Scratch

To my disappointment, the Boston Underground Film Festival’s copy of Able Edwards was flawed or scratched or something and they were only able to show the first fifteen minutes of the movie. It was a keen enough fifteen minutes, though.

I could have sworn I’d written about this movie before, but I can’t find the post in the archives. Able Edwards is a thinly veiled Walt Disney (Mickey Mouse becomes Perry Panda) who is cloned after an ecological disaster in order to revitalize Disney. Er, revitalize Edwards Corporation. According to other reviews, the cloned Edwards suffers an identity crisis of some sort. Regrettably, we didn’t get that far.

It’s another green screen movie, a la Sin City and Sky Captain. This is the seriously low budget version — it’s as if Kerry Conran hadn’t gotten funding for Sky Captain and had decided to go ahead anyhow. Most of the backgrounds are scanned photographs. By the time the DVD started skipping, I was sort of feeling as though the scanty live action sequences were stretched awfully thin over the technological scaffold, but the first fifteen minutes was also very expository in nature. I wouldn’t be surprised if the pace picked up later on.

Either way, Graham Robertson (the director, screenwriter, and one-man army) has done something pretty impressive. (Particularly at a cost of only $30,000.) There’s a great quote on the film’s website: “Francis Ford Coppola once said there would come a day when some little fat girl from Ohio could borrow her dad’s camcorder and become the next Mozart of moviemaking. We would like to think that Able Edwards is that little fat girl.” Maybe not Mozart; definitely a good start.

The BUFF folks were, by the by, very polite and apologetic about the problem. So no ill-feeling there, poor guys. Hopefully it’ll play at FanTasia this summer and I’ll get another chance to see it.