We Make Movies (2016): Behind the Indie Scene...Sorta

We have all seen them. Some of us have even been them at one point. That group of guys that hang together in a parent's garage or basement, seemingly never having girlfriends; really there's no seemingly to it, there just are no girlfriends for these guys. When these guys get together, which is usually about 20 hours out of any normal day to begin with, one of four things can happen: they can have a VHS movie watching session, they can break out the Dungeons & Dragons game, they can have an orgy (wait, wait, negate...oh gawd NO), or they can make a movie. For the love of humanity let's please focus on that last one.

A group of friends (5 guys and 1 girl) with apparently nothing better to do for the summer, you know like jobs, plan to make a movie over the summer to show at the Boehring Film Festival at the end of the summer. Led by Stevphen as director, who fancies himself to be a Stevphen..I mean Steven Spielberg in the making, this group rapidly fractures, fissures, or any other f-word you might like to use, apart at the seams, and of all things somebody wants to make a documentary of this!

Let's meet our intrepid filmmaker wannabes:

Stevphen (Matt Tory; also writer & director) - Lives with his mom, has never been laid; kissing doesn't count, and even if it did...has never been laid. Thinks that taking 'inspirations' (ahem) from blockbuster movies and throwing them into one script will make a successful movie; only the crickets in the background agree with him. Wants to appear to be a serious filmmaker if people would just stop interrupting him for trivial things like dinner.

Donny (Jordan Hopewell) - Has never been laid nor will he ever be laid. An accountant in the making, like I never saw that one coming, he is also Stevphen's best and most loyal friend. Just don't ever call Donny anybody's footstool; lawnchair, yes, but not footstool.

Garth (Jonathan Holmes) - Despite sharing his name with a Wayne's World character, has been laid and will be laid shortly. Has a singular trait not shared by any of the rest of the group; common sense. Also known as Gartholomew and Garthica despite his protests not to call him that.

Jessica (Anne Crockett) - The pretty girl who hangs with the group. Could easily hang with other pretty girls but then why would she want to as with this group she is showered with attention and the best gifts money can buy at a local yard sale.

Leonard (Zack Slort) - Pronounced Lee-on-ard. Too busy honing his craft by improvising scenes in public to get laid. Most likely considers Robert E. Howard to be a role model.

Curtis (Matt Silver) - Could get laid but would prefer to do it himself. Film school student and amazingly a thorn in Stevphen's side without even trying.

Kurtis (Josiah Finnamore) - Not actually a member of the group but a thief who has the shrewdness to con Stevphen by telling him he looks like a director, just before stealing his car. The fact that Stevphen is wearing a baseball cap that says director on it is completely oblivious to him.

I had a hard time figuring out where I would be going with this review. Watching a movie for review, you generally know by the end of the movie how you would rate it; at least I do. But how you arrived at that rating might be more difficult in some cases.

For me there are a few annoyances with the movie. At an 1 hr and 51 mins it does linger at times, and having spent too much time with these characters in the past I really don't want to spend that much time with them now. I do feel that a little too much of the story focuses on Stevphen's crush on Jessica and becomes redundant early in the movie. Additionally the jerkiness of the documentary style filmmaking is a bit trying on one's eyes and patience. That being said, there are more things that lean in the favor of this movie than the few annoyances I have mentioned.

Don't get the idea that the jerky camera movements of the documentary style is a sign of amateur filmmaking. It is not; these people know what they are doing. The script is well put together. It pulls together a lot of stuff that would be familiar territory to anybody who has had dreams of being a filmmaker, starting with their own amateur home videos, and then runs with it headlong, mocking it in almost every conceivable manner, and making fun of themselves as they go. There are a lot of laughs in this, at least there was for me, and of course at the expense of the characters involved.

I'll give them extra kudos for maintaining a consistent audio level. In one scene where the camera changed position frequently, there was not a single glitch in the audio track for the scene. The mockumentary camera movements and wide iris, though blinding at times, are on purpose. The look of this and laughs to be had in the script are not by accident, but purposefully and creatively staged to look raw.

I give it 3 1/2 Daggers

Availability

Get it in various formats via their website.

Check out the We Make Movies IMDB page.