41 (2012)

41: Directed by Glenn Triggs. With Chris Gibson, Dafna Kronental, David Macrae, Shane Lee. A young man discovers a hole in the floor of a local motel that leads to yesterday.

“This is an amateur film and parts of it are good, but for the most part it is still very amateur. Perhaps the best aspect is the directing and editing, which are probably good enough for mainstream film, but nothing amazing. The editing was well done, but again, fairly standard. Like any amateur film the acting ranges from reasonable to bad, but thatu0026#39;s not exactly the directors fault given the limited budget.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eBy far the biggest problem is the script which at times is quite poor, most noticeably when attempting to pose deep, metaphysical questions. At times I could hear the voice of the director speaking through his actors, and this sounded inept. In amateur film the scripting and plot are perhaps the only things not really held back by a restricted budget, and unfortunately neither aspect was that good. The film failed to evolve a coherent sense of empathy for the main protagonist, it feigned emotion more than produced any and nothing ever really became that interesting or exciting. Some characters, most noticeably the cops, were little more than 2-bit clichéu0026#39;s, and there were quite a few moments which were unnecessary, melodramatic and time-wasting. u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eHaving said that itu0026#39;s not unwatchable and as amateur film goes itu0026#39;s probably one of the better ones. But the director, in my opinion, is not ready to make feature length titles and needs to develop his abilities further, especially his screen-writing and scripting if he wants to write his own material. On the positive, however, I have seen Hollywood films that annoyed me far more and thatu0026#39;s saying something.”