WHERE THE HEART LIES ... Johnson, Hyten, Golden & Bullis

ZFarms Productions said:
Ha. Thanks. You have no idea how much I was blown away (no pun intended) by this film.
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Thanks a lot for your comments Zfarms! I'm glad you enjoyed it.


We really appreciate these reviews and are going to be getting around to everybody we haven't reviewed. There were some great films in this fest and I've got a lot to say about a lot of them.
 
ZFarms Productions said:
No problem man! I've been showing it to my friends telling them "This is filmmaking" and they all agree and really enjoyed the film.
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Dude, the whole DVD box is now your quotes :)

Seriously, we appreciate your enthusiastic support. Do you ever get out here to the West Coast? Fat Monster LOVES to entertain DVXUSER buddies and especially we like to shoot with them. If you've got a break this summer why not come out and bunk with us for a weekend? Tickets are cheap if booked in advance.
 
Damn... just watched this again! Thank goodness you guys are a NC!!! (j/k)

Man, you Fatties really turned your sh*t around! I mean... the growth is staggering.

I look at Tim's direction and editing as leaps and bounds above anything else I've seen him do. And Mark, you are the man with the vision... I know that you must be VERY PLEASED to see a world you imagined on film turn out so great!

All of you, Blaine, Bullis, Reisner... FANTASTIC WORK. (you 'Fat Monster' bastards! :) )
 
Mark Johnson said:
Dude, the whole DVD box is now your quotes :)

Seriously, we appreciate your enthusiastic support. Do you ever get out here to the West Coast? Fat Monster LOVES to entertain DVXUSER buddies and especially we like to shoot with them. If you've got a break this summer why not come out and bunk with us for a weekend? Tickets are cheap if booked in advance.
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I have a break June 30th-July 6th. I'm gonna look into coming out that way.
 
Hey guys, Whoa, this is some great work. Lighting camera editing...

And though Amanda Hill is no match for our fair damsel in "Dead Beautiful"... I gotta say, not only a beautiful girl, she's got a firm hand on her acting skills.

Tate reminded me of Nicolas Cage at his most paranoid. Great performance.

Happy Valentines Day!

Erik P.
 
OK here's my best recreation of the review I lost last night ...

Great work. It’s about as good as a film gets in execution and use of cinematic vocabulary and technical elements to tell story.

Acting was excellent. Especially the girl. Very natural and believable.

The directing and editing was great. The choice of shots used to tell the story and then picked in the editing were quite nice. So many times I was impressed with what you chose to show me … usually those small moments of change or decision or impact in an actor’s eyes that have very little to do with the dialogue or who is or isn’t speaking. Great.

So well put together. Maybe there could have been a tad less music. I wonder if it would have felt more No Country for Old Men and more uncomfortable. But that’s a maybe. The film has some throwbacks to noir but really you are working in a kind of modern sex thriller like Basic Instinct, etc. And for that slick genre the music is very appropriate and I thought worked very well. I never thought Justin took a misstep it was all quite good and germane … I’m really talking about a larger style issue, which again worked well, just wondering if there was more to mine here with a more minimalist approach. But excellent none the less.

Great sound design.

The script and story were well put together, had excellent structure, and the dialogue was pretty natural. I have some take em or leave em qualms with the ending which I Get to at the end of the page. But good job Mark and Blaine.

And great job Blaine for pulling together and bringing out a new level of filmmaking from this team.

A couple of members from your team commented on my huge growth spurt last fest and I can return the compliment without equivocation.

Excellent leap.

Excellent film.



OPENING
Wow wow wow
The opening is so stunning I had to go back and watch it twice.

Maybe a little electric sound with the flickering neon in the title and then again with the hotel sign? Very subtle though. Just a thought.

DINNER PARTY
Very natural all around, acting and the camera felt very loose and natural, seemed like real life.

The girl is great. She drips natural and unaffected. Touching your face and hair etc. is one of the hardest things to pull off naturally on camera.

Very nicely shot.

Nice editing choices, the story is told excellently through the shot selection. The long take on the husband at the top is great story telling. We get a sense of all the relationships through that one shot.

KITCHEN SCENE
He seems a bit big. Too on voice maybe?

I’d cut before her F.U. Matt. Maybe find a take that says the same thing visually, i.e. with her expression.

BAR SCENE
Excellently Shot and lit. Again great shot choices, in terms of coverage more so here though. We see a lot of under covered shorts due to run and gun, but this has a great establishing shot and then a great master.

I liked both actors in this scene.

EMAIL MONTAGE
Hahah, she has emails from Blaine and Bullis. :grin:

Damn she is so good. I mean it’s like you can see in her brain and read her thoughts. Again, small idiosyncratic totally natural gestures that convey volumes. It’s like she has a ticker tape on her head that says … hmm … should I do this? Probably not but yes … yes I will.

This whole montage has a great shape to it. Unlike some montages that just show passage of time, this has a great arc and build. Plus again she is so good. The moment on the couch where she laughs and arcs her back seems almost taken from the a bts shot. So candied and real and again tells us exactly where she is in her arc … or at least where you want us to think she is.

CONSPIRACY BY THE POOL
Greatly covered shot and edited again. Love the establishing crane down the house.

I wish the DOF was not so shallow here to see the lights in the background more. Kind of not using the location to the fullest … maybe they were crushed a bit too much in post and could be brought up with some power windows.

I might hold on and end with Jack to sort of end with him conflicted … a will he or won’t he kind of thing. Would not telegraph the twist while making it more plausible. But at this juncture in the story I think ending it on a question – will he or not – would add to the suspense and engagement as we will watch on to find out the answer … also will add some depth to a functionary character

ROOM SERVICE
Haha I love this guy. Great look. Great casting. Great demeanor.

GUNSHOT/FX
Not so great.

ENDING
The ending was not bad at all. It just didn’t have much resonance for me. I have one bit of confusion and a point about what I think was a missed avenue.

SPOILERS IN BLACK
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My confusion is why did they have to kill the guy. Lots of people go on doinking their brains out in an extra-marital affaire without killing their spouces. I think during the clean up of the body etc. I needed one or two flash backs to email maybe that said “impossible to get out of pre-nup” or “huge insurance policy” or … I needed one or two lines at the end. She calls her lover and really it’s a “non-scene” she just says I love you. Would have been better IMHO to give us some information that buttoned things, or clarified the context. “I guess that’s one way out of a pre-nup.” Or if the guy who did it is freaked out about it she could say “I need you to hold your shi* together. No one’s gonna trace us to him way out there. Just think about the money and having your way with me in on a Beach in Barcelona …. I’ll be waiting”. Maybe those suggestions suck. But just spitballing. Point is its not clear why it went down and then we have a dialogue scene that doesn’t button, illuminate, change context, or move us somewhere different than the rest of the new information we just received.

I think it was kind of a misstep to haver her boinking the work friend rather than the college friend for a couple of reasons. 1) in this cutting at least, the work friend feels a bit like an unearned twist after an earned twist. It was great that she was setting the husband up all the time, that twist was well earned. 2) It would have been much more parallel. And this would have felt more satisfying I think – she actually turns out to be doinking the guy that we thought her husband was just being paranoid about. For one thing … going back to the earned twist. You flip us from the husband is just paranoid … to he had something to be worried about after all … to she’s really going to have an affair with this college friend to … D’oh she was on to the husband all along – so you kind of have an off / on switch you keep flipping to say they are they aren’t and then you flip it to a third alternative and that’s what feels less parallel, less earned … so just when we are sure the college guy is not involved we get the switch up that she’s on to him with the gun shot, and then the reveal that he is in fact involved … the husband’s paranoia was right! 3rd and finally – right now you have a guy get killed that was just an asshole. He was wrong about his wife in a sense (maybe she wasn’t even having an affair with the work friend until the work friend came and told her about the husband’s plan) but he was wrong and paranoid and kind of got what he deserved. I think it would have been richer and more morally ambiguous if she was actually screwing the college buddy. Then it’s much more tragic. The husband was right all along. They were screwing. He was right in trying to catch her, and they flipped the table on him. More tragic because the husband is more innocent.
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Again, not that the ending is bad. It just didn’t have any deeper resonance or impact for me the way I think it could’ve with a bit more parallelism and tragedy.

Again, excellent excellent job.

Thoroughly impressed.
 
Great praise, particularly coming from you, Jack. We struggle over many of the issues you had. This was originally going to be NC and probably run about 10 minutes. The story structure was somewhat different. THEN Tim and Mark had an epiphany about the structure by going way outside the box with regard to the script. This is certainly NOT meant to be an excuse but we had to make some tough decisions when cutting to 6 minutes and still keeping the story complete. I can't praise Tim enough in the editing process. It was really great to see him completely throw his director's hat away and "kill his babies." This guy has come so far in the last year.

We were looking for suitable neon sounds right up to the point where we had to say f*ck it because we needed to compress it and get it uploaded.
 
SPOILERS IN BLACK


Haha, my GF Megan, whom Mark knows well, was just watching this and her jaw hit the hardwood floor in our apartment when the husband got shot and stayed that way until the end of the movie. I then asked her what she thought and she said "awesome". As a Harvard Dramarturg she's about as sophisticated as an audience member can get without being a filmmaker themselves. Just a reminder that with all our nitpicking, we're not the primary audience that buys a ticket on a Friday night.

 
I enjoyed this one. Great photography. The actors did really well, and I must echo that the actress definitely stole every scene she was in.

Regarding, the dialogue. I think the cursing worked well here. The wife was rude to the husband. The husband was rude to the friend. I feel that develops their characters. A wife flippantly telling her husband f.u. and a guy calling his friend a piece of sh*t definitely make the audience look at them in a different way. It desanitizes them. Stories with "unlikable" people have a certain texture to them that I find appealing.

Everything worked for me except the ending. Perhaps if there were hidden clues throughout the piece that made sense after the ending, it would have been more effective. As it is, it's a shock ending, but could have been a bit more clever.

That's just a nitpick of course. Everything was really polished and the production value was very high. Good job. Looking forward for more from you guys.
 
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