(MENAFN- Arab Times) The story of a hotly coveted unproduced screenplay that itself could use some drastic revisions, "3 Holes and a Smoking Gun" proves that there's a chasm-wide difference between talking about what constitutes - and actually being - great writing. A dialogue-driven affair devoid of a single believable utterance or attendant reaction to circumstances or incidents, Hilarion Banks' movie-centric crime drama concerns a former Hollywood screenwriting hotshot now teaching in New York and an ambitious pupil whose latest work draws his instructor's eager attention - and quickly ensnares them both in a deadly competition for authorial rights. No amount of industry-jargon blather and flashback-fractured plotting, however, can mask the wholesale phoniness and overpowering lethargy of this dreary drama, whose commercial prospects are just about nonexistent.
Having flamed out as a cine-scribe in L.A., Bobby Blue Day (James Wilder) now peddles professional tutelage - peppered with anecdotes about his friendship with an illustrious director - to up-and-comers, including Jack (Zuher Khan). Bobby's name is as laughable as is his cozily combative rapport with Jack, whose apartment he casually visits in order to strike up a bargain involving Jack's supposedly crackerjack script, "Hijack." Without a hint of the mentor-mentee dynamic one might expect, Bobby and Jack are, from their first moments together, verbally sparring over said draft like two antagonistic equals. Compounding their tete-a-tete's bizarre awkwardness, they're soon up on the building's roof, where Bobby is dangling Jack off the ledge and bellowing cliches about "living on the edge."
Back inside, Jack rejects Bobby's efforts to gain a co-writing credit in exchange for getting the script produced, but then finds himself the target of suspicion when he turns out to be incapable of operating the Remington typewriter with which he supposedly wrote his work. After a pointless flashback to Bobby's futile L.A. escapades that further negates any momentum, Banks' film jumps backward in time to reveal the origins of "Hijack." Unsurprisingly, those involve shady wrongdoing on the part of Jack, who found the script on the Internet, convinced the clueless England-transplanted author (Howard McNair) to meet him at a coffee shop, and then embarked upon a ruthless plan made more difficult by a subsequent run-in with a junkie mugger intent on acquiring what Jack so desperately wanted.
Consequently, "3 Holes and a Smoking Gun's" entire narrative hinges on the implausible idea that a talented writer would naively offer up his prized creation online, and then be foolish enough to believe every outlandish fame-and-fortune promise offered by a mysterious stranger. Not helping matters is that Khan's performance never strikes a single authentic beat - a problem shared by Wilder, who similarly overemphasizes every one of screenwriter Scott Fivelson's lines. Marked by exaggerated mannerisms that often threaten to tip the proceedings into outright neo-noir parody, Wilder's and Khan's turns render the talky action ridiculous, and that's before Jack's wannabe-actress girlfriend Sailor (Rebecca Mae Palmer), who's also Bobby's ex, shows up during the third act in order to serve as a contrived complication to their witless battle.
Modest
Director Banks exhibits an unexceptional visual eye during the primary scenes set in Jack's sparsely decorated flat, as well as in the intermittent, on-location trips outside to the streets of Manhattan and L.A. Nonetheless, set to Jason Lewis' functional score, his compositions exhibit only a modest tendency toward show-offery, and thus come across as far more competent than the words spoken by his cast - if not, ultimately, capable of changing the film's overarching direct-to-video quality.
Those seeking a raucous, wholly improvised 21st-century "Annie Hall" need look no farther than Eugene Kotlyarenko's ultra-indie "A Wonderful Cloud." Featuring the filmmaker himself as a transplanted New Yorker in Los Angeles and his real-life former g.f., actress Kate Lyn Sheil, as the visiting ex he can't get over, the film trots out a succession of weirdos and encourages them to spin their alienated angst or trendy imbecility around the mismatched couple as they explore an implausible future together. This freewheeling, sometimes scatological comedy owes more to truth than wit but, not devoid of charm, could catch on.
Katelyn (Sheil) flies out to L.A. to obtain the signature of her ex-lover Eugene (Kotlyarenko) on papers transferring his half of their jointly held clothing venture over to her. Eugene, on his side, harbors hopes of rekindling their affair, though his first stabs at intimacy include taking a dump with the bathroom door open and providing a running commentary on the process, punctuated by graphic sound effects. Eugene tries too hard to be offhand and funny, fudging the circumstances of his L.A. life in awkward avoidance of old sore points in their relationship. Filled with anarchic, almost manic energy by Katelyn's arrival, he jumps up and down on the bed in the absence of any more coherent expression of his confused emotions.
Katelyn, uncertain and wary, torn between feelings of friendly familiarity and longstanding frustrations, films everything on her cellphone in an attempt to gain some distance from the demands that crystallize around her. The self-parodying couple reconnect and re-flounder, on self-consciously slippery ground as they renegotiate their affection through a succession of encounters with L.A. oddballs.
Eugene's friends, a collection of highly individualized misfits, almost seem to represent various aspects of his personality, taken to caricatural extremes. There's self-proclaimed artist Vish (Vishwam Velandy), affable fiend and masturbator, and Lauren (Lauren Avery), still mourning a years-ago breakup, alternately caressing and stabbing a honeydew melon with a Magic Markered approximation of her long-gone lover's face. Joy (Rachel Lord), Eugene's current neurotic squeeze, is more present in her absence, as when she defecates on all of Katelyn's shoes in a jealous rage.
Katelyn, meanwhile, attending parties of the rich and entitled, gathers a gaggle of more socially acceptable dingbats, like the plump blonde (Tierney Finster) who disses everyone in sight, or the entrepreneur (Niko Karamyan), passing around his latest concoction with full descriptions of its health benefits. A meet-up with Paulston (John Ennis), a silver-haired, ascot-sporting couturier straight out of central casting, dangles the promise of fashion success should Katelyn move to L.A., the final ironic blow to Eugene's hopes of reconciliation.
Though highly improvisational and slapdash a la mumblecore, Kotlyarenko's pic proves more anarchic and satirically energetic, showcasing individual actors almost like performance artists. "A Wonderful Cloud" reps the continued reworking of themes Kotlyarenko explored in previous work: His ambivalent relationship with Sheil received a thorough airing in his feature "Skydiver," an amalgam of separately broadcast webcam episodes. His fascination with technological forms of communication, which constitutes the very visual fabric of his debut feature, "0s & 1s," pops up here in the cell-phone footage that opens and closes the film, and in the full-screen fictional Skype conversation between Eugene his real-life Russian mother. But these stylistic intrusions function merely as other aspects of the contemporary L.A. scene, as the film synthesizes immediacy and distance into a more fully integrated, linear narrative.
Legal Disclaimer:
MENAFN provides the information “as is” without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the provider above.