11:14

Written by Cool Hand Luke

Tuesday, 04 October 2005

Circular storytelling - a kind of artistic dog like chasing the tail - is always hard to pull off, but makes for fun in the US indie show 11:14.

This being a cool site, there's only so many times you can slag off Australian product - a right and cool thing to do, since it's usually like a pig in heat snuffling through slops - and there's only so many times you can moan about Hollywood action shows designed for boys with an intellectual age of 12 and an emotional age of 8, though it's nice to see bloatware like Stealth get shot down in a stream of anti aircraft fire.

Sometimes you have to step out into the world of indie product, but it's a dangerous and difficult task, since indie product often features sensitive tributes to minority groups and move at the pace of a funeral train (though if you live in Glebe or Carlton, that can be fun of a curious kind, as shown by the height challenged, slow paced drama The Station Agent).

Well 11:14 is a little different to the usual indie product, being cruel and cynical, and quite happy to kill off characters to keep its circular story telling ticking over. It's out in the remainder bin of rental stores right now, and well worth picking up for ten bucks.

Of course it wants to be Go, Run Lola Run and Memento, all great films, and all worth a second look, and it doesn't have quite the money or style to make the grade.

But more importantly it wants to entertain. Writer director Greg Marcks, who looks awesomely young as he muses about ant farms in the extras, keeps it short - only the end credits take the running time over the 80 minute mark, and he keeps things moving briskly along.

It's a bit hard to describe the plot without doing spoilers - after all the beginning's sort of the end, and the end is sort of the beginning - but it all starts with a body htting a car on a freeway. The hapless driver thinks he's killed the victim, but as things unfold, the story backtracks over a number of plot lines, and we see the way lives and actions intersect.

Marcks has a grim sense of humor about what goes down - including a missing penis out on the highway, a bowling ball doing good service in a grave yard, and a shooting in a convenience store - along the lines of the kind of bizarre coincidences already given an airing in Donnie Darko, whereby an airplane engine might land in your living room.

He's also assembled a good cast - including Rachael Leigh Cook, Colin Hankes, Henry Thomas, and yes, good ol' Patrick Swayze, keeping his Donnie Darko arthouse credentials alive. Hilary Swank, who also garners an e.p. credit, does a nice turn as a convenience store clerk.

It's nice to see cast help out a talented young film-maker. While it sometimes has the air of a post graduate thesis on this kind of film-making and runs out of steam a little as the plot convolutions begin to bite, Marcks is a talented young film-maker. Let's hope he gets to do a few more shows with fire in the belly before he begins making bloatware for the Hollywood beast.

MRA has picked the show up for release, and while their track record is very up and down, here the show looks quite good, and there's a few interviews on the disc.

Some people would die rather than watch low budget indie product, but if you've just come off watching The Dukes of Hazard, this might be the only way left for you to check you've got a brain and a good, black ironic sense of humor. If you haven't, off to the footy and leave the movies to the rest of us.

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