Review of The Leisure Class (2012) by Mark C — 04 Nov 2015

I thought the movie was visually striking, the performances were sound (Bruce Davison's performance was sheer brilliance), the score underwhelming and the writing flawed but with solidly compelling moments. I assume this is due to the time constraints on the production.

The problems with the writing had less to do with character, rather the plot pressed situations and had characters reacting unrealistically to situations in order to move to the next scene. For instance, while I found Tom Bell's character Leonard realistic at its core, his reactions and behaviour felt falsely nihilistic rather than truly characteristic. Returning to the house with a hooker claiming to Ed he knew how to make it right... these types of situations just felt laboured and contrived. Metaphorically, rather than figuring out how a male cat would react to having a tomcat encoach on it's territory, they just threw two cats in a bag and threw it into the audience.

That being said, the fixes to Fiona's character worked for me. She had depth of character, despite having shallow values.

The strongest scene in the film for me was when Edward confronts the brothers, then turns on the family. Yikes! Despite the discomfort it was an extremely powerful scene.

Overall, I thought it was a decent flick that didn't know whether to be more farce or cerebral. I only laughed out loud once, when Edward wakes up with penii pained on his face. That being said, I wish they'd gone the cerebral route rather than beating us on the soles of our feat with gags.

While watching Project Greenlight, I felt that director Jason Mann was overly picky, despite everyone's claim to his being a genius and respecting his vision, which is fair enough. It's great that he has an aesthetic vision, the film was beautiful to look at and I did notice continuity problems with the lighting with which he expressed concern. But you know what? If that information hadn't been telegraphed during the episodes, I probably wouldn't have noticed. They didn't really fix the car crash, there was a noticeable jump in the cut during one of the shots. My take? He needs to learn how to properly prioritize. Hopefully, that will come with time.

I.