Short Film Critique:     89¢    Director: Dhimitri Ismailaj    Expected Rating: General Audiences    Distribution: No Exclusive Distribution    Budget: $8500    Genre: Psychological/Philosophical    Running Time: 19 minutes    Release Dates: May 15, 2005    Website: Click Here    Trailer: Click Here    Review Date: April 15, 2006    Reviewed By: Monika DeLeeuw-Taylor Final Score: 8.0 How do we critique films? Click Here To See.

Agim is like most young men his age. He is balancing work and school, trying to maintain his independence from his parents, and find his way in life. He is studying at art school, and while he wants to make art that touches people's hearts, he is at a loss as to what he should paint. His mother often calls to check up on him, and she urges him to talk to his father, yet Agim resents that his father still treats him like a child.

But the pressing issue that Agim faces is whether or not to buy a cell phone. He wants one badly - he doesn't particularly need it, but is entranced by the freedom that seems to come with such technology. TV commercials around him advertise a special sale - for only $1.25 a day he can get the phone he dreams of. Yet they are promptly followed by ads for World Vision - for 89 cents a day, he can feed a starving child on the other side of the world. Agim is thus torn between his desire for the latest technology and that which his conscious knows is the better choice.

Content
This is a very interesting story. It deals with a subject that everyone, at some point in time, will have to think about - whether to be self-serving or self-sacrificing. There are some very interesting exchanges of dialogue, particularly between Agim and a blind beggar who he runs into by accident and later dreams about, and from the drunken ramblings of a man at a bar that Agim visits. Even though this is a short film, it's still a great "thinking" movie, particularly because it takes a very complicated subject - humanity and selfishness - and expresses it through a simple action - whether to buy a cell phone or give the money to charity.

In the scene in which Agim first encounters the blind man, the man's acting seems a little forced, though his philosophical voice-overs later on sound a lot better. In addition, there were some other moments where the acting could have been a little better.

The ending to the film was good, and one leaves the movie feeling just a little bit better about the human race. However, given the psychological nature of the film, it might have been nicer to leave the movie a little more open-ended; to wrap it up in such a way where the audience could use their own pessimistic or optimistic imaginations as to what the main character ultimately decided.

	This film uses an ethereal, dreamlike color scheme, golden in daylight... ...and green in the nighttime.

Visual Look
I really liked the visual look of this film; the strange colorations of orange and green hues really added to the dreamlike-quality of the movie. On the one hand, this made it rather difficult to distinguish between reality and dreams. But, on the other hand, the entire movie seems like one long dream, and once Akim wakes up, having made his decision about the cell phone, the coloration seems normal, making one realize the entire thing was in fact one whole dream sequence.

There are also some interesting moments in which the dialogue that is heard does not match the movements of the characters. This would look odd, except for the fact that it matches well with the whole dreamlike aspect of the beginning of the film.

This type of ambiguity fits in really nicely with the psychological aspect of the film - this type of film is meant to make your audience think, and if your film can reflect that visually, it becomes all the more strong. Think Memento - the way in which the film is edited together - virtually telling the story backwards - puts the audience into the mind of the main character whose short-term memory extends no further than the length of each segment of the story. This type of editing made Memento the great movie that it was.

There were also some nice juxtapositions within the film. For instance, there is one scene in which Agim is sitting in front of his TV, calculating the cost of the new cell phone. When another ad for World Vision comes on the screen, he tries to ignore it, paying attention to the figures in front of him. He then leans back on the couch, and we can see a poster of Mother Theresa just behind his head. This is a nice and rather ironic twist that he sees Mother Theresa as an important enough person to hang her picture on his wall, and yet he is fighting the urge to emulate her and help someone who needs it.

There were some jump cuts in the film that sometimes felt a little disconcerting, though in the beginning they matched pretty well with the dreamlike quality of the majority of the film. At the end, however, when Akim is on the phone with his mother, there is a jump cut to a close-up shot of the curtains on the window, then another jump cut back to him on the phone. This is a very awkward movement, and there seems to be no good reason as to why it happened. In addition, the feel of this last segment of the movie seems to be more in reality that in the "dream world," so any strange jump cuts seems very out of place.

[Writer's Note to Director: One last issue I had was with the menu on the DVD, as there were no options to chose from, just an image screen. It didn't take me too long to figure out how to play the movie, but some people might be really confused as to how to do so. It would be advisable to at least include a "Play movie" button on the menu, just to make it a little more user-friendly.]

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