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90 Days Visa is intended to be a slapstick film in the pattern of movies like Beverly Hills Ninja and Tommy Boy, with Stacey playing the bumbling hero who has to come to grips with who he is. However, because of the scripting issue, many segments of this film were painful to watch as the main character would attempt to be absurdly stupid and over-the-top, while side characters would try to be even more over-the-top or, conversely, spontaneously realistic. This led to no one being believable in this film, which, as logic dictates, prevents the viewer from suspending his disbelief and being taken along for a ride. Additionally, because of the improv nature, the actual storyline did not wind into a very useful conclusion. Eventually, Stacey simply is beaten down to the point that he realizes that if he doesn’t believe what society is saying about him, then he must be deluded. While this may be a stoic message, it doesn’t really leave the audience with a good taste in their mouth. (It’s quite possible that the intended message was that Stacey needed to learn to be himself and not try to be something he’s not. However, due to the aforementioned issues, this wasn’t clear at all.)
Due to the over-the-top acting issues, as well as some audio issues which will be mentioned later, I would actually recommend a rather unusual step to salvage this film. In fact, I’ve never given this advice before and may never give it again. For a short segment in this film, the directors’ desaturated the film, turned it a light sepia tone, and replicated an old silent film for an especially slap-sticky segment between Stacey and a strangely Caucasian bum in Shanghai. To my pleasant surprise, this segment worked perfectly and, once I saw it, I realized that the over-the-top facial and body acting accompanying most of the characters acting in the rest of the film would actually be perfectly suited for a silent film. (Silent films, incidentally, also did not have scripts. Scripts were largely brought into existence for films with the advent of the talkies.)
As such, I think this entire film should actually be converted to a silent film. Before this is attempted, some time will need to be spent watching old silent films from the 20’s and 30’s to make sure that the actual damage done to the film looks authentic. (You can actually seem some really impressive silent films in Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant Garde Film 1894-1941, a collection that can currently be purchased from Anthology Film Archives.) In addition to creating a truly original film through this process, the filmmakers will now be able to choose more streamlined comments for use in the text placards that will replace conventional dialogue. This will allow them to make sure that the audience comes to the ending that they want them to and will prevent them from being confused.
Visual Look
While this film takes a great look at areas of Shanghai, there were some issues with the visual look of this film. While continuity of motion edits and grainy night footage were an issue in certain scenes, the biggest issue that occurred was cross-cutting between two aspect ratios which were conformed to 1.85:1. It looked like part of the film was shot in a squeezed 16:9 aspect ratio in the Sony PD150 camera and part of the film was shot at normal 4:3 aspect ratio. Then, when the film was edited, it was all squashed down to 16:9 letterboxed. Unfortunately, all the 4:3 shots were squeezed down along with the 16:9, causing the actors to become foreshortened midgets in these segments.
[Note to the Directors: The correction for this is to squeeze only the 16:9 shots and create a 16:9 letterbox matte for all the 4:3 shots. You’ll have to reposition the shots in the 16:9 matte, to prevent people’s heads getting cut off, but this will yield a consistent look throughout the film.]
Use of Audio
Again, with this being everybody’s first feature film, there were a number of issues with their audio. (As someone who has learned the hard way about audio issues, I completely understand how they can crop up, especially in a first film with a largely untrained crew.) The folks were trying to make do with a normal camera microphone on a boom, which yielded several problems.
Part of the film was redubbed, and these redubbed sequences were actually fairly well synched. Unfortunately, these redubbed sequences had no room tone or reverb added to them, so they sounded very surreal. The parts that were not redubbed ranged from somewhat echoey with excessive room tone to very echoey and distant when the actors were just too far away from the mics.
[Note to the Directors: For future films, it’s highly recommended that you purchase or borrow a good shotgun mic, like a Sennheiser ME66 (which is a short gun mic good for closeup work) or ME67 (which is a long gun which permits you to be farther from your actor when recording), either of which will run you around $350-$400. For economical shotguns, short shotgun mics need to be around two feet from your targeted actors and long guns need to be about three to four feet from the actor.]
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