Gosh, another movie that is well conceived and poorly executed, this time built around what I call folding. Storywise, it is between "Be Kind, Rewind," and "Is There?" which features the same boy actor, the same setting of an English privately run old folks' home in 80's England and the same parental issues.
Here the main fold is a movie about a kid making a movie that is based on another movie. The following is true of both the movie we see and the movie we see being made: the result is bad, but we are told that it is endearing so we are supposed to let the poor film-making pass.
The extra origami is planned to come from folding this into two other "performances." One is the roles invented and played by schoolchildren to convince themselves and each other that they matter. This comes from the bully role of the buddy who starts the movie, a situation of a preening "cool" French kid who is visiting, and what appears to be a severely cut series of episodes involving older kids and their comparatively comic roles and costumes.
The other is the notion of prescribed roles that must be played by parents, here prescribed by religious rules.
The folds as written are combined clumsily. The map to religion we "see" by visions of an imagined story that becomes the movie within, but presented as drawings superimposed on the pages of a Bible. To map to the schoolyard bits, we have similar drawings on the walls of the school. Its a bit literal, but it gets worse: when the inner movie takes off is when the role played by the French kid and his posse map into the roles in the Rambo film, the merger literally happened in a church, with some obviously deliberate staging.
And there is even a focus on watching and watches, and not one but two demented elderly watchers.
Get it? Jees. So much for the writing, but you have to give the writer-director credit for also working on folding these elements in the cinematic sense. There are transitions between "real life" and the various inner roles and stories. Unfortunately, this visual overlapping is done with two distinctly different kinds of animation, neither of which match the various forms of drawings from the boy through whose eyes we see all this.
If I had an annotation tool that pointed to scenes, I could show how all this tries to work and could have with a bit more visual coherence.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
Here the main fold is a movie about a kid making a movie that is based on another movie. The following is true of both the movie we see and the movie we see being made: the result is bad, but we are told that it is endearing so we are supposed to let the poor film-making pass.
The extra origami is planned to come from folding this into two other "performances." One is the roles invented and played by schoolchildren to convince themselves and each other that they matter. This comes from the bully role of the buddy who starts the movie, a situation of a preening "cool" French kid who is visiting, and what appears to be a severely cut series of episodes involving older kids and their comparatively comic roles and costumes.
The other is the notion of prescribed roles that must be played by parents, here prescribed by religious rules.
The folds as written are combined clumsily. The map to religion we "see" by visions of an imagined story that becomes the movie within, but presented as drawings superimposed on the pages of a Bible. To map to the schoolyard bits, we have similar drawings on the walls of the school. Its a bit literal, but it gets worse: when the inner movie takes off is when the role played by the French kid and his posse map into the roles in the Rambo film, the merger literally happened in a church, with some obviously deliberate staging.
And there is even a focus on watching and watches, and not one but two demented elderly watchers.
Get it? Jees. So much for the writing, but you have to give the writer-director credit for also working on folding these elements in the cinematic sense. There are transitions between "real life" and the various inner roles and stories. Unfortunately, this visual overlapping is done with two distinctly different kinds of animation, neither of which match the various forms of drawings from the boy through whose eyes we see all this.
If I had an annotation tool that pointed to scenes, I could show how all this tries to work and could have with a bit more visual coherence.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.