Notes from Melanie

For years, Chris Stuckmann has given us some of the greatest movie reviews on the internet. His reviews are less reviews and more like breakdowns on the given films. With someone who clearly understands movies, I was curious to see what Chris Stuckmann was able to create.

His first short film reminds me that it's not easy to create a Hollywood picture. This main character reflects Stuckmann's desire to create movies and because of that we begin to relate with him. It's also touching and sweet, which is what these types of shorts should be. Great work Chris. We all love you.

I liked the bits showing the fake movies. The Melanie character seems perpetually outraged which made it very hard to watch. I like Stuckmann's reviews plenty and he seems to do camerawork very well, but he's not great at writing dialogue. He's a talented guy, so I'm sure he'll improve with time.

I'll be honest, a lot of the gags here are pretty hackneyed and the plot is just a conversation in which the only real pay off is that the main character learns to steal ideas from his love interest rather than existing movies.

That said, the camera work is spot on and the acting (particularly from Newberry) is so good that you actually briefly believe these characters in this weird roller coaster of a script that bounces back and forth from emotional-to cheesy-to funny.

The gags are each various dressings for over the top Flickinger cameos and they are pretty funny the first couple of times. If the script didn't rely so much on them, they might have retained their humor throughout, but unfortunately it does, and they don't.

In the end, Stuckman will likely go on to bigger and better things and this weird entry will just be a footnote.

The dialogue feels so formulaic and structured, but the film overall is far from boring: actually it's fairly amusing and quite fun to watch. The ludicrous, silly comedic bits - albeit frequently a bit too much - work well for the most part. The leads are really amiable, to be honest.

(6/10)

If you don't know the director is a movie critic, he has reviewed hundreds of movies on his youtube channel and Rotten Tomatoes. I really love his reviews, even through he's way too soft on most movies. The point is he has such a movie knowlegde, so I expected he'd use some of it to create a movie with fantastic plot and cheap (low budget) but genius tricks. Sadly, while this movie has some interesting writting, that's it. Story is very simple, the only thing it's worth watching are the dialogues and movie's somewhat style.

B-