Skills Like This

Just saw at the Edinburgh Ineternational Film Festival. I saw many films at the fest this year and Skills was definitely my favourite. The film is fast and furious and has really none of the usual American comedy clichés. About a bad playwright turned robber and his friends. The Tommy character has some brilliantly funny lines I sure will be repeated. All the performances are really strong. The actress playing Lucy is so natural and fun to watch. The film takes you on fast ride and you have no clue where you are going, and this is just one of it's charms. A wee bit edgy and maybe too fast an ending but I look forward to catching this one again. It is a Cool Comedy.

When you go to see an independent film there is a hope that what you will see will be something new, different and entertaining. You hope to discover something. Skills Like This is that kind of film. This is a great movie, I loved all of the characters. The performances are right on and funny. The film moves at times from silly comedy to darker comedy. It does this at all the right times. This movie kept me engaged and pulled me in to the point where I was engaged but not aware of where it would take me next. It is rare bonus to see an indie comedy that makes me laugh and one that I won't soon forget.

4/4

Skills Like This won "Jury Prize" at the Jacksonville Film Festival this week. I had heard about "Skills Like This" through the film fest world, seeing it both in Denver, and again in Jacksonville. Skills Like This will be a cult classic, mark my words. I want to see this film over and over. I can't wait to share it with my friends. This film is so un-pretentious and original. It makes sense, and solves all the problems it proposes which is rare for low-budge film, it is indie film making at its best. The music, the characters, the bike! All I can say it, "I am going to need a ride" to this film again! SXSW Winner and all.

Why would the writer(s) put the idiotic "Tommy" character in?! Why the dying grandpa?! I like this film. I'd _really_ like it if there wasn't so much stupid involved.

While I'm complaining, the sound mix is pretty bad. One last bit of advice to the producers: Please zoom in a little more; while I could easily see the molecules of the characters' faces during closeups, the atoms were hard to discern. ;^)

Monty Miranda's "Skills Like This" has more things wrong with it than just its ungrammatical title. In fact, it's about as innocuous as an indie comedy can be without disappearing from the screen entirely.

Set in Denver, the story centers around four buddies with widely divergent personalities who, nevertheless, remain the best of friends; Dave (Gabriel Tigerman), a straight-arrow salesman who hates his job; Tommy (Brian D. Phelan), a wisecracking slacker with an inflated view of his bad-boy toughness; and Max (Spencer Berger), an unsuccessful playwright who finds he has an aptitude for petty thievery and begins to view it as his very own form of artistic expression.

The theme of going outside the law as a means of finding one's identity as an individual is a fairly amusing one at its core, but the movie makers don't really seem to have much of an idea of how to carve an interesting movie out of it. Perhaps, the script by Berger is just a bit too timid, a bit too reluctant to dive head-first into the realm of slashing satire or hard-hitting black comedy to register much of an impact, settling for feel-good, pseudo-Robin Hood pablum instead. That's a shame, seeing as how most of the actors reveal at least some degree of talent that the material gives them little opportunity to show off for the audience.