SF Indiefest: Filmic Achievement
Way way way back in the day, when we were in school back east, people would ask us what our major was, and we'd reply, "film," then always found ourselves adding, "but we're not actually all that bad." But the truth is that ALL film majors are, in fact, "that bad"; and a Guffmanesque mockumentary called Filmic Achievement (screening in the SF Indiefest this Saturday at 4:30) shows us just how bad "that bad" is.
The story tracks a handful of aspiring twits who've enrolled at UNY, a film school that's almost as clueless as its students. Teachers advise that sets should be meat/dairy free, and that students must consider the camera's "attitude." Students get storycrafting tips from a suspiciously familiar book called "The Hero's Jaunt," which says that characters pass through stages like "Boat to the Hinterland" and "Cuddling of the Prize." One kid's script consists mainly of "something blows up." An aloof student is asked why he enrolled in the school if he wasn't going to attempt to learn anything, and shrugs, "I needed a crew." Rather than admitting that his lessons are "vague," a teacher insists that they "have elasticity." Oh dear God it's ALL TRUE. Barely an exaggeration, Filmic Achievement directly pinpoints the fumbling disappointment that is film school.
Which is not to say that the story doesn't drag a bit. Although writer/director Kevin Kerwin pokes fun at the school's story-structure classes, he might've benefited from adhering to the real-life inspiration for his jokes -- the guidelines that legitimate creative teachers offer for building plot, and character, and thesis. Like its characters' creative works, Filmic Achievement is lacking when it comes to plot points or character arcs. And while it's fun hearing pretentious snob Delvo Christian explain that he's "majoring in semantics and minoring in semiotics," that schtick gets old after a while. There's a few flareups of action and suspense, but in general it just feels like something's missing ... and that something is the first thing that they teach you about in real-life film school: conflict.
If anything, we'd have liked to have seen more of the students' worst. The screening of their work at the end of the mockumentary is tears-down-your-face hilarious; if only there'd been more. ("Why do you run?" muses an old man to a child ... in French.) And the film curiously omits several film-school archetypes, such as the Dude Who Once PAed on a Commercial and now Thinks he's an Industry Insider, or the Guy Who Works Godard into Every Conversation, or the Chick Who Thinks "Self-Referential" Automatically Equals "Meaningful." What about them? Ah well, maybe in the sequel.
Filmic Achievement is a fantastic revenge fantasy come to life; it's a poking-fun of the pricks who we hated (and were) back in school. "My goal is to be almost as good as Quentin Tarantino," says one character, and immediately we think of two or three friends who WERE that guy. "It's a film term," sniffs another, and we knew people who were him, too. "Being a teacher asks SO MUCH of me," sighs a self-congradulatory teacher, and holy cow we were in a guy's class who was EXACTLY like that. These folks' silly dialogue is, in some cases, word for word identical to the crap we lived in for four years.
More than that, though, it's a revenge fantasy on film school itself, or on anything you ever pinned false hopes to: joining the Army just to get away from small-town life, or your parents who bought a computer but won't use it, or campaigning for a candidate who then turns around and acquires a taste for building more downtown parking lots. When you've got goals as narcissistic as "making people feel as deeply as I do" or as unrealistic as making an erotic feature-length version of Little Red Riding Hood, you can't help but turn defensive and a little ridiculous when they flop.
Filmic Achievement screens Saturday at 4:30 at the lovely and voluptuous Women's Building. Ticket sales have been unjustifyably slow on this picture (the screening on Wednesday had way more empty seats than it deserved) so if you see it -- and you should -- you'll get tons of indie cred for checking out an underdog.