Hollywood (2007/Short Subject)

 

Short: C

 

 

An earlier work done for a college course, Chris Golon’s Hollywood (2007) wants to be an urban drama in the New York School of filmmaking style, yet it is shot in the title location least likely to fit.  It wants to be a sort of detective story with visual allusions to Schrader’s Hardcore (1978) when it delves into the seedy side of the title locale.  It even has that old-style voice over, but then it gets into trouble.

 

Though it is well shot for a video project of the time, editing is not as effective as it could be.  The quest to find the elusive missing girl takes too much of a backseat to a major overuse of hit songs, especially of the Rock genre.  Add a terrible and terribly unconvincing struggle scene and you get a short that does not manage to become as realized as it could have with better choices.

 

The music comes at the expense of exposition and the voice over is too short.  The acting is what you would expect from a student project, but practice and careful choices could have stopped this from seeming so.  So much more could have been done with what was around 11 minutes or so, but too much happens that is unconnected and it becomes an interesting failure at best.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo