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Movie Review: “We Make Movies” Gives The Finger To The Art Of Filmmaking

[yasr_overall_rating]
 

A heartfelt and hilarious comedy chronicling the ups and downs of a group of college students who spend their summer making a movie for their town’s Film Festival.

Once in a blue moon, a film comes by that is so unabashedly misguided, it defies description – or a coherent review. What in the world was Matt Tory thinking when he put together his lame excuse for a crew and proceeded to shoot the incoherent mess that is “We Make Movies?” In my mind, he got high, binge-watched “The Office,” thought, “Hey, I could do that Michael Scott thing, but, like, about making movies and shit,” and then called his film-nerd friend, who was, like, “Totally, dude, it’ll be like a micro-budget ‘For Your Consideration’ meets ‘Ed Wood’!.” They then got high together while working on the script, and decided, screw it, we’ll do the Larry David thing and just come up with random outlines, sketches, and puns – mostly revolving around character names (“Stevphen”), town names (“Boehring”), riffs on Hollywood franchises (“Dreidel to the Grave”) – and so on and so forth. As a result, they produced a film so awkward in pacing, intent, acting – literally very aspect of production – that it falls under that rarefied “zero-star” film category, having absolutely no merit for existing. Only due to my unadulterated love of filmmaking did I cringe through the entire almost two-hour (!) length of this garbage.

One of the main issues is that Tory’s just not NEARLY wise/savvy enough to satirize popular films, rendering his jokes futile and tasteless. From the get-go, “We Make Movies” starts with two cinematic tropes in one second: the pointless “Based on a True Story” gimmick, instantly follow by a California desert shot, with the titles proclaiming “Arabia.” Do they mean the entire Arabian Peninsula, spanning ‎3.2 million square miles? I wish that were the joke of the scene – how redundant location credits in films can get – but no, the plot swerves wildly, “panning back” to reveal that it’s director extraordinaire Stevphen’s (Matt Tory, tackling the mighty task of writing/producing/directing AND starring) crew working on an ultra-ultra-micro-budget film set. A wild vortex forms – an abysmal director, Matt Tory, making a film about abysmal filmmaking that satirizes abysmal Hollywood productions – sucking the entire enterprise, and its audience, into a dark, dark abyss of cinematic depravity. Tory’s purportedly incisive stabs at clichés if that’s what they actually are, happen to make one long for the clichés he satirizes.

Stevphen and his right hand, Donny (Jordan Hopewell), argue about executive producer credit and coax their “star” friends Garth (Jonathan Holmes) and method actor Leonard (pronounced “Lee-o-nahrd”) into being in their new film (the latter starved himself for six hours once for a role – are your sides splittin’ yet?). Stevphen’s “film” is titled “A New Don: Part II” (“It’s like ‘Star Wars’; after they see this one, they’re gonna be dying to see what happened in the first one”), and Tory makes us follow the characters through a painfully unfunny table-read, acting in front of a green curtain, etc. “He’s like my Sundance Kid, the Burt to my Ernie… Tonto, to my Walker Texas Ranger” is just an example of a line reading, which probably made Tory’s crew’s guts bust with uproarious laughter. “Shalom, suckers!” a rabbi yelps, machine-gunning away – trust me, it sounds way more amusing than it is.

I’m all about supporting micro-budget filmmakers whose ambition and skill overshadow a lack of production values – see my review of the minuscule budget “People” here. Yet when a film, as earnest as its goals may be, is done this poorly, with no sense of pacing or comedic timing, it makes me sad that we live in an era where anyone with a bit of cash can grab a camera and consequently pollute Amazon Prime with their crap. While there are certainly benefits to talented filmmakers having the ability to publicly express themselves, the downside is, turds like “We Make Movies” are churned out on a daily basis, polluting VOD “Recently Added” lists. Time is precious, as is the art of filmmaking – “We Make Movies,” which could have been shot by my 12-year-old sister, is a sad waste in regards to both.

There’s absolutely no reason for anyone to see “We Make Movies,” a flimsy, cheap and poorly acted so-called “satire” on filmmaking, especially when great films, like David Mamet’s “State and Main,” Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood,” Robert Altman’s “The Player,” or even Tom DiCillo’s micro-budget mini-masterpiece “Living in Oblivion,” deal with the subject in much more artful, confident – and most importantly, bitingly witty and entertaining – ways. Those directors know the cinematic world they inhabit and satirize. Matt Tory either needs to stick to his day job or “make way more movies” – and much better ones than this heap of junk – before he can claim the right to poke fun at the industry. Let’s hope he spares us.

Now available on Amazon

 

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[…] the recent catastrophe that was the micro-budget “We Make Movies” (read review here), here’s an example of what a talented filmmaking team can achieve on a minuscule budget. Liz […]

Alex Saveliev

Alex graduated from Emerson College in Boston with a BA in Film & Media Arts and studied journalism at the Northwestern University in Chicago. While there, he got acquainted with the late Roger Ebert, who supported and inspired Alex in his career as a screenwriter and film critic. Alex has produced, written and directed a short zombie film, “Parched,” which is being distributed internationally and he is developing a series for a TV network, and is in pre-production on a major motion picture.