Point System
The Web is full of entertainment that complements another
piece…or many pieces.
Sometimes, they’re fleeting connections, the way similarities
can appear when you’re flipping between late night movies on TV. At other
times, it’s as if they were part of a double- (or triple- or quadruple-)
feature, a thematically-connected bill at the local Bijou.
Take this Issue’s Net Movies selection, “DAMNED IF YOU DO,” in
which a newly-dead man tries to qualify for Hell, and our last Issue’s Net
Movies selection, “IN GOD WE TRUST,” in which a newly-dead man tries to qualify
for Heaven.
Director/Writer Jimmy Zeilinger reportedly got the script
idea for “DAMNED”…in which David, frustrated by a life of disappointments,
tries to break every Commandment to get into the endless party in Hell… when he
saw Charleton Heston in “THE TEN COMMANDMENTS” and noticed that the actual 10
Commandments weren’t named.
In “IN GOD WE TRUST,” Robert must get a few more points to
enter heaven. Apparently, both Heaven and Hell are point-based; too bad one
can’t use those left-over air miles.
Interestingly, Jason Reitman, director of “IN GOD WE TRUST,”
directed another short film, "CONSENT," in which lawyers for a soon-to-be-intimate
young couple negotiate the legal points on a sexual consent form while the
would-be lovers wait patiently on the bed. The idea that emotional, intimate
occasions—love-making, death—can be determined on a point scale is both
inherently funny and…given the plethora of get-into-heaven-if-you-do-this
clerical sermons and calibrating guides to sexual behavior…quite close to
implied standards. "I think the humor comes
out of the darkness in the material, the fact that these characters speak so
frankly about life and death,” Reitman says, speaking about a recent feature he
directed, “THANK YOU FOR SMOKING”…but he could also be talking about two short
films that, together, are by-the-numbers guides to the hereafter.
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