John Smith's film samples http://www.vdb.org/artists/john-smith

Manchester by the Sea. Not just a very good story but also a beautifully told one.
I think it's an example of a so-called branching story. We start with one simple thing and then, as we go along, it gets more and more branches. And only in the end, we can see the whole tree.

I can do this with my story. I think I should try.

Also, the plot has to do with scams, and this is a podcast episode that has some very useful information on it:

Feb 10, 2017

There is a lot of things we have to talk through today.
Part one will be about intentional mis-use of the media. Part two will be formalism in film (again). So there's structure, baby. I will even change the bgcolor to make a distinction what is what.

One time, David Byrne opened Powerpoint, messed around with it, proclaimed it meta-software — software that is used to show things made in other software — and, to push it further, made some powerpoint art.

"Having never used the program before, I found it limiting, inflexible, and biased, like most software," Byrne wrote of his user experience in Wired. "On top of that, PowerPoint makes hilariously bad-looking visuals." And yet, "although I began by making fun of the medium, I soon realized I could actually create things that were beautiful. I could bend the program to my own whim and use it as an artistic agent."

Another notable powerpoint theorist (ok, professor of political science and statistics) is Edward Tufte. He says: "At a minimum, a presentation format should do no harm. Yet the PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content. Thus PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play – very loud, very slow, and very simple."

http://www.re-magazine.com/

In the early 2000s, Jop van Bennekom authored Re-Magazine, a real publication about fictional people. Fictional people are based on bits and pieces of existing people, and the creation is fully referenced.

That's a bit like what I'm going to do. The point is: to use pre-existing materials to craft fictional characters. Very cool very nice.

Someone by the name Matt Beaumont wrote a book that is email history. It's called "e." How edgy was that back in 2000?

Mike Figgs, the screenwriter and director with some musical background (he played in Brian Ferry's band) once made an experimental film that is basically four continuous takes shown simultaneously on a split screen.

Also, it's a film about film industry.
And, as if it wasn't enough, Figgs made scores for each camera. Because if you show four things at once, you'd better plan where to draw people's attention in advance.

The Act of Killing (2012) is a very powerful documentary about an Indonesian gangster who killed over 1000 communists in the 1960s and was honored by the government for doing so.
We see him as a nice old gentleman who cares for his grandchildren and enjoys fishing. We also see him reenact the murders for the cameras. At first, he has this seemingly impenetrable image of a victor: he somehow mind-fucked himself into thinking that what he did was right. Well, so did many others who fought communism along with him.

As the film progresses, he revisits more of his deeds both as a prosecutor and the victim. The mask begins to crack in front of our eyes. In the end, the weight of his doings finally gets him, and we get to see him breaking down morally and physically.
It's heartbreaking in so many ways.

Vertical Features Remake by Peter Greenaway is a structuralist mockumentary film about another film. A deadpan BBC-documentary-like narrator tells about an attempt to restore a film Vertical Features, made by the (fictional) ornithologist Tulse Luper. The footage shows mostly vertical objects, and the theoretical basis elaborately pretends to make sense.

Swimming Pool by François Ozon is a film about a slightly eccentric writer lady who goes to her publisher/lover's country house in France to work on a new book in peace and solitude. But her plans go out the window when the publisher's teenage daughter comes to the house with a strong intention to have some good time. Or does she? Long story short: the writer imagines the girl, her many love affairs, a murder and a dark mystery revelation.

Cancun is not a movie, it's a play. I saw the Malaya Bronnaya theater production . The set construction is the following: a big screen on the back shows either the sun or the moon depending on the current time of day. A pseudo-sand covers the stage, plus there's a couple of benches. That's it. Between the acts, there's date/time/weather info on that very screen. And the moon/sun is getting larger as the scene progresses, providing a kind of timeline for the audience. You kinda know that once the sun fills in the whole screen, the scene would end. And it does.

Finally, Bunraku (2010) might just be the least American movie made in Hollywood.
It looks and feels like a reenacted comics. The set doesn't even try to look real. Parts of it are all-out cardboard models. The events follow some kind of dream logic. Heroes either are archetypes or mock archetypes.
Fights are dances and blood is ketchup.
This movie is my project, done the other way around.