to be really funny, the movie had more potential really. Maybe a longer running time would had helped? Yet the movie remains entertaining to watch and therefor still is perfectly watchable.

And don't be fooled by its running time people. It is said that this short is 9 minutes long but almost halve of that time is taken by the end credits. Yes, I felt kind of cheated afterward.

So the final verdict is; Perfectly Watchable but not recommendable. You won't feel any better or worse after seeing this film.

7/10

http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

Adam Bertocci has a knack for satire and quirky writing. His work is full of humor and odd angles on situations. And yet, this seems to fall short, somehow... the idea just isn't explored as much as it could and should be. While commenting on love by comparing it to creating a film is original and does make for some good scenes, there is simply not enough done with this concept. The plot could possibly have improved through following romantic comedy formula more, and more could have been done to build upon the fact that we're watching a movie-within-a-movie... we're seeing the film being made. It should also be noted that the short is probably most entertaining to film-makers... though I believe anyone with a base understanding of film and knowledge of other movies about love(and the emotion itself, for that matter) will enjoy it. Also, the running time is a little misleading... though it does last for the 9 minutes advertised, about a third of that is pure credits. Featuring a good ending and being altogether entertaining, this could have been excellent, had it done more than scratch the surface of its subject matter. Worth watching, but not too memorable. I recommend this to fans of Bertocci. The behind-the-scenes is also worth a viewing or two. 7/10