The Action Shorts I (SBIFF 2018)

Reviewed by Keyu Zhu. Viewed at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, 2018

There are five movies in total in the Action Short movie including the short film “Abroad”, “Couch for Sale”, “Santa Claus” and so on. The short movies were all well performed and above the average level. There were all very outstanding so that could be selected out of 3000 entry movies. The first film is called “Couch for sale”, it is totally a talking and conversation film basically about a guy who try to sell the coach which contain a lot of his memory to another girl who think it is not worth that much. The negotiation between them brought a lot of interesting facts. The guy who cannot get out of the zone that he used to be in love with his ex-girlfriend until know he realized that she won’t come back and this couch was the last thing that can remind him of this memory, so he didn’t want to face that the couch is only worth 20 dollars but not 40. As the talking between him and the girl, he finally decided to sell the couch in a more proper price and even want to give her for free because he did not want to remember this anymore. The short is only like 7 or 8 minutes but actually very interesting to watch. The unique thing about the film is that the good use of intro which is basically setting Craiglist as the background to show us all the cast and producers. Also, the movie was set to be a conversation and talking film because of the low budget. The ending is also creative when the guy was staring at the desk and thought about his ex-girlfriend.

The next film is called Abroad,which was directed by Zayn Alexander. It is the movie about two different people is making choice between the marriage or following their dream and career. The whole movie is about the screenplay with two character arguing their future and work.However, the conflict between them and their family seemed to stop one of them to following their dream. At the end, the couple just broke up on their engaging day, which could be considered as a tragedy. Some movie reporter said that “In a world of full of overly expansive special effect-driven movies which have a little terms of story, we need more movie like abroad.” I totally agree with the point and it also means that the movie got a good script and good performing by two characters. The film is also fast-paced with close lighting, it is all happen in a room.I personally really like the film because we really don’t know what will be at the next, the script is not systematic but stylic. It is very hard to tell an amazing story with such low budget. I just realized the reason the movie will be selected not only because of the contribution made by the director but the contribution made by the cast.