Room 36

Director: Jim Groom
Starring: Paul Herzberg, Portia Booroff, Frank Scantori, Nicola Branson
Production Budget: ~US$300,000 (guesstimate)
Running Time: 90 min
Released: 2005

Set mostly in a seedy London hotel, the Midlothian, Room 36 is a tale of mistaken identity, although in this case it is the identity of the room that causes the confusion. In room 36, an obese salesman (Scantori) awaits a prostitute (Branson), while next door, in room 38 a hit-man (Herzberg) has arranged a meeting with a young, female MP (Booroff). All it takes is one chipped room number and things go horribly wrong.

"It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, 'What's that package up there in the baggage rack?' And the other answers, 'Oh that's a McGuffin.' The first one asks 'What's a McGuffin?' 'Well' the other man says, 'It's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.' The first man says, 'But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,' and the other one answers 'Well, then that's no McGuffin!' So you see, a McGuffin is nothing at all." - Alfred Hitchcock.

This film took 11 years to make, due to one disaster after another, including death, fire and Kodak's decision to stop producing the film they were using half way through filming. Yet the director persisted, and it was well worth the effort. The grainy black and white looks fantastic, giving it very much the feel of a film noir or early Hitchcock. It even has a classic Hitchcockian McGuffin, in the microfilm the MP is supposed to be delivering to the man who turns out to be a hit-man. Yet it is also very funny, at times almost to the point of slapstick. The acting is excellent, not even considering the budget, and the 10 year commitment many of them made to it with little or no pay.

Groom's only other movie was 1991s The Revenge of Billy the Kid which centred around the mutant child of a farmer and his goat (get it, Billy the Kid). I haven't seen it but am intrigued, and who wouldn't be?

I urge you to seek out this film, so then in another 11 years we might get to see what Groom comes up with next.

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Hey Borat! Show me the money!

So I went and saw Borat yesterday. This is a very funny movie and I was intending to do a glowing review. A clever movie filmed on virtually no budget, documentary style, just the kind of thing I love. Imagine my horror, when, in the course of my online research, I find out that 'virtually no budget' is actually US$18M. I am outraged.

Some movies are lauded as $5M movies that look like they cost $20M. Well, here's a movie made for $18M that looks like it cost $100,000.

Let's just see if we can work out where all that money went.

Sets: zero (it is filmed entirely on location in Romania and the U.S.A.)
Cast: 3 credited (all other people on screen are real people, reportedly unpaid)
Special effects shots: 1 (a black bar over Sacha Baron Cohen's willy). FX crew: 1
Costuming: Borat wears the same suit (never washed) throughout the movie
Bears: 1

The previous weeks highest grossing movie in the US, Saw III, cost $12M, has a cast of 27, complex, specially built sets and an 11 man visual effects crew. That sounds like pretty good value. Admittedly it didn't have any bears in it, as far as I know.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe it is really expensive to make a movie look this cheap. I can't really see why, though - surely the easiest way to make something look cheap, is to make it with very little money. Certainly, if the entire thing was a setup, it would have cost a fortune to stage. However, given the publicity surrounding the 'victims' of Borat and subsequent litigation it is pretty clear that the majority of the film was not setup.

I can only think of one cost the could blow the budget out that high. Wages.

I have one word for Mr. Baron Cohen... percentages. If you are the creative force behind a movie project, or any kind of big star, have enough confidence in your success to take minimal payment upfront, and a percentage of profits.

Another possibility is that the production budget included a large war-chest to fund the inevitable lawsuits that followed the release of this film, à la Google's Youtube purchase. I doubt it, though, and that doesn't count as a 'production' cost anyway.

Regardless, I can't and I won't review this movie, as much as I'd love to.

Even though Borat has passed $100M at the box-office, I just hope they realise that by not making this movie for less than $10M they will be missing out on the significant revenue that would have been generated through a full review on this site. According to Google Analytics, there have been 11 unique visitors in the past week, not including Meatpopsicle and myself. That's right, 11, Mr. Greedy Baron Cohen. Think about that next time you make a 'low-budget' movie.

Clerks II

Director: Kevin Smith
Starring: Brian O'Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Rosario Dawson, Jason Mewes, Kevin Smith, Trevor Fehrman
Production Budget: US$5 million
Running Time: 97 min

In 1994 I was an innocent 18 year old. I believed the Death Star was built by bad people, that the number 37 had no particular meaning, and if anyone had asked me to make like a Circus Seal I would have clapped. Then I saw Clerks, and my eyes were opened. This was the greatest "No Budget" film ever made (US$27,000). Smart, funny and extraordinarily crass, I loved every minute of it. So, 12 years later, has Clerks II opened my 30 year old eyes?

Most of the original male cast returns, older, fatter and no better at acting. There is poor loser Dante (O'Halloran), at his last day at work before moving to Florida and getting married. There is his best friend Randall (Anderson), who seemingly spends most of his life trying to ruin Dante's. And, as always, there is Jay and Silent Bob, the perpetually loitering local drug dealers. The two main additions are Mooby's manager Becky (Dawson, who can act) and nerdy, god-fearing 19 year old Elias (Fehrman, who can act, weirdly), aka Optimus Prime, the butt of many a Randall put down. And there's a donkey.

The story pretty much mirrors the original: Instead of the Quick Stop convenience store, Dante and Randall now work at fast-food restaurant Mooby's, and we once again experience a day in their lives, with all the hijinx and emotional turmoil it entails. The jokes are all there, be they scatalogical or sexual, or sexually scatalogical, or about drugs, beastiality, racism or The Lord of the Rings. Before seeing this movie, I had never realised that you could put the words 'ass' and 'mouth' together with a simple preposition and get something so distasteful. It's not outrageous, splitting your sides funny, but it does have a lot of great jokes, the kind you'll want to quote among your friends (but not your grandma). Awkwardly, it also has a lot of melodrama, which tends to fall flat through parts of the movie, although I guess the romantics in the audience probably appreciate it more than I do. And it does have a surprisingly emotional and uplifting ending.

So, to answer my own question, no, I am not a changed person for having seen Clerks II. Basically, it's Clerks all over again, with different jokes, colour film and a donkey. The main thing that was missing was originality, and I didn't have the same "I'm cracking up because I can't believe they are saying that" experience I did with the first movie. But I did have an enjoyable hour and a half, and I look forward to seeing it again on DVD.

What are you waiting for? Go and see it, you little porch monkey. And take your girlfriend... tell her it's a romantic comedy, with a donkey.

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