Late Night with the Devil is an adroit piece of work, a tribute to a time and a place but also an enjoyable and imaginative trip into fantasy, breathing new life into two tired formats – the mockumentary and the found footage phenomenon – by making them entirely engaging and, at least in terms of […]
The mockumentary standard was probably set by Man Bites Dog in the early Nineties, and since then the basic format has changed very little. Surprisingly little, perhaps. There’s the renegade subject (usually a man) who forms a dangerous relationship with the film crew, then the loss of control over the creative project itself and an […]
Brian Emond is, or was, a ‘content producer’ from Brooklyn who always badly wanted to rise up through the ranks to real journalism. And, as he tells us early on, journalists are always looking for their exclusive – but don’t always end up telling the story they expected to tell. It’s a premise which guides […]
Meet Gillian. Gillian is an aspiring filmmaker, albeit one who could use a content filter; this is clear as she explains to her friend Chase that some mutual friends paid her the unusual compliment of saying she’d ‘make a good murderer’, so she wants to explore the idea by going to his place and elaborating […]
The ‘mockumentary’ format has been used to interesting effect over the years; note that I said ‘mockumentary’ rather than ‘found footage’, a sub-genre which usually conjures more questions than it can ever answer. There are some important distinctions between the two. Strawberry Flavored Plastic dodges the most typical question asked during found footage, which is […]