Name: Collapse
Genre: Drama
Released: 2013-10-04
Duration: 1 h 37 min
Cast: Russell Murphy, Anita Paciotti, William Martin

If you look up "pretentious crap" in the dictionary, you'll find a link to this movie. It's that bad.

Really.

I won't spoil the movie for you, except to tell you that the only thing different between this movie and Plan 9 From Outer Space is that Collapse doesn't have 5 minutes of footage from a dead Bela Lugosi.

Otherwise, the director of Collapse (who, much to my utter amazement has actually won an award or two for SOMETHING, hopefully not directing or writing) shares a lot in common with Ed Wood: 

(a) he actually thinks the movie he made has some sort of artistic redeeming features (that kinda makes this movie quite funny actually, and unintentionally so -- I kept hearing the voices of Tom and Servo from MST3K commenting on this movie as I watched it at its premiere); 

(b) loves to use stock footage to pad the movie (although, unlike Ed Wood, Collapse's stock footage has nothing whatsoever to do with the movie and is a shameless and utterly tacky grab at invoking "relevance" by including 9-11 stock footage and possibly a nuclear explosion as well -- yes that's right, it's not spoiling anything to tell you that there is a nuclear explosion in a movie about a ballet dance company in San Francisco).

(c) he made this in black-and-white -- but again, this director did it to be "artistic" (as if throwing out the color gamma values from his film somehow made it less pretentious?!) -- Ed Wood just couldn't afford color film processing.

(d) neither the director or the editor or the camera crew from Collapse knew any more about "white balance" than Ed Wood. And the sound guy for Collapse, assuming there was one, obviously was smoking crack during most of the filming because the sound editing and production is stunningly bad.

It's hard to fault the worst parts of this movie: the directing was something that a freshman film student at community college would turn in, before he got that first failing grade that makes him rethink his career; the "writer" who mistakes improvisational dialog as an excuse to not have a plot; the acting which is slightly above the level of a high school play; and of course, every element of the cinematography -- as I watched the movie, I kept coming back to the notion that I could have pirated the movie by cam-shotting it using my iPhone in the theater, cleaned it up in iMovie, including correcting the annoyingly bad white balance errors, and then inserted my own five minutes worth of Bela Lugosi stock footage and turned out a better work than the director of this sordid mess delivered.

This movie is so bad, it's just barely on the verge of being funny. I would suggest heavy use of illicit, mild-altering drugs before going to see it, and then you're guaranteed to have a comically good time!

The drama genre is a broad category that features stories portraying human experiences, emotions, conflicts, and relationships in a realistic and emotionally impactful way. Dramas delve into the complexities of human life, often exploring themes of love, loss, morality, societal issues, personal growth, with the aim to evoke an emotional response from the audience by presenting relatable and thought-provoking stories.

Mahershala Ali and Alex R. Hibbert in Moonlight (2016)

After 15 years away, Thorson (played by Russell Murphy, former San Francisco Ballet principal dancer) returns to the ballet company where audiences once flocked to see him. He has choreographed a ballet for troubled times but it's not going to be easy to finance new work with funds for the arts drying up. As his original scheme collapses and he loses heart, a new experience, both transcendent and terrifying, seizes him.

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Streaming Stars, Then and Now

with director Rob Nilsson and cast at the premier of "Collapse" at the Mill Valley Film Festival 2013

Collapse

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