Posted on

Partitioned_Heart

Sometimes technology can be just as frightening as it is amazing.  For one thing, it can raise all kinds of thorny legal and ethical questions, and if you really want to freak yourself out, try doing an image search sometime for “uncanny valley”.  There’s a good reason why such questions have become a staple of science-fiction — just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should, but the temptation to go ahead regardless can be very hard to resist.  And sometimes the technology does things without human intervention, as seems to be the case in Partitioned_Heart.

Rob (Travis Mitchell) is a father who’s lost his only child, Daniel (Malik Uhuru).  When you’ve lost a loved one, often you’d give nearly anything for one last chance to sit and talk with that person.  Rob has simply stumbled into that miraculous opportunity, as a mysterious program on his son’s computer has allowed him to talk to Daniel, now a literal ghost in the machine.  But this miracle comes with a high price.  When Daniel asks his father to do something Rob simply can’t face, will he be able to honor his son’s pleas?

A partition is a computer term for a way of dividing a hard drive into sections, which is something you might do if you want to be able to run two different operating systems on the same computer, for instance.  Here it’s also a metaphor for the warring impulses in Rob as he’s faced with an unimaginable decision to make alone.  As a short, the film inevitably asks more questions than it answers, but that only makes it more gripping and the anguish on both sides of the screen is simple and crushing.  Mitchell and Uhuru are both utterly convincing as the equally pained father and son, and their performances pull the viewer in.  Sometimes the most uniquely human dilemmas can spring from the most advanced technology.

Posted on

All Between Us

Though it’s rarely as dramatic as the movies would have you believe, it often seems as though when things go wrong they all tend to go wrong at once.  One minute everything seems fine, and the next thing you know your car’s broken down, your dog’s run away, your roof has sprung a leak, and you’re wondering what you did to deserve all this.  But whether you call it karma, fate, or sheer dumb luck, once the world decides to start beating you up there isn’t much you can do about it, as the characters in All Between Us can attest.

A rare quiet moment before they all want to kill each other.

It starts innocently enough (as it usually does) with a dinner party Clara (Denyce Lawton) and Ray (Brian Hooks) are throwing.  They’re about to get married and Ray has so far only met Clara’s horrible parents Mr. and Mrs. Tillman (Carl Gilliard and Connie Johnson) via Skype, and this party is his chance to impress them in person.  Of course this will never work since Clara’s parents have decided he’s useless, being a mere writer, and they really are horrible people besides.  Clara’s brother Freddy (Esau McGraw), is also awful — though Mom and  Dad think he can do no wrong — so I’m guessing Clara was adopted since she’s so much more human than the rest of the family.   And Ray and Clara have more news that they don’t expect to go over well — Clara’s just found out she’s pregnant.

Also invited for moral support, of which they need plenty, are Clara’s best friend Mishawn (Tiffany Haddish) and her boyfriend Ty (Christian Levatino).  Freddy and his equally wretched wife Aubyrn (Tabitha Brown) can’t stop harassing Ty for being a white man dating a black woman, at least when they aren’t busy making fun of Ray or even Clara.  I really can’t emphasize enough the casual cruelty of this family.  Most of the guests probably only showed up because they’d never met the Tillmans before and assumed that Clara was representative of how they acted.  Certainly neighbor Chad (Kevin DeWitt) and hippie friends Billy (Mancini Graves) and Channel (Isley Nicole Melton) aren’t treated any better, though for some reason Mr. Tillman greatly approves of Ty.  Maybe he does that randomly to keep people on their toes.

As you can imagine, the situation is already pretty doubtful even before things really start to fall apart.  Secrets are revealed — and most of the guests do have at least one impressive skeleton in the closet — and what was already a painfully tense evening descends into absolute chaos.  It probably doesn’t help that Ray’s best man Sam (Jay Phillips) shows up both extremely late and falling down drunk, despondent over his girlfriend having left him.  And he’s far from the biggest disruption of the evening.

The movie suffers from pacing problems — the first half hour or so is mainly setup and it’s very slow setup, doing a lot of telling when they should be showing.  By the time Freddy, for example, shows up on screen they’ve already said so much about him that he isn’t nearly as shocking as he could have been… though granted he’s still pretty shocking.  Once things get properly underway, though, it becomes a quietly zany and entertaining slice of life film that even has a few wise words to say about life and relationships.  I suppose watching relationships disintegrate can be informative.  It’s one of those movies that will make you glad that your family isn’t quite as bad as you thought after all.

Posted on

The Lightest Darkness

A private detective.  A train travelling all night to a mysterious destination.  Three strangers encountering each other by chance — or is it chance?  The moment you start watching The Lightest Darkness by Diana Galimzyanova, you know you’re in the world of noir, where everything is black and white but never simple.

Musin (Rashid Aitouganov) is the neurotic private eye, a frequent train traveler these days as he works to clear up the estate of his recently deceased uncle (Alexander Rapoport).   Elina Vyasovtseva (Marina Voytuk) is a concert pianist travelling for her work.  Arina (Irina Gevorgyan) is a screenwriter researching a script for a computer game — which, as she is quick to point out, can be as complex as any novel these days.  And the subject of her game is one that isn’t far from anyone’s mind: The Fruiterer, the odd nickname bestowed on a serial killer who haunts the night trains for victims, having claimed at least six lives.  People are afraid to ride the trains and are staying away — no, wait, actually the trains are booked solid and the conductors (Anfisa Mukhamedzhanova and Ekaterina Dar) are doing a brisk business in grisly souvenirs and sharing all the sordid details, for the right price.

As this story moves forward, another spools backward, as Musin recalls the details of his latest case.  A worried husband (Vladimir Morozov) hired the detective to find his missing wife, Lyubov (Ksenia Zemmel), and what began as just another missing persons case quickly flies out of control as Musin becomes far too personally entangled with the case, and especially with the last person to see Luybov — her highly unconventional therapist, Izolda Ivanoff (Kolya Neukoelln).

The stories are skillfully woven together, each mystery heightening the other as they unfold.  The characters all have secrets and are haunted by their pasts one way or another, pasts that seem to have inevitably brought them together.  There’s a strong sense of inescapable fate about the entire film, a feeling that all of the characters are doing exactly what they must do, whether they truly want to or not.  Like a train taking the viewer inexorably to the next station, there’s no turning back — not that you’ll want to, as you’ll be far too caught up in the mystery.

This is Galimzyanova’s feature-length debut as a director, and she handles it like a pro, turning the two stories into a fascinating web of intrigue that will satisfy any film fan and especially noir fans like me.  The actors never hit a wrong note, the characters and various classic noir elements blending seamlessly with the modern world to create an atmosphere that’s both dreamlike and alarmingly real, a place where unknown dangers might lie behind every corner.  Sometimes there’s good reason to be afraid of the darkness.

Musin checks his look in the mirror.
Posted on

Shadow

College is a time for expanding horizons, learning about new things in and out of the classroom, and taking the first steps to adulthood and (hopefully) self-sufficiency.  Of course it can also be a time for learning by making horrible mistakes and possibly falling apart under the pressure of grades, the temptation of wild parties, and the sudden lack of any parental supervision.  They may be adults legally speaking, but turning eighteen doesn’t magically give everyone a good dose of common sense, more’s the pity.

Jane (Revell Carpenter) is one of the good kids, there to learn calculus and maybe meet some people, though she’s also shy and a little overwhelmed by colleg life.  She also has the most adorable crush on Allen (Kumasi Hopkins), who luckily happens to be very good at calculus and is also willing to tutor the less skilled like Jane.  Allen is shy, too, and has so far resisted the extreme peer pressure from his friend and roommate Will (Nicholas Goodwin, who also wrote and directed) to ask Jane out.  In fact Will says that if Allen doesn’t go after Jane, he will, despite the existence of Will’s girlfriend Jessica (Samantha Morias).  It sounds very high school, but then, that’s where they all were not so very long ago.  Anyway, Will has talked Allen into co-hosting a party at their place.  Hoping to have at least one other non-party-animal there, Allen talks Jane into coming over.

 

It’s a fateful decision, and none of the relationships among the characters will be the same again.  But perhaps the most striking thing about this short film is how quietly realistic it is.  Some important events unfold in near total silence, heightening the power of the images on-screen, with the plot unfolding as much in the pauses as in the words.  Every look and gesture from the actors rings true, and every scene is important.  It’s unfortunately not an uncommon story and there’s nothing shocking here, but there doesn’t need to be — the cold and unvarnished truth is quite bad enough.