5 min. Shortfilm: "A Devastating Judgement"

sbryan.

Do you know what AIDS is? It's just a low white blood cell count caused by HIV. Unless you're super rich like Magic Johnson, you can't afford the amount of meds it takes not get it soon after you get HIV. So saying "Also, he may be HIV positive but not have AIDS" doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Consider, at least in the US, how terrible every high school gets lectured about how HIV will kill you if you get it or at best, make your life barely worth living. Whether that's the truth I can't say, but that's the message. Stands to reason if someone got told they have HIV, they might not take it too well. Are there are lot of young people that have unprotected, casual sex? Yes. A lot of them smoke? Yep. Have a gun at home? OK, maybe a little dramatic (although a few of my friends know where their parents keep guns), but cinematically it works.

Songs, movies, and video games making people more violent? I'm not even going to get into it.

Get away from gun? Lets see... Go see and action movie. Tons of guns. Why are they there? Because they're cool. Go see a drama. A few guns. Why are they there? To do have characters carry out what they want to do. It's the difference between the Godfather and MI3.

The message of the movie is "don't rush choices" and not "guns solve problems". The audience sees the character wasn't smart and would've been better off not using the gun. The movie shows the problem with violence.
 
Clearly, the gun IS a character in this short because it shares a considerable amount of screen time with our protagonist. And where as action movies have clearly defined characters (or characterizations, I should say), this short does not have. Dramas have clearly defined characters where, perhaps, violence is the only option out of necessity, or because all other options have been exhausted -- in either case there are many moments we spend with characters that lead up to that point.

There's a tight-rope line successful filmmakers who take themselves seriously walk when it comes the balance of drama, humor, guns, sex, violence, etc. For some reason I'm thinking of that seen in War of the Worlds with the gun, the angry crowd, and the mini-van. The way violence was illustrated there was profound and existential... here, not so much.

(And don't get me wrong, I love the Die Hard series or a Michael Bay Flick when I'm in the mood. I liked the CPU short film on this site that had guns, then again, that filmmaker was able to tell an effecient, and believable story where guns were expected of the bounty hunter main characters)

I find public schools lied to me in grades 5-8 -- they only tell you what's close to the truth in a high school class. And if you look it up, you'll find plenty of scholarly debate on whether or not HIV is the end all cause of AIDS (as in other situational factors may apply). There's a lot of indedent research that says this is not the entire case -- a noteable percentage of HIV cases do not develop into AIDS. Last time I had to research this, no official government financed studies were conducted linking HIV to AIDS -- which kind of sticks out considering we've spent over 22 billion in research.

AIDS is painful, but lung cancer wouldn't be? I'd imagine that people would not prefer one over the other and try like all hell to avoid them.
 
wow, that was intense. i loved the way you shot it, with the in your face angles. the colors were on point as well. as for the story, it was extremely chilling. i really liked how the end had a twist, with her being pregnant.


great job! i look forward to more.
 
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