Realizing
that their mutual strapping-young-architect friend lightning-rods away
the attention of all the ladies, pals Ben and Mike, with the aid of all
the technology can muster, plot to force he and his office crush into
all-consuming love.
* * *Port Washington was made by
Ben Heckendorn,
best known as a guy who cracks open classic video game consoles and
converts them into portables. His flagship project, of which he's since
made six or seven revisions, was a portable Atari 2600:
He's
done the same for Atari computers, the NES, the Genesis, the Super NES,
and even current systems like the Wii and XBox 360. But he's also a
filmmaker! While his earlier movies
Possumus Man,
Adventure!,
The Adventurous and
The Lizard of Death aren't without charm,
Port Washington
represents a quantum leap forward. Heckendorn says it's the most
complicated project he's ever taken on — four years for postproduction
alone! — and, considering the look of the soldering inside some of
those portable beasts, that's really saying something.
That this
is a movie made by a non-professional filmmaker with whatever sets,
props, locations, and actors he happened to be able to acquire is both
neat and distracting, neat because even the simple stuff carries with
it a "How'd he do that?" factor, distracting because, well, even the
simple stuff carries with it a "How'd he do that?" factor. Thus I
couldn't experience it straight, as a story; I was too busy thinking
about the production. As with most micro-budget indies, I couldn't
resist hunting for seams, for those little giveaways that call out the
film as something less than "real": what's that awkward framing hiding?
Doesn't that restaurant look suspiciously unlike a restaurant? Was that
out-of-scale cop green-screened in? They say there are three kittens,
but did they only use one? This doesn't come out of any film
schadenfreude — I actually really admire what Heckendorn and company have accomplished — but I couldn't fight the instinct.
An
old maxim, one primarily repeated by foley artists, says that sound
constitutes half the film-viewing experience. I'd say it constitutes
more; if your movie has bad sound, you might as well pack it in. Sound
was evidently a problem during production — maybe they forgot to use a
boom mic? — which, according to the
production timeline, resulted in dialog re-recording session after dialog re-recording session. And even so, if any element of
Port Washington
gives the game away, it's the inconsistent sound quality. The lines
sync well with the speaking actors, and you can always hear them — in
any indie film, no trifling qualities — but the texture of the
recordings varies. Background hiss, for instance, rises and falls from
line to line.
But that's a quibble. The fact of the matter is that
Port Washington
is both a lot of fun and, given the resources available for its
production, pretty damn impressive. Slightly less than half of it
operates as a "normal" romantic comedy, portraying the unaware Steve
yearning for Erica the receptionist while his scheming, hard-gaming
buddies look on in pity. This is the less enjoyable part of the movie;
hyper-polished slickness characterizes the modern romantic comedy, so
any indie equivalent — much less one with not-that-actor-y actors —
suffers by comparison. The more enjoyable part of the movie, the one
where nearly all its strengths come on display, is the half where Ben
(Heckendorn himself) and Mike (Heckendorn's
podcast partner Jason Jones) execute their devious, gadgetry-intensive tricks to get Steve and Erica together.
First, they dispatch Erica's incumbent boyfriend by photoshopping his face into the middle of a
Girls Gone Wild-like
tableau and leaving the printout in a conveniently discoverable
location. Then, to ensure that Steve doesn't repel his
ladyfriend-in-waiting with his decidedly un-girly taste in music and
movies, they break into his car and rig the stereo to loop "I Want to
Know What Love Is" and bribe the theater guy into pretending that
The Phantom Menace is sold out, but
Notting Hill
sure isn't. (It's a period piece — a 1999 period piece.) Then Ben must
do battle with the projectionist in order to splice a fake
anti-depression PSA ("The love of your life could be sitting right next
to you, in this theater!") into the trailers. Then, in order to give
the couple some alone time, they drain Steve's gas tank and shoot out
one of his tires. But it's not enough! A high school friend of Erica's
surfaces, so Ben and Mike tackle him the only way they know how: by
breaking into his apartment and leaving goat porn lying around. And
even that doesn't completely do the trick; by the end, a grenade, a
jet-ski, a grappling hook, a stolen convenience store security camera,
a handgun modified to fire tranquilizer bullets (which Ben uses
throughout with gleeful abandon), and a rocket launcher have all been
employed in the service of nascent couplehood.
It's in the
Ben-and-Mike-centric scenes that you really see the filmmakers having a
good time. As much as they serve to move the story forward, the
segments with Steve and Erica alone don't work nearly as well. True,
without them there wouldn't be a movie, but nobody's heart seems to be
in their scenes. But when Ben and Mike, say, pull off their final,
most-dangerous-yet plan to isolate the still-tenuous pair on the
titular pierhead,
that's when the joy of making this thing shines through. It's a
"chick-flick" bolted onto a "guy movie", and clearly the latter
components work a little better, but Ben Heckendorn, always the clever
engineer, is at his best when he gets them to work in unison.
Some of my admiration for
Port Washington surely arises from the fact that, when I was thinking about filmmaking early in high school, I wanted to make
almost exactly the same movie.
I even wrote out a very similar précis, though it's now sitting on a
hard drive of some dead Pentium. For whatever reason, the idea of
enlivening the search for a girlfriend with weapons, high technology,
espionage, and sheer goofiness seemed truly awesome. Kudos for
Heckendorn for bringing a like vision to fruition. Now, will some
financier please give him ten million dollars? I'm so very curious to
see what he could do with a Hollywood-y budget.
(Oh, and you can download
Port Washington — viewable on your computer or your iPod! —
here.)
* * *Writing up
Port Washington
got me thinking about the idea of subjective celebrity. Subjective
celebrity resembles Andy Warhol's quip about how everyone gets their
fifteen minutes of fame in the future, but it's more nuanced and
therefore cooler. From Warhol's perspective, 2008
is the future, and what with Youtube phenoms like
Tay Zonday,
Chris Crocker, and the
Back Dorm Boys,
some might say that the silver-wigged one's prediction has become
reality. Not so fast, I'd say; it's less that everyone gets fifteen
minutes, but that everyone, with the aid of the internets, now has the
chance to become a celebrity to
somebody.
When I think
about those I consider celebrities, the list turns out nothing like the
supermarket checkout tabloids would suggest. Tom Cruise? Yeah, even
though he's a scientologist, he did a good job in
Magnolia, I guess. Angelina Jolie? Ah, right, that girl I saw in
Hackers;
what's she up to these days? Britney Spears? That's a name I've heard.
If I saw any of these people in the street, I'd surely get a twinge of
"Haven't I seen you before?", but I doubt if I'd react with the
excitement befitting
celebrity.
Ben Heckendorn, on the
other hand: the ultimate classic game hacker and the
producer/writer/editor/director of one of the most entertaining movies
I've seen in a while? Now this man
is a celebrity. Who else is a celebrity? Well, you've got Jesse Thorn, host of
The Sound of Young America, of course, and Tyler Cowen of
Marginal Revolution. And let's not forget James Rolfe, better known as the
Angry Video Game Nerd. If he's not celebrity material, who is?
But
they're not objective celebrities, in that most everyone would
recognize them enough to get excited about seeing them. But these days,
who is an objective celebrity? I think they're a dying breed, to be
replaced by the vastly superior subjective celebrity, because
subjective celebrities can more specifically provide for any given
individual's celebrity needs. It's a bit like how the "big three"
broadcast networks are rapidly being made irrelevant by infinity
smaller media outlets from which we can exactingly pick and choose.
