PLEASE DON’T
Here’s my
top ten list of short films people never need to make again:
- Twenty something trauma in your
rented flat. Drama and conflict free essays in narcissism. Sorry your
girlfriend/boyfriend left you but you know what? When you get older it
won’t matter. And if you put your twenty minutes of sitting in a kitchen
smoking and staring into space to an indie soundtrack you deserve
executing.
 |
| What a great idea for a film |
- Zombies. It used to be vampires
but then it was zombies. It’s probably demons now.
- Street musicians are wise. Or
interesting. Same with fire jugglers or anyone who may attend a festival.
See: devised theatre.
- Middle class boys wearing suits
in underground car parks pointing guns, swearing and shouting into each
other’s faces. Arguing over a suitcase full of something mysterious is
equally dull.
 |
| Hey, no one's done this before! |
- Drugs. Films about drugs are as
boring as the people who take them. It’s not about cool. It’s about
interesting.
- Raising your head and looking
into a mirror to see how haunted you are. Not necessarily a film per se,
but a cliché we never need to see again. See also any film where the
protagonist sits on a beach looking at the waves. With an indie
soundtrack.
 |
| Get a job |
- Films about young people. You
may be a young person and think whatever you’re currently going through is
important. It isn’t.
- Love I.T.? Know how to do CG?
Brilliant! Just don’t do an I Am Legend/Monsters knock-off about you alone
in a deserted, abandoned city.
 |
| Hey, this already exists. So you don't need to do it less well! |
- Work in an office? Don’t like it? Poor you. Funnily enough though – all bosses aren’t shits, and
you’re actually a twat. Jobs are crap but ordinary people seem to manage
them without casting themselves as Joseph K.
- What is the nature of love? Are
relationships possible in an existential universe? I don’t care and nor
does anyone else. You don’t actually feel any more nor wound more deeply
than anyone else. The difference is, they go and do dramatic and
interesting things worth making films about.
 |
| You win. No one in the history of the world has ever understood suffering the way you understand suffering. At seventeen years old. I need to know about that via the medium of short film. |
There you
go. Totally unfair and biased. So what. I could have mentioned super heroes, martial arts and manga but I don't want to upset people.
