A dark comedy that will make your bad days look like a cool walk in the park
The End is most definitely a cliché driven short film, but keeps you nonetheless wondering ’til the very end. A dark comedy that will make you feel sorry for a miserable guy that keeps continuously failing at his simple objective.
The film flows through its wonderful cinematography, with its punctuate lightning and marvelous visual effects. Just the opening scene flying through space and grazing the Moon into Earth gives the film such high hopes. And it delivers! Director Cameron McHarg says he got the idea from an interview he heard on TV years back from George Carlin.
In the interview, he said that he actually hoped that a comet or an asteroid would crash into Earth and wipe out humanity. To hear this was both funny and shocking to me, and it made me step back a little and think. It was that, and also the whole buzz about “the end” in 2012.
The film was funded entirely on Kickstarter, gathering enough budget to get the right equipment to bring the visual experience to the next level. The shadows and details in the close ups like the sweat on the forehead are little details that really place us in the uneasy world of the miserable protagonist. But as sad as his life can be, Cam managed to add a little humor into his script in a kind of dark, subtle way. Much like the type of humor found in the Coen brothers films, where in an interview with dailygrindhouse.com, Cam admits to getting is inspiration from them when asked what films influenced the darkly humor:
No Country For Old Men is definitely one of them. I think that’s literally a flawless film. I try to never forget the feeling that I had both watching that movie, and how I felt at the very end. In addition to the dread, the tension, and the dark comic tones that the Coen Bros are geniuses at, it also was full of strong existentialist themes, which I find fascinating and even somehow refreshing in movies for some reason.
-Cam McHarg, interview excerpt from dailygrindhouse.com
A feel-good short that will make you ponder on how your bad days aren’t all that bad. The fantastic cinematography along with scripting and acting makes this short film a complete recipe for an amusing and entertaining movie – the kind we love to feature 🙂
Here are a few links to learn more on the film or Cam
facebook.com/theendmovie
facebook.com/CamMcHarg.Fanpage
twitter.com/cammcharg
Daily Grindhouse interview with Cam McHarg