Mean Creek…
Half way through the movie, Christine leans over and whispers in my ear, “look what they’re doing here… filling in empty pages with scenery.”
Always the producer this one.
Mean Creek was last weekend’s movie. A dark horse in the screening running, I had never seen it before and so was hesitant to put it up in front of the rest of the crew for fear of it being shitty or completely irrelevant. I was quite happily surprised.
The film was shot for $500,000 with quality actors and was, quite honestly, rather impressive. It was simple, elegant and Hella-entertaining. And I suppose that this simplicity is why the movie was able to pack a lot more into $500,000 than most films shot for 3 times that:
- small-name but extremely talented actors
- simple narrative that centers on a single primary event
- (as Aristotle would say) unity of time and space (i.e., the movie didn’t occur over a vast number of locations or extensive length of time)
- most scenes were dialogue-driven
- slow pacing punctuated by lovely montage sequences
Any other thoughts out there?