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Niador
Reviews
Pinching Penny (2011)
A struggle to sit through. Pointless and irritating.
It's been said by others, but this just looks and feels like a looooong student film. And not a good one. It drags on and on while nothing of interest happens. The acting by the lead is good, but the rest of the film is garbage. The characters all look like young friends playing dress-ups and there isn't even a hint of credibility or 'realism'. There's no feeling of any real threat, either. To anyone. The 'medic' was beyond idiotic. Was all the red light meant to make it feel like 'hell' and he sold his soul to the proverbial devil? Well, it didn't work. It just made it look even more like an amateur production. The 'story' is irritating. The editing is terrible and overly complicated, trying to be stylistic and cool, but just coming across as pretentious and annoying. A lot of the slow motion sequences with music are completely pointless. The characters are all silly, boring, and dull, and the swearing feels fake and forced, with no real emotion behind it... or anything, for that matter. I had to sit through this garbage for professional reasons, and was a real struggle. Rest assured that my company at least will not be touching this train wreck. It's a waste of time and money. And the weakness was not the lack of money. Better films have been done for less. The weakness was the over-directing, the pretentious editing, and the utterly terrible writing. As you can tell, I absolutely hated it.
Edit: Do the people posting the fake reviews here really think that anyone would be stupid enough to believe them? If they do then I guess those gullible people deserve to sit through this joke of a film. However, since most low budget pieces of garbage (as opposed to some genuinely good low budget offerings) have a bunch of overly excited fake reviews by family, friends, and people involved in the film claiming it to be the greatest thing ever, I guess that assuming anyone would be gullible enough to believe those reviews is even more of an insult to the public than the film they want to dupe you to see.
Acting Out (2007)
Unfortunate.
I was excited to see this film, and although it was made with some degree if skill, it was a massive disappointment. The first problem is casting a 28 year old to play a high school student. As soon as you see her she is unbelievable in the role, and thus you can't connect at all. All through the film it was laughable that she was a student, so it was hard to take it seriously. With the amount of young and talented actors available, I am astonished by his terrible casting choice. She would have been fine playing a role more suitable, so it is not the actor's fault. The course language and harsh attitude simply don't work. I like scarface and other films that use excessive course language, but only if it WORKS! It doesn't here, because it doesn't seem natural. The dialogue is simply horrid, appalling, and all other words that mean TERRIBLE. The delivery is almost always unnatural and forced. It is well shot and well put together, with good music, but there is no real story and it takes ages for anything remotely interesting to happen. They probably thought the writing was clever on the page, and that's what it seems like. A good attempt that just didn't work. Melodrama like this really isn't very interesting. I couldn't even watch some of it because it was so boring. It's really annoying that films like this keep on getting made, which is crippling the Australian film industry and giving it a terrible reputation. I didn't end up watching the end, I couldn't. I tried but I just couldn't. So hopefully I missed out on some great twist or explanation of that terrible casting choice (again, not the actor's fault, although she should not have accepted). Yeah, you made a film, and I'm sure that at the wrap party everyone was proud. And I'm sure that the cast and crew screening finished with enthusiastic comments on a job well done. But a film is for an audience, and so what if you got to make a film that doesn't entertain, or enlighten, or work?
Instead of watching this, try watching something like the American TV film 'Speak' for a low budget teenage angst masterpiece. Or Thirteen. Or even the Australian film 2:37 (even though it is a rip-off of elephant.)