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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:
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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.
The initiative would expand basic research so as to maintain the technological development.
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Posted by: DVR security camera systems | March 05, 2010 at 08:46 PM