Alone, Pressure & Supermom
Reviews by Paul Preston
Welcome to Today I Watched…, a series of posts documenting my new challenge – watch a movie a day for the rest of my life. Keep coming back to TheMovieGuys.net to find out what I watch each day…and get my take on it.
When I see a movie that’s a new release in theaters or on demand, I’ll give it a proper review in the “Reviews” or “Home Viewing”, otherwise, I’ll write about it here.
May 29, 2017 – Alone
If you don’t know, I’m going to watch all the short films with the title Alone on YouTube till I run out. There are…a lot of them (50+ until I stopped searching).
This Alone is called a “Depression Short Film” and is also called “Award Winning”. This Alone did not win an award for cinematography and sound design, like a previous Alone, but instead, it won the Irving’s Superintendent’s Shining Star Award. So…this is a high school project. I can’t really review it in the same vein that I’ve reviewed Blow Out and The Limey on these pages. They don’t have great acting, they have the high school willing participants and they don’t have mics, so you struggle to hear what they’re saying but young filmmaker Eric Nguyen has made a film that looks like the ones I made when I was young and his heart’s in the right place to address the struggles of pressure and bullies on a high school student. The film ends with a call to action to reach out to those struggling with depression and for that, he should be encouraged.
This content plus good more mature filmmaking can be seen in the short Pressure. Read about that film next.
May 30, 2017 – Pressure
More cheating! I went to Dances With Films film festival and saw a block of short films that I’m spreading out over a number of days to make up for an otherwise busy week. So expect a few days worth of short film reviews from Dances With Kidz!. My overall thought would be: Who knew it would take seeing programming for kids to catch a block of good films at a festival. They do all have the ease of being viewed through the filter of kids’ programming, and that often gives lenience to a number of things, artistically, but still, more than the last horror shorts block I saw, these films for young people were overall entertaining.
Pressure, a short film by Adria Dawn and David Tarleton, addresses the mounting strain on school kids, from parents, peers, schoolwork and sports. The best part about this short is the adult manner in which all these issues are handled, even though it’s technically a short for kids. I’ve always believed that you should shoot high with entertainment for kids and let it trickle down to them, rather than undercut their intelligence with easier choices. The result is a complicated adventure for our young hero as he navigates a lot of issues. And if you think it’s easy being a kid and you wish you were one again, give Pressure a look-see and you’ll realize we all have to work our asses off to get by in this world, no matter what age you are.
Trailer:
Pressure trailer from Tarleton/Dawn Productions on Vimeo.
May 31, 2017 – Supermom
This was my favorite film of the Dances with Kidz! Program. There’s a superhero out there named Skyfire and our young girl lead of Supermom thinks her mom is that superhero. She overhears her mom telling her father about the people she saved that night and gets even more suspicious. Then real danger kicks in and things become treacherous for Skyfire/Mom. Up to this point, the movie has employed some cartoonish superhero tropes to tell its story, but the danger gets real at the end, and effectively, almost too heavy, but leading to a wholly satisfying finale. The end of this movie is everything and I can’t tell you a thing about it. Just know it’s got a payoff more satisfying than half the feature-length blockbusters out there.
