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The world is hard for Miles (Austin Hillebrecht), who has finished film school and can’t find a job in the industry. To make matters worse, he’s got a crush on his best friend, Caitlyn (Nomi Summa), whose feelings for him are a complete mystery.
After months of scouring possible openings and being turned down, a strange set of circumstances leads him to Bourgeois Pictures, a movie studio that’s plagued by a high strung director and has loads of money problems. With some sneaky finagling, he manages to get hired by the studio head, Rick (David Loftus), who states that he can start the next day. His first day, however, confuses Miles greatly, as the director, Adrian (Corey Brunish), seems completely out of touch with the material being filmed and is as quick to throw you off set as to greet a new worker.
Fearing the worst, Miles decides to rent a bunch of movies that were created by Bourgeois and, to his horror, discovers he’s now working for a cut-rate B-movie studio that makes the most cliched movies imaginable with awful editing and awful effects.
He tries to stick it out on set, but, after a few weeks, it’s more than he can bear and he hatches a plan to steal the film’s script and change things up himself. As he can’t do it on his own, he appeals to the film’s DP, Buster (Dennis Fitzpatrick), to help him. With Buster in his corner, Mile’s is able to recruit many other members of the crew to stand up against the “man” and take filmmaking back to an idolized “guerrilla” beginning.
There are some things that Coup de Cinema does very well, and other places it struggles. Considering that it started as a student film that stretched over 30 unconnected shooting days, these struggles are definitely understandable.
The overall story arch is pretty enjoyable, as we can all relate to the concept of staging some sort of coup in our work place, especially if we’re filmmakers and we see people bastardizing the art for their own private gain.
With that said, there are a number of extremely cliched plot devices woven throughout the film. For example, when Mile’s team is shooting extra scenes at night as part of their coup, Adrian finds out about it the next day, through an infernus ex machina (as opposed to deus ex machina) situation where he discovers a pair of head phones that happen to link up to a microphone that his audio guy has forgotten to turn off while he talks with Miles about all the secrecy involved in creating new audio after hours. As everyone’s portrayed as being gun-shy in the film, this seems just too blatantly artificial (especially since Adrian can’t be bothered to read the script or pay attention to his actors, so him suddenly deciding to find unknown headphones and put them on seems like quite a bit of a stretch). With that said, because this is a film about hijacking a B-movie with too many clichés, it’s quite possible that this was intentional. (Either way, I would’ve liked to have seen a few less obvious twists.)
Of course, the biggest problem with a movie about making movies that are about looking at problematic moviemaking practices is that it gets a little hard to follow, sort of like tracking the body of the oroboros. This becomes most noticeable in regards to the acting, which is a bit too over the top from everyone but Dennis Fitzpatrick as Buster. As with the plot devices, the question is, was this intentional? If they wanted to emulate the campiness present in the type of movies explored by this film, it very well might have been. (And the fast paced editing reinforces the feeling of intentionality, especially due to the incredible telescoping of time toward the end in which approximately 40% of a feature film was shot, edited, and exported in 24 hours!)
From my experience, if you’re going to examine over-the-top characters within a film, even if you’re intending to make it campy, then you’ve got to have more discernible differences between the characters that the actors inhabit in the film you’re telling and the caricatures they inhabit in the film within the film. In cooking, we often talk about sweet and savory—contrasting flavors that pull out the entire flavor profile. Done properly, contrast causes flavors pop, whereas, if you were to ignore the contrast and, say, double the sugar, you would have a cloyingly sweet dish that would be harder to eat. Right now, Coup de Cinema is a bit too much like the latter, with characters that go from believable at one moment to excessive the next moment. For future films that might choose this sort of sense of humor, I would just encourage the filmmakers to fully decide what type of humor they’re shooting for and work on making the differences more easily recognized.
Finally, the ending is pretty solid. It does navigate through a number of additional cliches toward the finale, but it closes on a nice and rather unexpected note. (And eventually concludes with a nice homage to Swingers, which was, in turn, an homage to Reservoir Dogs).
Shot on the Canon 5D Mark II and the Canon 7D DSLR cameras, the footage looked very nice with an impressive depth of field. The shots were well laid out and framed, and the color grading was pretty consistent for most of the film. (There were a few times where there appeared to be a bit too much orange in the lighting on the lead character, such as in the café scene where Miles is recruiting Buster, but, overall, these were pretty negligible.)
The introductory and exiting series of credits for this film were really well done by co-director/lead actor Austin Hillebrecht, who might easily find professional work as an animator with these two elements on his demo reel!
The overall editing was also well done, although, as I mentioned before, sometimes it drew extra emphasis to some of the acting issues.
The visual effects were done quite well, with some being so well incorporated that they were seamless (such as a sequence where one of the actors in the film lights himself on fire, which really does feel more like a practical effect), while a muzzle blast of a gun later in the film felt a bit too artificial. (Of course, as a disclaimer, I’ve spent the last six months working on muzzle blasts for World of Depleted stuff, so I guarantee I’m a bit more neurotic than most viewers will be! With that said, Andrew Kramer’s VideoCopilot.net site has some really great FX training and his Action Essentials 2 collection is one that I’ve personally used quite a bit for these sorts of things, although you do need to combine a few of the assets together.)
The only effects that I would really comment on needing to be addressed more thoroughly are in regards to a video camera that Miles uses toward the end of the film. Part of the story element is that the camera is down to only 1 minute of tape and they’ve got to get all the footage they need before the tape runs out. However, there’s no second countdown to build suspense and this lack of a countdown feels like a mistake. Of course, as is often the case with bridging reality with filmmaking, many DV and HDV cameras don't actually have a second countdown in regards to the end of your tape. Nonetheless, as the camera has essentially been turned into a “time bomb” in regards to a plot device, the seconds countdown is needed to make the sequence feel more complete.
The audio is really well done and was the largest (and, in my opinion, best) overall expenditure of money on the film. Other than the fact that the audio’s master level could probably be raised 2-3 dB to make it easier to watch without headphones, it was really great. Foley and sound design elements were also well done!
The music, written and performed by co-director/lead actor, Austin Hillebrecht, was also well designed. It fit with the overall feel of the film, especially the more manic scenes toward the latter part of the film.
Considering this feature film was shot over 30 non-consecutive days and had $6,000 in audio expenses, I would say its $15,000 budget was really very reasonable! As this began as a student project and funds were low, the creative team successfully used Kickstarter.com to raise half the budget! Since much of this extra cash would have been represented in the audio of the film, this was an especially smart move!
For B-movie fans, this film will probably have a fair amount of lasting appeal. For me, I found the concept interesting and the byplay at times entertaining, but wouldn’t probably rewatch it, largely because the transitional type of acting left me uncertain whether to treat the film more like a straight comedy or campy heist flick.
For a first feature film for most of the core creative team, this is really quite impressive. With that said, it does have some content issues that pulled me out of the story from time to time. If more acting contrast can be used in future films, then I definitely think the folks behind Coup de Cinema have a very bright future ahead of them in film!
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Content |
7.0 |
Visual
Look |
8.0 |
Use
of Audio |
9.0 |
Use
of Budget |
9.0 |
Lasting
Appeal |
5.0 |
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7.6 |
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The
director of two feature length films and half a dozen short films, Jeremy Hanke founded Microfilmmaker Magazine to help all no-budget filmmakers make
better films. His first book on low-budget special effects techniques, GreenScreen Made Easy, (which he co-wrote with Michele Yamazaki) was released by MWP to very favorable reviews. He's curently working on the sci-fi film franchise, World of Depleted through Depleted: Day 419 and the feature film, Depleted. |
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