Quoth the Screaming Skull: “Nevermore”

And one need not be derivative to tell a classic story

Ashley Thorpe’s horror short, The Screaming Skull, aired Friday night at the Salt Lake Film Festival. Part of Thorpe’s “Penny Dreadful Shorts” series, in which he retells classic British folk-horror tales, this film is ten minutes of incredibly challenging movie-watching that ultimately doesn’t quite pay off.

Based on a folk tale popularized in a turn-of-the-20th-century short story, Skull is shot digitally and edited into stop-motion animation with a heavily saturated look. The sound effects are intentionally harsh and omnipresent, and the technical elements combine to generate an astoundingly deep sense of dread. If that were the extent of its intent, I’d call it a rousing success. Sadly, there is a narrative peeking its way around the corners of the technical abstraction, and it’s a pretty dumb one.

It’s easy to call a folk tale derivative, because by definition, folk tales have been told enough to have wormed their way into the collective understanding. Even with that caveat, the story of an object (in this case, a skull) of which a character can’t rid himself, no matter how hard he tries, has been told a thousand times. Nor is it novel to associate the returning object with the haunting memories of war and family tragedy. If Thorpe thinks he’s the first person to create a short work in which a character is haunted by an idea at the fringe of his consciousness that seems to grow stronger the more he tries to push it aside, I believe a Mr. Edgar Allen Poe would have something to say about that.

Still, this short is technically interesting, and if you’re into feeling really uncomfortable for ten minutes, you should check it out. Watch the trailer below or download the short in its entirety from Carrion Films.

45365 is a Midwestern Fantasia

45365, a critically acclaimed documentary by Bill and Turner Ross, is currently tearing up the festival circuit. A meandering tone poem lovingly addressed to Ross Brothers’ Ohio hometown, Sydney, the film won best documentary at SXSW and the Truer than Fiction award at the Spirits, among other impressive accolades. 45365 made a quick stop at the Salt Lake City Film Festival on Friday night and I had the pleasure of checking it out (paired with the previously reviewed Out of a Forest).

“45365” is, of course, the postal code of Sydney, Ohio, tbe small town through which the audience is ushered in the so-titled film. The camera takes us from life to life, like a hummingbird, stopping lightly to drink from a character before moving effortlessly to the next subject. The audience isn’t permitted to get very far beneath the surface of any of the film’s subjects, and I’m not sure if that’s a strength or a weakness. On one hand, some of these people are fascinating and endearing, and appear to deserve more than a cursory glimpse. On the other hand, the star of this movie is the town as a whole. The Ross Brothers want us to see it as a unified organism, a complex machine with interesting, though largely interchangeable parts.

One particularly handsome resident of Sydney, Ohio

The camera work in 45365 is gorgeous. Shot in high-definition, and painstakingly framed, most of the shots are highly evocative and moving, linked and juxtaposed together into something approaching coherence. This film is extraordinarily successful when it remains in the visual realm–like a sort of microcosmic Baraka—and doesn’t intrude too deeply into the lives of the people it portrays. One particular sequence in which a frantic, Friday night football scene cuts quickly to a shot of the same field, now silent and snow-covered, communicated mood and idea with an efficiency that simply can’t be translated into the spoken or written word.

The film struggles, however, when it starts to flirt with narrative intent, examining elements of conflict in its subjects’ lives with a startling shallowness. Really, the “stories” the movie tells are either boring (a local judge runs for re-election), inconsequential (a teenager deals with typical teenage relationship problems), or dangerously close to exploitative (various family spats and legal woes of the lower-class). The result is a movie that clocks in at only 90 minutes, but feels quite a bit longer, and could easily stand to shed ten or fifteen of its least successful minutes.

Despite its weaknesses, I liked 45365. In fact, I’m probably overstating my criticisms. As a whole, 45365 is a lovingly-shot homage to the communities that molded and shaped who we all have become. As a debut, it shows startling promise, and I can’t wait to see what part of the world the Ross Brothers decide to show me next.

Out of a Forest

I went last night to the Salt Lake City Film Festival. Turnout was weak and the festival organization seemed haphazard at best, but the films featured were impressive–a real testament to Salt Lake’s burgeoning film culture. The first film we were treated to was a Danish short by Tobias Gundorff Boesen called Out of a Forest. It’s a moody, stop-motion animated piece, set to “Slow Show,” by The National. The animation is gorgeous, and the song is one of my favorites. The narrative structure, however, seemed less than fully realized, more like a clever joke than a true story. That said, the visuals are more than enough to carry the five-minute film, and Out of a Forest is, if not an excellent movie, a pretty damn good music video.