USA 2014 94m Directed by: Bingham Bryant, Kyle Molzan. Starring: James Han, Erica Jennifer Hill, Ryohei Hoshi, Anabelle LeMieux, Tom Lloyd, Rosalie Lowe. Music by: Keiichi Suzuki.
A digital-pastoral drama of friendship, landscape and technology, "For the Plasma" begins as the story of two young women (Anabelle LeMieux and Rosalie Lowe) employed as forest-fire lookouts in Northern Maine, and ends in a hundred places at once. Along the way, the girls make financial predictions based on surveillance footage of the surrounding forest, the local lighthouse keeper and a pair of unusual investors interrupt their solitude, and a dreamlike portrait of small town America and contemporary life is revealed. "For the Plasma" is a film of minimal means but ambition, shot in Super 16mm and 4:3 with a small cast and crew, and scored by the great Japanese experimental composer, Keiichi Suzuki. great Japanese experimental composer, Keiichi Suzuki.
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I saw this film at a local film festival, and I have to say, it's awful. The acting is flat, the editing is janky, the lighting is sub-par, most of the dialog is poorly ADRed.
Yet, for some reason, I totally loved this film. It's bizarre, quirky without being pretentious, baffling but in a way that doesn't frustrate you. It's charming, it has this unique feel to it that just makes you want like it. It like something you'd see in a motel room at 1am on a public access television station. It's like if Wes Anderson directed a 1988 student SciFi film at his family's summer cabin in Maine, screened it once at student film festival, then threw it in his uncle's storage locker only to be found by a public access TV producer in Toledo Kansas. It feel like something you weren't meant to watch, and in that way it makes you feel special for watching it.
We live in an era where "cult movies" aren't really that much of a thing anymore, but I feel like this is going to be a cult movie if only because I'd totally be willing to join that cult. I'm totally going to buy a hard copy of this film (if one ever becomes available) and show it to all my friends, most of who will probably say "why the hell are you showing this to us?" and I'll go, "BECAUSE IT'S AWESOME!!!".
Review by Jackson Walker from the Internet Movie Database.