Director:
Cory Reeder
Studio/Production Company:
Renaissance Man Productions
Genre:
Drama
Length:
Feature
Website:
http://www.myspace.com/onceandforall_themovie
Score:
2/5
Ambitious while not being wildly original, writer-director-actor Cory Reeder’s portrait of the ups and downs of a relationship is more a hybrid of long form music-video/musical and narrative. That is to say that, the bulk of the film is essentially little wordless vignettes edited to the songs from the Foo Fighter’s album “Echoes, Silence, Passion & Grace” (breaking one of the top ten rules of indie filmmaking, if not all filmmaking: Do Not Use Copyrighted Music If You Do Not Have The Rights Or The Budget --- something that I actually teach on Day One or Two of most of my classes, in the How Not To Write A Screenplay lecture) mixed with occasional “home video” sequences of a couple, Him (Reeder) and Her (Jennifer Ross), trying to keep their relationship alive despite convincing arguments to take it off life support ---- basically lots of things are going well until someone, usually him and his drinking problem, screws it up.
The idea of setting a story against the soundtrack of existing, well-known music is nothing new – from Disney’s “Fantasia” to Julie Taymor’s “Across The Universe” to Stanley Donen’s “Singing In The Rain” among others, filmmakers have often found inspiration in the music. Whether or not the music of The Foo Fighters has achieved the cultural stature to deserve the dramatic adaptation treatment is not a question for a film review however it is quickly clear that complete appreciation of the film will really depend on viewers appreciation of the music since it, more than the melodramatic screenplay, is the real foundation of the film with both characters, her (oddly) more than him, lip-synching to Dave Grohl.
More than anything else, “Once & For All”, while generally well-produced, comes off as a vanity project, a platform upon which Reeder’s Him can spend a lot of time brooding, smoking, drinking, acting like a tortured artist/lost soul and bounce back and forth between scenes with Her and his new sort of girlfriend (Hollis Sherman-Pepe), The Bartender. The narrative is slight at best and taking the approach of mixing the longer music video sequences mixed with much shorter improv style segments and a handful of more conventionally produced scenes really feels like a device to avoid actually writing a screenplay.
Cory Reeder
Studio/Production Company:
Renaissance Man Productions
Genre:
Drama
Length:
Feature
Website:
http://www.myspace.com/onceandforall_themovie
Score:
2/5
Ambitious while not being wildly original, writer-director-actor Cory Reeder’s portrait of the ups and downs of a relationship is more a hybrid of long form music-video/musical and narrative. That is to say that, the bulk of the film is essentially little wordless vignettes edited to the songs from the Foo Fighter’s album “Echoes, Silence, Passion & Grace” (breaking one of the top ten rules of indie filmmaking, if not all filmmaking: Do Not Use Copyrighted Music If You Do Not Have The Rights Or The Budget --- something that I actually teach on Day One or Two of most of my classes, in the How Not To Write A Screenplay lecture) mixed with occasional “home video” sequences of a couple, Him (Reeder) and Her (Jennifer Ross), trying to keep their relationship alive despite convincing arguments to take it off life support ---- basically lots of things are going well until someone, usually him and his drinking problem, screws it up.
The idea of setting a story against the soundtrack of existing, well-known music is nothing new – from Disney’s “Fantasia” to Julie Taymor’s “Across The Universe” to Stanley Donen’s “Singing In The Rain” among others, filmmakers have often found inspiration in the music. Whether or not the music of The Foo Fighters has achieved the cultural stature to deserve the dramatic adaptation treatment is not a question for a film review however it is quickly clear that complete appreciation of the film will really depend on viewers appreciation of the music since it, more than the melodramatic screenplay, is the real foundation of the film with both characters, her (oddly) more than him, lip-synching to Dave Grohl.
More than anything else, “Once & For All”, while generally well-produced, comes off as a vanity project, a platform upon which Reeder’s Him can spend a lot of time brooding, smoking, drinking, acting like a tortured artist/lost soul and bounce back and forth between scenes with Her and his new sort of girlfriend (Hollis Sherman-Pepe), The Bartender. The narrative is slight at best and taking the approach of mixing the longer music video sequences mixed with much shorter improv style segments and a handful of more conventionally produced scenes really feels like a device to avoid actually writing a screenplay.