please review this short film - The Mustache
May 01, 2011 12:57PM
Hello all!

Well it's that time again and this time, I'm sorry to say I do not have a 48 Hour Film for you to watch and comment on because our city, Philadelphia, isn't having a 48 Hour Film Project until JUNE!!!
But in the interim what I do have is a short film that we helped shoot a while back and is in its drafting stages.
YES! A short that didn't have the restriction of 2880 minutes!

As usual, I look forward to hearing everyone's comments.

Thanks again!!




Re: please review this short film - The Mustache
May 10, 2011 12:37PM
We used 2 Canon 7D's handheld on those shoulder mount things.
Re: please review this short film - The Mustache
May 25, 2011 11:53PM
Any review would be helpful... smiling smiley
Re: please review this short film - The Mustache
May 26, 2011 12:36AM
I tried watching this when you first posted this. I didn't have the patience to watch the whole thing. Unfortunately, I just found nothing appealing about this short.

The good thing is that the acting is a bit better than your other works. They don't look too much like filmmakers being bad actors.

The bad thing is that I don't know why I'm watching.

The Tom Cruise story is completely pointless. I listened to it and I went, "Okay, okay", but it's not amusing, it didn't make me like the characters any more, or get any entertainment out of the film.

All the characters act like juvenile "dude" types I had no interest in watching. The location is uninspired, the cinematography had no flavour to speak of, and there was no story. Just endless yapping.

The first time I watched, I think I lasted until about 45 seconds after the moustache character entered. That's the point when I went, "Why am I watching this?", and went on my merry way. A good film should make you feel like you have to watch the rest because you'll miss out if you don't. This one, I never felt like I was missing anything by walking out. I forced myself to watch a bit more this time, and I still couldn't last all the way through.

The only way a piece like this would work is with a witty, funny script and quirky characters with a lot of life to them. These guys feel like what I'd encounter going to any party featuring stoned, drunk, vacant, jobless guys who aren't interesting enough to warrant my attention. It felt a lot like that infamous feature film The Room. Except the acting wasn't quite so bad and self-serious as The Room.

In a 15-minute short, you only have about 90 seconds to establish good characters, a central problem, a tone, and grab our attention. At the 3:00 mark, they're still yapping about irrelevant back story ("Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)"? Who cares?), and the three characters are equally annoying. They're completely interchangeable; I can't root for any of them. At the 4:00 mark, they're still yapping away with pop-culture references. There's no tension, there's no comedy, there's nothing dramatic or even interesting. There's no concept, there's no main character. Without a main character there's no point of view, and without a point of view you have no sympathy. Without sympathy, there's no stake in the story; without a stake, the audience walks out.

You guys keep tripping up against the very first stage of any workable film project: A good script. I'm imagining this film on the page, and it doesn't "pop" either as a script or as a film. What made you move this script to the production stage? Who was the person who said, "Okay, this script is good enough now, we can shoot"?


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