Movie number 7 in Joel Haver's quest to make 12 feature films in 12 month. As with most of these, it's more impressive as a feat of sheer perseverance than it is as an actual movie - though he still has to somehow churn out 5 more films in just over a month if he's going to complete the challenge.
Joel has talked about this one as the only straight-up comedy of the bunch, and it does actually have some solid comedic set pieces and gags. However most of them feel like they could have been worked into any comedy film in some way, and surprisingly little comedy is got from the premise itself. Maybe that's because really this is an idea for a sketch, somehow dragged out to feature length. Even before watching this, looking at the runtime of 104 minutes was kind of daunting for something that sounds like it should have been a tight 80 at most. And that speaks to the film's biggest issue really, that it just needed to be tightened up an awful lot.
Joel has spoken a lot on his second YT channel about his ethos around movie making; he has some very strong opinions which are interesting though I don't fully agree with. It would be too much to go into here, but the main issue for me is that the production values of his films mean that they remain basically high-grade YouTube videos. It is sort of impressive that he's made 12 feature-length ones (though it's arguable if The Text is feature length) in a year, but I don't think any of them are polished enough to be considered suitable for, say, widespread commercial release, so I'm not sure ultimately what this exercise proves. You would think his efforts would be better spent focussing down on one movie, spending time on it and making it really good, but he seems really keen on his methods of high-speed, improvised film-making that gets very, very mixed results.
