It’s a very difficult thing to review a small local film. Everyone is rooting for the little guy; hell, I am too. It’s understandable. It’s easy to sweep certain things under the rug that any normal big-budget production would be held to account for.
I believe that when your film is being sold in theatres at 10 dollars a ticket, especially if it is your second film, it is even more vital that the critics offer both the good and the bad of these independent films. Not only does the viewer deserve to know what they are going to be spending an hour of their evening on, but the makers of the film deserve to see through the lens of their audience the flaws and the gold we see.
That all being said, let’s go over the plot first. “Saving Black Bear” takes place in a small-town movie theater where the kid-manager (played by director Nick Cassidy) is about to move away to try and make it big on the West Coast. The staff decided to make a sort of mockumentary to commemorate his final days. This doubles as the film’s main styling and the source of a few of its issues.
All the while, the movie theatre’s financial problems are made apparent by the theatre’s owner, Skip, who says the business was going under if he couldn’t raise $20,000 dollars to pay off his greedy landlord. The group decides that the only solution is to break into said landlord’s summer home, stealing items worth the money, then selling to save the theater.
It’s a competently shot film featuring good angles, fair cinematography and decent music choice. I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention the fantastic energy that was generated by this film. I saw it on its premiere day and I have never seen Black Bear Cinemas so full of people. It was impressive and a testament to what these two and their crew have accomplished as private filmmakers, especially when their budget was only $15,000 dollars or so.
I’m sure that some of you have heard this kind of plot before, most famously done by “The Blues Brothers” in 1980 and less famously by “The Three Stooges” in 2012. It’s your typical “come on guys, we gotta save the orphanage, it’s do or die time” kind of story, but it doesn’t start that way. The film starts by jumping between scenes of the actors talking into the camera like out of an episode of “The Office.” It takes a bit for the film’s plot to actually kick in, which usually is fine, but the problems become apparent immediately as the characters begin to talk.
The dialogue in “Saving Black Bear” is nothing short of mind-numbing. So much of the dialogue is just “uhs” and “likes” and “yeahs.” Even the most illiterate of high school students don’t sound nearly as bore-ish and just plain hammy, especially when Skip gives his heartfelt speech about the closing of the theater, which is one of my larger critiques of the film.
This is a bit of a stinker, but very clearly a fun stinker. The crew seemed to have fun while making this film and despite the rushed production, they managed to squeak out a film that can be considered on par with something like “Blair Witch Project,” but only as far as the mockumentary aspects go. This film is still a messy, poorly written film, and you can see that in the film’s third act, where the film finally remembers it has a plot and needs to wrap itself up. Despite this, I sincerely hope to see more from these two guys. What they have done shows great passion, especially with their work on their first film, “Childish Things” and I think that with enough time, they’ll make something truly fabulous.
