Film review

Soft vs telling lies

About Simon Ellis

Simon Ellis is a film director of short films that have different twists and plots involved in it, he first started off when the was just 16 years old, he shot his first film in black and white where he attended the school Coventry, Ellis began to take media more serious as he began to work with cameras and studied fine art. Later on in Simones career he developed into an amazing film director winning awards for his short films making eleven different short films to entertain the audience. ”Director Award for Best European Web Film for Choose a Different Ending and Who Killed Deon was ranked 'most awarded TV campaign in the world' by Campaign magazine in January 2012”.

Soft

This film was made in 2007 and it is  basically a this short film it highlights a boy who is being picked on by a group of hoodlums/teens and it ends up going to far as you can see in the film even though we do not know how long he has been bullied for we as the audience see that he looks to be bullied for a long time by the same group of people, the story starts off with a running camera scene recorded by a mobile phone which gives us the effect that a teenager is recording off their phone ,then we see a group of boys picking on this one boy in particular and they are beating him up leaving the boy weak and defenceless.

We then move on later from that scene to see the boys dad getting a pint of milk from the local corner shop then he is encountered by some hoodlums not knowing it was the same hoodlums that attacked his son ,they then get into a conflict and the teenagers then retaliate in a way that they made the dad feel very weak and defenceless as his son was, later on in the film as we see the dad and the son have a very slow and not so good relationship we see the group of teens end up outside the family house calling out the father ,as we go on the boy is wanting his father to go out and deal with the boys as he tells his dad that those were the exact same group of teens that attacked him on his way home from school ,we then learn that his dad is not what he makes out to be and we soon find out who’s in charge of the house hold.

Telling lies

This film was made in 2000 and it still has an effect on society now ,This short film starts off with a phone call from the man’s mother as she is checking on him ,we then go on to find out that the man had been drinking the following night and he has a hangover by the low tone of his voice even though we cannot see him we can tell by the convocation that later on leads up to it with his mother, he then tells his mum he had a break up with his girlfriend  which resorted to his best friend sleeping with his girlfriend ,we find out this when his girlfriend calls him angrily to tell him what she had done with no remorse because of the boy friend’s behaviour during the night out, we wonder why she is telling him this and why she is angry we find out when his girlfriend tells us the audience by saying that he had cheated first on her so she took it upon herself to get him back.

Soft is very similar to the film “Telling lies” not just because they are directed by the same man but because the genre is more like the same the relationship wise and drama wise . in the film we see that the boy and the dad do not really have a good relationship with each other I think the short film “soft” is a drama as we can see that there is a lot of tense moments in the film where we see the hoodlums that attacked the boy are in control over a grown man when we see the scene where he is being attacked and not doing anything about, this makes us the audience wonder what is he going to do to the hoodlums? is he going to get them back? For attacking him and how he will react and what will happen when we find out the same people that attacked the boy finds out that they also attacked his father, so this genre of film is classified as drama because there are fight scenes and also suspense.

Telling lies is very similar to the film “soft” because I think that the short film about “telling lies” is more of a relationship type of drama as we see in the film that its about a rocky style of a relationship  ad that there is no trust what so ever in the two couple as they had both cheated on each other on a night out, there is one scene where we see drama and a bit of betrayal when the girlfriend tells him that she cheated on him with his best friend , then we go on to see him right his best friend and ask him what happened ,he stars off the convocation with “is there something you have to tell me?” this causes dram and tension because we want to know if his friend will tell the truth ,again like in the film soft, this causes drama and leaving us in a state of mind thinking are they going to fight or even have an argument and this gives us the audience a sense of anxiousness in wanting to know what is going to happen.

I think overall both films were very interesting as it had different twist and turns in the film and the titles are more deceiving than you would first think , as you could probably by looking at the first opening scene when you see the boy in the film soft being bullied by a group of people but as alter on you see i the film everything becomes more clearer and you begin to open  your eyes more as you see the real meaning of the title of the film and who its really about, just like the film telling lies, we see like to different sides of the film we know that it’s about telling lies but what we don’t know is that they are telling the truth out loud speaking it but they are really lying in their heads which ,makes us question the title and the smart way the film director plays around with the film.