Absolut (2004, Romed Wyder)

Ah, the "warped reality" screenplay. Kind of the One Ring of screenwriters, it seems to offer limitless power ("Ha! Fooled you! The world is really an illusion created by alien bureaucrats!"), but easily leads to corruption ("Ha! Fooled you again! It's really the fantasy of a English housecat!"). Here, we have a young man who loses his memory of the past few days after a car accident -- which is unfortunate, because he was in the middle of some corporate monkeywrenching, and isn't sure if he completed his mission, or if the authorities are on to him. He volunteers for a new scientific procedure to recover his memories (via the use of a magic hairnet) -- but which memories are real and which are blah blah blah. Wyder is pretty good with the paranoia -- background characters continually turn up at various places, and it's unclear if they're villainous agents or harmless bystanders or figments of the hero's imagination. The straightforward digital photography, all those grey-blue tones that seem to visually define the 21st century, is well done, if not groundbreaking. And, narratively, it moves well, which is always one of my sticking points. But the problem with the warped-reality story is that it, almost by definition, moves well; since we're always unsure what's real, we're always on the edge of our seats, so the problems the screenwriter must solve come after that. How, for example, does one insert disruptions into the story's reality without it seeming arbitrary? And what, ultimately, is the reality distortion for, narratively and thematically? Wyder's script doesn't tackle these problems adequately; the only big revelation here is that corporations will do unethical things to protect themselves [slaps cheek with mock surprise]. Bonus points, however, for scoring a Mission: Impossible-lite sequence to a Young Gods song. Good job, Gods.

[Note to David Pittner, should he be reading: Your script Parson Street was better than this, imo.]

[Yet another note: The highlight of my only 2005 SIFF movie to date was getting to meet socialretard and decadentscholar, two very cool people whom I hope to see again in the future. In the words of Paul Young, "Come back and stay for good this time..."]