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| Images courtesy of Mangoland |
Parody or tributes are the purest form of flattery and
they’re becoming more common in a post-Tarantino universe of movie homages as
an art form unto itself. Whether its
showing off your letterboxd account lineup or your poster collection on your
wall in between your shelves of countless DVDs and blu-rays, everyone who gets
into film has an eagerness to share and impress with what they know. The problem is finding your own voice and
craft amid a sea of boundless inspirations coming at you from all directions
and often in earnest filmmakers misinterpret empty cribbing and name dropping
as a sign of having mastered the art of original creative storytelling. At a certain point, too many obvious outside
influences threaten to discolor or cloak whatever you were trying to say as we
just find ourselves hung up on homage for its own sake.
If you’re wondering what I’m rambling about, I had a look at
short-film indie filmmaker Jeremy Berkowitz’ microbudget podcasting pressure
cooker Sydney. Basically about a
podcast consisting of three characters who are hired and increasingly poked and
prodded by Jeremy with mounting hostility and endless angry rants, the film is
building up to…something or other. While
featuring an up-and-coming character actress Callie Bussell in the titular role
of Sydney alongside Kevin Marus and Jeremy Berkowitz more or less
playing an iteration of themselves, this multi-media multiple-aspect-ratio
driven ‘slow burn’ doesn’t know whether it wants to be Richard Linklater’s Tape
featuring three actors in an intense closed space or if it wants to
recreate the black lodge from Twin Peaks or the closing curtains credits
shot from Blue Velvet.
When the film co-written by Berkowitz and Alexander Kang is
trained inside the podcasting room with Sean Mouton’s camera gazing back and
forth between the trio, it rambles but seems to have a unique premise. The idea of making a film around a podcast
that steadily goes awry and uncomfortable if not borderline sociopathic is a
novel one. But then Berkowitz gets bored
with his own story and amid a series of intertitles intended to function like
Lars Von Trier chapters, he starts channeling and even quoting Lost Highway with
the time-honored David Lynch motif of a black highway at night scrolling past
the camera. For what it’s worth the film
is decently acted with Callie Bussell from the recent low budget unofficial Crow
film holding her own against a litany of tawdry dialogue largely coming
from Berkowitz himself. The
cinematography is crisp though it can’t decide if it wants more aspect ratios
than Christopher Nolan or more recently Andrew Dominik.
Released on the director’s YouTube channel while touring
festival circuits, Sydney feels like an attempt to steal back the title
from Paul Thomas Anderson’s Hard Eight when it isn’t showing off posters
for Inherent Vice. Very clearly
Berkowitz loves PTA and Lynch and at one point name drops Stanley Kubrick and
even slyly references a certain Tom Green vomitorium. But love and admiration for your heroes does
not mean imitating them is the way to go.
Somewhere in Sydney is a decent exercise in experimental
minimalist theater akin to the aforementioned Richard Linklater film but it
gets lost in pointless Lynch shoutouts for no real reason in scenes that flat
out boot you out of the film. I wish
Berkowitz the very best in his future filmmaking endeavors but he needs to find
his own niche away from his heroes.
--Andrew Kotwicki
