Sonnet 21 is a little playful in that, despite the writer lavishing colorful poetry on his subject in the other sonnets, here he turns round and plays down the need to praise, but rather just to let the beauty of his subject speak for itself – and those making a big play of it with fancy words and comparisons, are just missing the art of truth, which of course his love has. With film 83 in the series, it would make me look smart and self-referential if I could do the same for this film, under play how good it is and let it speak for itself. Problem is that I cannot mainly because the film is not much good.
The sonnet lacks a meaning to the words; I confess I do not know anything about the choice of location, so maybe there is a meaning in that which I am not aware of, but otherwise there is nothing here to help the viewer connect to the words. This is not necessarily a bad thing since straight delivery with a good performance has worked in other films here; however with this one we do not get that, because the camera just keeps moving around. We get lots of different shots, few for any reason other than just keeping the camera moving. We also get lots of stuff I don't care for – like soft-focus, odd movement of the camera, and other effects like this. None of it adds much, but what it does is make things harder for the actress, since her delivery is all fragmented up – without a narrative connection to the text, it needed to be all about what her performance brought to the film, but the film works against her on that.
The 'look' of the film is a bit amateurish I am afraid (although I could do nothing better with 10 times the resources!); sound quality is also variable depending on the shot – some is tinny while other scenes are fine. Generally though, what causes the problem is that the film isn't sure of what it is doing itself and as a result the camera just seems to drift around and the actress is left speaking words, not delivering content.
The sonnet lacks a meaning to the words; I confess I do not know anything about the choice of location, so maybe there is a meaning in that which I am not aware of, but otherwise there is nothing here to help the viewer connect to the words. This is not necessarily a bad thing since straight delivery with a good performance has worked in other films here; however with this one we do not get that, because the camera just keeps moving around. We get lots of different shots, few for any reason other than just keeping the camera moving. We also get lots of stuff I don't care for – like soft-focus, odd movement of the camera, and other effects like this. None of it adds much, but what it does is make things harder for the actress, since her delivery is all fragmented up – without a narrative connection to the text, it needed to be all about what her performance brought to the film, but the film works against her on that.
The 'look' of the film is a bit amateurish I am afraid (although I could do nothing better with 10 times the resources!); sound quality is also variable depending on the shot – some is tinny while other scenes are fine. Generally though, what causes the problem is that the film isn't sure of what it is doing itself and as a result the camera just seems to drift around and the actress is left speaking words, not delivering content.