Just as I suspected, it's not as Earth shatteringly good as Smith and his friends would have you believe, but it's also no where near the cinematic atrocity that the stick-up-their-ass bloggers are making it out to be. Across the board I liked the performances, the minor exception being Melissa Leo, who wasn't bad, but I can see through her too easily. I can see her acting, and it irks me. Parks? Pretty awesome stuff. He's such a natural. The already infamous speech he gives didn't seem that long to me, both in terms of how it played and in literal running time. The capper to that scene worked really well too. It got a little rise out of my pulse. I don't think the movie ever hits a peak like that again, and once the ATF shows up, I wish there was a little more meat on it. It felt a bit insubstantial and the fire fights could have used more variety in how they were staged and framed. The first half of the film certainly plays better than the second half, but over all I dug it. I'll probably pick up the DVD and check out the special features in the future.
Regardless of my opinion on the quality of the movie, I really admire how Smith has handled distribution. Smith does have a tendency to believe his own self perpetuated hype, but you have to give him credit for being reasonable enough to recognize his own salability. It's limited. And now he's proven he doesn't need a major backing him to recoup his investors. They're in the black before the film even goes wide. That's awesome. It's a business model smaller filmmakers with smaller movies, and, smaller film companies should start following. There's been a huge gap for smaller movies to find a niche lately, and I've been waiting for years now for someone to take advantage of touring a movie the old school way combined with internet distribution and On Demand. If your movie didn't cost that much, you don't need any more than that. Find some humility and forget about about opening wide in theaters and snagging every demographic. Know you're audience and play it smart. This is a subject personal to me as I was involved with a now dead film project that I saw perverted in the name of snagging every demographic. I helped write a simple, raw, bloody, creature feature with a team of friends. I was going to score it. We wanted to gather investors and get maybe $25,000 and do it real guerilla style. Cut to a year later, and the budget has ballooned to $100,000, and our business manager is being a pain in the ass. He wants it set up for a sequel. He doesn't want us to kill a character anymore because he wants to make a star out of one of the actors we found (we found, not him). He wants to divert budget funds to a studio so the female star (who he wanted to screw) could record an album. He wants PG-13. Most infuriating, the director (my roommate at the time), went for it. She saw stars and really believed we could get kids and old people to come to the movie, she was going to be the next Del Toro. The script went to hell. What was once a to-the-point, no frills horror movie became an unreadable load of D&D fantasy nonsense that bore almost no resemblance to what I, and most everyone else, wanted to do. Everyone had lost sight of the goddamn point and everyone's heads got too big. The project imploded in spectacular fashion and never even got in front of cameras. Those investors are never going to see a dime of their money back. This wasn't Hollywood. This was a bunch of nobodies, but doesn't it read just like some ridiculous story of Hollywood waste and compromise that makes you scoff and say nasty things on the internet? If we had stuck to our guns, accepted our small corner of the small pond, we could've come out with something reasonable marketable, something cheap enough where it could been stayed under the radar and still recouped, no loss of integrity required. So I say bravo, Kevin Smith. Bravo for being smart, showing some humility, and making your investors happy campers. I envy you.
t:
Awesome movie.
