Whilst all my friends are out watching Star Trek, here I am making movies with precious little time to actually go and see them (and I what I do see is usually dictated to me by my kids of 7 and 10 years). So when I heard Reid Gershbein's feature "Here. My Explosion..." (HME) was available free for download I figured I owed myself a couple of hours off without the hassle of a trip to the cinema (which would entail lead-times and babysitters, etc).
So what did I make of Reid's movie?
Being a true indie production puts it into some context but that doesn't mean I'll cut it any slack. There are things to dislike about the movie (mainly technical) but the performances shot in a cinema verite style are very natural and, I found, quite absorbing (despite many shots looking at the backs of people's heads). I forget who said it, but "movies are about people" and in that respect HME holds its own. Just the fact that people talk over each other freely is a small revelation when you're conditioned to standard Hollywood blockbusters where crashing each other's lines is just not the done thing (or if it is done, it is done in post dialogue editing). Visually the tilt-shift and grading give the whole production an almost surreal feel - which, considering the story is about coffee drinking producing matter-shifting events is just as well.
I came away from HME with a similar, if less intense, emotional residue that I felt after watching Primer. Whereas Primer has complex and multiple timelines, HME is largely linear and a whole lot easier to follow. I'd say HME's weakest point is in the dialogue recording department. As a part-time sound recordist myself, it just grates my ears to hear all that hiss and gating and other techniques used in post to "save" bad sound. It's not terrible throughout - but there's enough bad spots in there to reinforce the universal notion that most indie productions don't give a fuck about sound (I do get the impression Reid made an effort with radio mics but either wasn't monitoring or wasn't doing multiple takes). No matter how pretty the visuals, how good the actor's performances, nothing can carry badly recorded sound - it is what it is - bad! Dialogue recording aside, the music does manage to lift the movie and augment emotional context in an intelligent manner. There was just enough "goodness" in HME to see me through to the end.
Here's my acid test for any movie: if I was flicking through channels on TV and the movie came on, is it intriguing enough to keep me watching it? With HME, it's a borderline "yes" ... because somehow the performances under Reid's direction do manage to carry my interest, sound warts and all.
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