A self-taught critic and genuine movie geek
It’s great to see someone working to fulfill a long-held dream. Well, most of the time it is. It depends on the dream. For example, in Capture Kill Release, Jen (Jennifer Fraser) dreams of making a documentary film. Sounds nice, right? The problem is, she wants to make a documentary of killing someone, which is not so nice. Luckily (so to speak), her husband Farhang (Farhang Ghajar) is willing to spend hours planning with her.
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The story in Deadly Intent is unfortunately a pretty familiar one: a widowed mother raising a young son after the death of her soldier husband. This isn’t Becoming again, though — in this case it’s Bryony (Rebecca Reaney) and James (Gus Barry), struggling to move on without husband and father Steve (Peter Lloyd). Grief has made Bryony awkward and snappish towards James, who is in turn increasingly withdrawn and sullen, spending hours alone playing out mock battles with his toy soldiers.
Memory can play some pretty strange tricks sometimes. Usually memory is just annoying, when you forget where you put your keys or you blank on your phone number for a few seconds, but there are other times when it can be downright bizarre. BoXeD is definitely in the latter camp, because “bizarre” is the least you can say about the memories here, as displayed in flashbacks.
Years ago in Vietnam, a young man discovers a murdered woman. He reacts about the way I suspect most people would in the situation, but those spur of the moment actions launch a tale of revenge that spans decades. Adam (Adam Nguyen), the aforementioned young man, is now a Roshi, a Grand Master of yoga, Vietnamese Karate-do, and Zen meditation, both in the movie and in life. He leads a secluded life with his pupils, or at least tries to; Ho (fellow Grand Master Hoy Lee), one of the others involved on that fateful day, keeps sending people to kill him.
In the short film Becoming, we meet Cassie. As an Army wife, she’s struggled with loneliness for years — and even more so now that she’s become an Army widow. It’s just her and her young son Danny now and she’s doing her best to shield him from the awful truth even though it’s useless. But they’ll be all right, she insists — they’re both adjusting, slowly learning to accept the situation.
As in a short story, in a short film like Seize the Night you have to start as close to the end as you possibly can. In this case they may have started a bit too close to the end, though since they only have 13 minutes to set up an entire world of urban fantasy, full of vampires and werewolves, there’s only so much explaining you can do. It felt like jumping into the middle of a TV series and I was scrambling to catch up with all the relationships and nuances.