Videotape is way too cheap. Because it’s so cheap, we’re all being subjected to this so-called “DV Revolution” in filmmaking, whereby anyone with a camcorder and some rudimentary editing software on their computer can shoot a bunch of stuff and call themselves “filmmakers.” Sure, this has technically been possible for a number of years now. The difference is that now it’s starting to catch on. Festivals are starting to program more and more of these “DV Features,” thereby conferring a certain undeserved legitimacy to many films that otherwise wouldn’t even exist because making movies used to be expensive enough to weed out most of the pretenders.
Now, however, we’re stuck with a whole bunch of camcorder movies that are full of amateur actors at best, if not just friends of the director. Films with “lighting” that consists of turning on the wall switch. Films like “One Thousand Years.”
Maria (Mara Gerstein) and Emma (Abby Paige) are a couple of twenty-something best friends who seem to have nothing better to do than hang out at parties with presumably unpaid extras. There, Maria meets the dangerously dashing Keith (Soren Gray). While Maria is just part of the field for Keith, she begins falling for him hard and turns to Emma for advice. Unbeknownst to our smitten heroine, however, Emma has developed her own crush…on Maria. How will this ever turn out?
Trust me, you won’t care because these are some of the most uninteresting lead characters ever committed to film. Oh, wait. Make that videotape, which is as good a material as any on which to store this film’s pointless ramblings and repetitious “moody” padding. “One Thousand Years”? That’s about how long it feels like it takes to get through this piece.
Director Gabriel Fleming would have been in much better shape had she jettisoned her dull and uneventful main story in favor of this film’s subplot: A Man from 1,000 years in the past (Phil Young) and a Woman from 1000 years in the future (Nancy Stone), characters in a short story Emma reads to Maria throughout the film, meet in the present day to find and return with a book on how to prevent the apocalypse that will otherwise wipe out their respective civilizations.
Now THIS is interesting stuff, told without a stitch of dialogue, that Fleming wastes as a metaphor describing Emma’s feelings for Maria. Cut off the dog and save this tail, because the tail at least tells a STORY. And good stories are always interesting to watch.
Even if they’re shot on videotape.
