Part of the well-orchestrated hype for the upcoming film Be Kind, Rewind was to have a contest where people could send in their own "sweded" versions of popular films. To swede a movie is to make an extremely low-budget, shorter adaptation of it, like Jack Black and Mos Def do in ...Rewind. I haven't seen the film yet, but I'm imagining that their sweded movies are clever, endearing and simple. Edited in-camera with no fancy effects or music.
The problem with an internet contest to replicate that stuff is that most people don't quite catch that purpose. They create short parodies of their favorite flicks, with time-consuming effects, animations, music, etc. They're missing the creative spirit of flying by the seat of your pants and not really knowing what you are doing. By and large, these sweded movies are unimaginative and tired, mostly relying on cross-dressing to elicit any laughs.
Taken without context, they are acceptable reflections of how people with limited budgets can recreate fancy computer-generated effects to tell a story. But if you are a stickler for the rules (and today I am), they are mostly crappy. Except for one: a 6-minute synopsis of the Back to the Future trilogy. Highly entertaining, particularly in its re-creation of the Lybian VW bus chase scene.
Keep in mind that this blog entry comes to you from someone who was asked to draw Willy Wonka's chocolate factory in third grade and went through the book page by page to find every aspect, then labeled each element, down to the buttercup trees. Then I got upset because somebody else won the contest even though mine was the most technically accurate. How did I not have more friends when I was eight?
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