by jon bosworth jaxvillain@yahoo.com
C Not Rated 180 min.
WHAT: Tomorrow Mourning
WHERE: Jacksonville Main Library
WHEN: Saturday, Nov. 4th at 7pm
For years art films were expected to be a little too deep for the viewer to completely understand and to have an aspect of German expressionism that takes the viewer out of the traditional mindset they might have when watching a commercial film. With local filmmaker David Petlansky’s new film, Tomorrow Mourning, we definitely get the somber vision and a more avant-garde approach to film, but German expressionism is replaced by a rich visual texture and a newer sort of expressionism more common to Wes Anderson or Michel Gondry.
Independent film buffs are a tolerant audience, but when it comes to independent Jacksonville films, the viewer must be even more tolerant. The acting talent available to local filmmakers is slim and the number of technical people available to fulfill all of the aspects of filmmaking is negligible. Considering these limitations, Petlansky’s film is incredibly well-made and manages to make the viewer care about the characters, regardless of how poorly acted some of them are. The storylines are not entirely believable. Although the characters are somewhat endearing and not static, the writing of the dialogue was amateurish.
Petlansky, as cinematographer, director, and co-writer, presents a vision that is unified, seamlessly stitched together by a great soundtrack, and even implements some avant-garde techniques that really work. Embracing Florida’s hot sun and ample light, Petlansky creates an exposure-open, washed-out sort of imagery that consistently makes white light a major portion of almost every scene. In one scene, sunspots invade a continuous shot following dialogue like a tennis match as the glare volleys between the characters. Even the night scenes seem to have a strong reliance on white colors and lights to fill the screen. The mise en scene that Petlansky creates with his camera and in the editing room give the film a consistency that really works to show you the power of illumination, thematically and physically on the screen.
Through using various different filters and lighting techniques, he deftly takes you inside the minds of the main characters. Although the editing is sometimes choppy and it certainly doesn’t have that studio glaze, the story is interesting and the scenes about the drug dealer hallucinating during the getaway from a crime brought a surrealist and fantastic element that the film desperately needed. This storyline also lightened the load with some humor as the drug dealer screams in the streets that he has drugs for people. Drugs he must sell in 24-hours to keep his life.
While there were certainly too many plots intertwining in this film, the good ones were worth watching.
The film is a little too much, trying to carry the plotlines of more than five main characters is difficult and rarely effectively achieved without bogging the viewer down, and Tomorrow Mourning is no exception. The best performance in the film is easily Rita Manyette’s portrayal of Sheila Melbourne, the wife of the preacher and the mother of the gay teenager trying to come to terms with his authoritarian father. She is not only the best actress in the film, she provides the only source of warmth and affection. Admittedly, though, her lesbian encounter with the prostitute was the most far-fetched storytelling of the film.
Not a simple storyline, the viewer follows Ester, a troubled teenage girl coming to terms with being gothic. Drew, a teenage boy dealing with his affinity for drugs and the conflict it presents to his church life. Kyle, the gay son of a preacher confronting his father with this painful truth about himself. Roger, an enormous high school senior struggling with his father’s accidental death and his mother’s consequental suicide. Mike, a criminal that loses everything he loves in the pursuit of a life of crime. And Lisa, a prostitute that hates hooking but isn’t really motivated to stop, in spite of how horrible every encounter seems to be.
Every character in this film that is associated with the church is deeply evil, except perhaps for Drew (do people get addicted to marijuana?) as he attempts to escape the church by overdosing on ecstasy (do people really overdose on ecstasy?) which combines to present a somewhat forced mouthpiece for the writers to deliver some of their personal agendas. Drew is actually played by the co-writer, but his story was one of the plots that should have been cut.
Petlansky shows a great deal of promise as a filmmaker and this artistic vision is carefully assembled, so the not-so-subtle messages of the film definitely have an artistic value and speak for Jacksonville’s ability to participate in the real world in spite of our Bible belt façade. Had this film restrained itself to two or three plotlines to follow, it would have certainly been a better film, but even as it is, this three-hour epic is worth watching. It will also be enjoyable to see familiar Jacksonville locales on the big screen at the Jacksonville public library this weekend. Tomorrow Mourning shows at 7 p.m. on Saturday, November 4th at the new downtown library at 303 N. Laura Street.
Is there a God? Is there such thing as forgiveness? How much ecstasy does it take to overdose? What does it mean to be "goth?"
We all ask ourselves these questions everyday and finally they are being addressed in film by Jacksonville filmmaker David Petlansky. These days filmmakers don't need rich studios backing their films to implement a more high-tech, flashy look, since personal computers became personal digital editing studios. And with the inception of You Tube and the proliferation of video iPods, the term independent film is being returned to its roots. Anyone can purchase a $40 disposable digital video camera from your local CVS and make a movie that gets international distribution, the question is will it be any good?
Audiences learn to be tolerant of novice filmmaking when the filmmaker shows promise of something that could extend beyond a free You Tube download. Everyone loves to be the person that discovered someone on You Tube just before HBO or MTV made them famous. Straddling these worlds is the Jacksonville filmmaker David Petlansky and Chad Hendrick's Jacksonville-based production company Two Crackers and a Lamp.
Hendricks has branched away from his urban comedies and forayed into the documentary field with his film Grind2Shine about Jacksonville's burgeoning hip-hop scene. Petlansky, on the other hand, has taken a more traditional angle for independent filmmakers: the serious drama.
I met with David Petlansky and the co-writer and one of the actors in the film, Jeff Soto, at the Hovan Gourmet in five points. A portion of our conversation is here and the entire interview can be found at http://tomorrowmourning.net/eu.htm.
EU: What inspired you to make this movie?
DP: There's a lot of incidents in there that happened to me personally. I was looking for an outlet to make a really personal movie, that's the way they all start, this one just happened to stick to it throughout the whole process.
The original script was more focused on the incidents. Jeff was more interested in the characters and how their lives ironically intertwine, so it was good how those two came together.
I was really influenced by Spun, Requiem for a Dream, and Manic. We were originally going for a Spun type of film, you know, borderline funny at times. The original scene where the rapist comes into the hotel room, there was supposed to be some crazy funk music playing, and it was supposed to be almost animated. It just wasn't happening when we got out to Phillips Highway in a dirty motel where that actually happened to people. The tone changed on its own.
EU: Do you feel like the talent in this picture is compares to other independent movies you see out there?
JS: We were surprised at the talent because when you are dealing with a low budget to no budget situation, you're hesitant on the kind of talent you can get. Even after we were filming, there were several times when we thought to ourselves if we had a large budget and we were able to get named actors and actresses, we still wouldn't trade our cast for any of them. I would have definitely gotten rid of me for somebody else.
DP: On the audition tape, which Jeff had to put on VHS for me, he added a forty-minute audition at the end of the tape for himself. It was so effin cute.
EU: How did you do your research?
JS: We just based the writing on what we stereotypically thought, but [Christianna White] actually went out and talked to people that live that life and that's where she got the inspiration for her character.
DP: And she already had the wardrobe for some reason. Most of the movie came from personal experience anyway, so that's where a lot of the research came from and Jeff is a Googlemaster, so a lot of interesting facts got in there.
EU: Is there really an Angel's Trumpet flower that gets you high?
DP: That's a real experience. My girlfriend at the time found out there was this plant that gets you really high if you eat it, so I went up to this nursery to see if it was there and acted like I was getting it for my grandmother. We went up to the nursery later that night and stole the plant. I woke up the next morning and I couldn't see anything, my vision was all blurry, I had a stomachache. I found out that there is a Brugmansia that droops down and a Datura that stands up. The Datura will screw you up bad and Brugmansia will get you real high. It was dark in the nursery when I took the plant and I accidentally took a Datura that had died and was wilted, so it was drooping down. It was bad news. The poison control lady actually called me an idiot.
EU: How difficult is it to coordinate an all-volunteer cast?
JS: Surprisingly, with the amount of people we had to work with, there was never any conflict.
DP: We never had to cancel a shoot. One weekend we actually went forty-eight hours of straight shooting. It was six o'clock in the morning on a Saturday that we called everyone out to do the nursery scene and we shot all Saturday, then all through Saturday night we did the car crash scenes, we had to do it when no one was on the road. We finished the car crash scene just in time to get to Orlando and do a scene with extras in Orlando at eleven o'clock the next morning. It was a wild weekend. Everyone was right on time, except for us. We made it to Orlando forty-five minutes late.
The car didn't actually run, so we had to pull it on the highway and the straps kept coming undone so we had to coast onto the shoulder. It was a scary evening. We left the car there with blood all over it. It was on a construction site. I can just imagine what people thought when they got there the next morning.
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