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Supertalk
The best
thing about Cinequest is the fact that I get to hang out in
the Hospitality suite and meet and greet a lot of the directors,
writers, actors, and press. Now, this year, I had the honor
of meeting a bunch of great people, and one of them, Mr. Adam
Reist, director of the short film Back 2 One, and I
got to talking about the Fanboy Planet site and he gave me
a copy of an earlier short he had done called Supertalk.
I didn't get around to watching it for a while, but if there
was ever a short film made for the fanboy set, this is it.
Supertalk
began with a contest in WIZARD. It made a challenge to readers
to come up with a 5-minute movie on comics, something that
you should never do, since our type are apt to try and meet
the challenge. The boys got together and wrote it and filmed
it, the result being Supertalk, a movie that goes over
the time limit by 300%.
The film
is the story of the Dr. Flora Harbinger show and a night's
worth of callers. Dr. Flora, Kathleen Chalfant, is every bit
the stone-cold bitch that her near-namesake can be. Chalfant
plays her big, but not so big that you feel like it's merely
an impression. She actually brings a fair amount to the character
that you wouldn't expect from the real deal, and I found myself
more interested in her than in the callers, which is odd when
you consider that they were all superheroes.
Yep, every caller that night could be found in the pages of
various Marvel and DC comics. All of them calling under their
alter-egos, the jokes that you expect are all there: Clark wondering
if Lois can "handle him," Diana wondering why she
and Supes never hooked-up, Spiderman lamenting loss, and Robin
questioning his relationship with Batman.
Those
of us who are familiar with the comics will laugh, even though
the jokes are obviously coming down the pipe. The calls are
very well done, never feeling like a tired, one joke moment.
Each is developed further, and the interaction between Dr.
Flora and the callers are great. When the lines start crossing,
things get funnier.
The callers'
voices are played by some pretty big stars. Billy Crudup of
Almost Famous, a few soap opera stars, and a couple
of Broadway performers (including the awesome Alice Ripley)
are the callers, though none of them appear as themselves
on screen. The shots of the callers are handled so you never
see their faces, which took some doing, but cinematographer
Dylan Sanford handles things beautifully, making the shots
work and giving a signature look to the film that works in
both the gritty talk radio sense and the superhero worlds.
Shot in
and around New York City, the production values were fantastic,
and it felt like a film that a studio would have made for
internal enjoyment, like the Trey Parker and Matt Stone films
done for Universal.
This is
the work of fanboys, and I missed a couple of jokes that were
there, and I felt like I should know. It has been a while
since I read any Hulk. It kept me going the whole way through,
and at twenty minutes, it's longer than most of the short
films I favor, and I was never bored. Maybe it could have
been a couple of minutes shorter, but the pay off at the end,
the classic twist that you knew had to be coming, makes it
all worthwhile.
So, go,
get thee to www.supertalkthemovie.com
and find out all about it. See it! Recommend it to folks.
Movies like this get made all the time, and this one is by
far the best I've seen in ages, and almost none of them get
much respect, regardless of quality. Supertalk is well
worth searching out, and if folks get to talking, more fanboy-centric
films may make their way to us.
All in
all, I like me a good comic book comedy, and this one is really
good.
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