Saw The Call of Cthulhu today (not to be confused with the gay-themed Cthulhu indy film). Call is a 40-minute short shot on DV and then given the old film treatment. It's extremely well-done. Good acting and directing. But there's a kind of sterility about it, as if it were some sort of exercise in craft. There was lots of care lavished on the project and an obsessive attention paid to period detail. But Cthulhu groans under the weight of self-consciousness making it a film less about cults and mysterious islands and more about itself. The source is fossilized and the homage becomes a fetishized presentation of effects.
Like Cthulhu, Able Edwards is the creation of folks on the periphery of the film industry. Cthulhu's director, Andrew Leman is a creature/prop designer for film and theatre. Able Edwards' Graham Robertson is a set dresser for film/TV. Able Edwards is a mashup of Citizen Kane and Walt Disney that doesn't stray too far from its sources. There's a sensitivity and sincerity at display here and the film has some nice (if contrived) moments. The overall effect of watching this all green screen production is like watching an extended pre-viz. With all the fake grain and desaturation, they might as well have shot it in a garage; the fact that it was shot on an actual soundstage doesn't come across. Robertson also buys into technology hype. The operative idea here is that with the right software you can do anything! So Robertson gives us spaceships, crowded throngs and large-scale destruction, most of the time not done particularly well. Plus, there's no match-moving so the camera is bolted to the floor sometimes with comic results (the actors fake tracking shots by walking in place). Well, I guess they deserve some technology hype: apparently this film holds the Guinness record as the first all bluecreen film!
With some money behind it, this project would be a decent if melancholy movie of the week. Like Radius and a couple of other indy film projects, there is a companion book (Desktop Cinema by Graham Robertson).
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