scottla

What you quickly notice about this thirty-minute movie is that it has all the trappings of sophisticated big-budget international thriller. It's set in a real 18th-century French château. The characters are elegant in formalwear and have arrived for an evening of mysteriously sophisticated games. The plot is just complex enough to keep us intrigued though also a bit confused. The leads (Kellan Lutz and Torrey DeVitto, familiar from US television) are drop-dead gorgeous. Swedish actor Ola Rapace and German actor Götz Otto are on hand as potential villains. Both are veterans of the James Bond movies, and that's clearly no coincidence, as this flick has a definite 007 vibe. During a tense chess match, we can easily imagine Rapace as Le Chiffre in Casino Royale. This isn't a straightforward thriller, though. As the story progresses, funny things happen with time and memory. In addition to the chess match, there is alternatively some kind of elaborate murder mystery evening going on, and we get intimations that there is another obscure level entirely to the action. Sure enough, by the end there is a twist worthy of a classic Twilight Zone episode. The film is quite well made - especially when you take into account that it's only the third movie by this filmmaker (Keyvan Sheikhalishahi, based in Paris) and that it was made when he was 21.

Our first brief shot is of Greg, a man possibly of retirement age, picking away at his guitar. Quickly, though, we are transported to open mic night at the Bus Stop Music Cafe, a real establishment located in Pitman, New Jersey, about 15 miles from Philadelphia. As captured by this 17-minute film, the cafe is a warm, friendly local hangout with regulars supportive of anyone who wants to get up and sing his song or read her poem or play his trumpet. While the cafe is arguably the star of the movie, the protagonist is Greg, whom we come to know by observing him in real time and in a few flashbacks to his youth. The film does not tell us his story so much as show us. As a young husband and father, he loved the guitar. Apparently, he laid it down at some point, perhaps because of work or the demands of family life. Now he has been working on a song and working on the courage to perform it in front of an audience. The plot is not any more complicated than that, but Greg and his family and friends and the folks at the cafe are all vividly realized characters whom we come to care about, and so we become invested in Greg's late-in-life dream. The film makes some interesting jumps in space and time as we watch the various performers at the cafe and observe Greg's home life with wife and son and his solitary work on the guitar. In the best movie tradition, the payoff at the end is Greg's heartfelt performance of his song, which shares its title with the film. It was composed by Joseph Fuoco, who plays Greg, and the lyrics are by Joseph McGovern, who wrote and directed the movie. McGovern also appears on screen in the role of the open mic MC. The soundtrack music by Matthew Amadio also deserves a mention for setting just the right tone early in the film and over the end credits. McGovern has done a lovely job of capturing a set of characters we would like to spend more time with and a place that we would love to visit.