User Reviews

I thought the first half of the movie, which is the making of the original Shirkers film in 1992, was a little too slow. But once we get to the thrust of the movie, i.e., what Georges Cardona did to Sandi Tan and her colleagues, it was very, very compelling. Maybe we had to sit through the long set-up so the movie could effectively show how devastating it was to Sandi Tan that Georges Cardona crushed her dream. I thought the insights made by Stephen Tyler (no, not the guy from Aerosmith), who this also happened to gave additional context and corroboration regarding the sick mind of Cardona. Tan and her colleagues all became successful in their lives anyway, but they didn't deserve this happening to them after they put so much work into the original film. So if you haven't watched this yet and want to, my advice is to hang in there and give this documentary a chance.

I'd say it is a wonderful collage of real life drama using different media and a plot that hides itself until the end. The movie itself may not have the feeling of a deliberate piece of exceptional art, but like the main subject of the movie, the original movie Shirkers, it has this subjective and pure feel from a young person, looking at and absorbed by cinema and being bold enough to let things be as they are giving it a punkish, girlish, 80's twist. Sandi Tan can't really claim she directed this movie, because the events that transpired were not shaped by her. Was George the director after all? I'd say this movie is a unique 'making of...' documentary in that this story is a real life made story that spans over more than 20 years and that the actors, in front and behind the camera, unexpectedly get their full glory in the end.

The main theme of an amateur 'avant garde' movie aside, "Shirkers" to me is about an impressionable group of teenagers (as well as several unbelievably gullible adults) who fall victim to mind manipulation by a cruel and narcissistic fantasist of dubious background and no achievements of his own. I hope the success of the documentary at Sundance has been satisfying and therapeutic to the author.

For most film buffs, the birth of Singaporean cinema beganin 2003, when Pen-Ek Ratanruang's "Last Life in the Universe" was selected for the Vienna Film Festival. Tadanobu Asano took home the Upstream Prize for Best Actor. It went on to play around the world, most notably, the United States, where it grossed a modest thirty-one grand. That may not sound like much, but back home, the methodical art house film bombed with its general public, recouping only $65,000 from a two-million dollar budget. No matter the country, some semblance of a mainstream/alternative binary exists, in regard to media, especially film. As narrator, Sandi Tan, who also directed "Shirkers", a documentary about the history of a lost film that she and her high school friends(Jasmine Ng and Sophie Siddique Harvey) made in 1992, the filmmaker explains: "When we were fourteen, we discovered unusual music and unpopular movies" Only a self-described "art school weirdo", exposed to "Blue Velvet" and Jim Jarmusch films could have devised a script like "Shirkers", a plotless road movie about a teenage female serial killer with a Holden Caulfield complex. To be DIY before the advent of the Internet meant that you had to work your tail off to get your film made. At nineteen, Sophia wrote a letter to Kodak in the voice of an executive producer and somehow managed to pull it off, securing free equipment and film. Jasmine, Sophia's main co-conspirator, who helped publish "The Exploding Cat"(a fanzine that turned both girls into underground celebrities) saw the same films as the kid screenwriter and knew a lot about film production, especially editing, a skill she acquired from Singapore's first film class that they all attended. They didn't need a mentor. But Georges Cardones, their teacher, inveigled his way into their personal and professional lives, turning Sandi against her friends. He helped create two factions during production. As Georges' protege, Sandi listened to everything what the director had to say because she gave him absolute power.

"Dorks, you're still alive," an older kid exclaims, as Joe Lamb(Joel Courtney) and his friend pile into the car, reminding the audience once again that "Super 8", directed by J.J. Abrams, is paying homage to Richard Donner's "The Goonies". To shoot your own movie circa 1980, especially an exercise in genre filmmaking, before Sundance and Comic Con transformed independent filmmaking and cosplay, respectively, into something cool, playing around with fake blood and models made you an outsider, a goony. Whereas Sandi aspired to be David Lynch, the films that attracted Charles Kaznyk(Riley Griffiths): John Carpenter's "Halloween" and George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead", albeit of the midnight movie variety, nevertheless, were no less independent. Unlike Sandi, however, Charles doesn't stray too far from Hollywood convention. After all, he's American. Sophia, reminiscing from her office space, describes the original "Shirkers" as a mood piece, in which the plot was "immaterial", or in other words, impenetrable, save only to the writer, in which the meaning gets sussed out through the subtextual properties of semiotics. Charles, on the other hand, feels obligated to abide by the three-act structure. He doesn't settle for pure spectacle; he adds a character, the detective's wife, a romantic interest, who doesn't want her husband to investigate the syndicate behind an outbreak in zombie-related murders. It's not the pure cinema that attracted Sandi as a fourteen-year-old girl, in which the image, not the story, was integral to a transcendent filmgoing experience. Arguably, the fact that she loved the French New Wave, especially Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless", made her an even bigger goony than George and his right-hand man Joe.

Sophia never trusted Georges the way Sandi did, unconditionally and with blind faith. She had an axe to grind, but for the greater good, she put the axe down. Although Sophia arranged a meeting with a high-profile money person, Georges told the de facto producer to wait in the kitchen. Weighing "Shirkers" against her feelings of marginalization, Sophia chose the film, even though she was the mover and shaker(ironically, it's part of the original film's tagline) who helped turn Sandi's dream project into a reality. She was a shirker, for real, while the men talked business. Jasmine wasn't particularly enamored with Georges Cardona either, turning down an opportunity to take a road trip across America, the journey that would inspire Sandi Tan's original screenplay. It was on this drive that the much-older man made his power move. Surely, Jasmine picked up the vibe during the production of "Shirkers" that their "us against the world" attitude they embraced as Singaporean outsiders was now tuned to a different frequency. Years later, during Jasmine Ng's sit-down interview, she calls her old friend an "*******" for not "paying attention to the progress reports". "Diva" would have been a more tactful way to put it. Sandi was part of the cast now; she played the lead, the assassin named S., and the "talent" doesn't talk to the crew. Sandi admits, as narrator, over moving images taken from the Super 8 footage George shot of their cross-country escapades, that she had chosen "Georges as my new best friend." Out of the three girls, Sandi was the last to know that they didn't need Georges. The filmmaker reminds herself, zooming in on a teenage girl's excited scribbling on a postcard: "We've got to be The Coen Sisters!", that Jasmine was her spirit animal, when both girls were on opposite sides of the Atlantic for college. Imperceptible to Sandi, over time, Georges Cardona turned into a Svengali-like figure, convincing both her and Sophia to drain their savings accounts when production shuts down due to insufficient funds. Also, Sandi's vision for "Shirkers" gets compromised when the director writes and films an extraneous scene that doesn't comport with the shooting script. Jasmine and Sophia, she had forgotten, bolstered this fledgling artist, making her powerful, a shared goal that made their carefully-cultivated sisterhood gleam, but with this power, the fledgling artist didn't reciprocate. They weren't "the magic kids" anymore. The director stole Sandi's superpower, reducing the auteur to an ingenue. She just did everything the director asked of her; no questions asked. And then the director made-off with seventy reels of unprocessed film, never to be seen or heard from again.

Alice Dainard(Elle Fanning) fills the role of detective's wife. She's no diva, but the self-assured girl kowtows to no one, not even Charles, the director of "The Case", a short movie that the aspiring director plans on submitting to a Super 8 film festival. At the train station, the film's first major set piece, while everybody races around on the first night of shooting, dancing to the music of Charles' barking voice, Alice puts the little dictator in his place, assuring him that she knows her lines. As the camera rolls, a train derails, nearly killing them all. They also have a gun pulled on them by the high school biology teacher. Back in the car, while everybody talks excitedly about their near-death experience, Charles expresses a unilateral concern, the detached focus ring on his busted camera. For some, art is more important than life itself. At the outset, Joe's mother dies. During her funeral reception, Charles seems more concerned more about "The Case" than his best friend, questioning aloud amidst the mourners speaking in hushed tones, if Joe would be emotionally available to finish his incomplete masterpiece. The specter of a lost film, just like "Shirkers", looms, a micro-version of other unrealized projects, such as Alexandro Jodorowsky's "Dune". Later on, without considering Joe's feelings, he takes for granted that his best friend will give up a beloved model train for demolition via pyrotechnics. Alice thinks it's wrong. "He shouldn't always get what he wants." She advises Joe to stand up for himself. Alice gives him strength. "When did he get so bossy," the older kid with the car asks his younger passengers before they head out to save Alice from the clutches of the monster. In the finished Super 8 film, the train is spared. Charles uses camera movement and editing to simulate an explosion. Joe, in essence, directs, like how Sandi Tan goes on to mount a non-fictive version of "Shirkers", gaining in strength from her interviews with older versions of Jasmine and Sophia. With Jasmine, her best friend, Sandi had a voice. Without her, she was rendered mute. Georges, a monster in his own right, draws a comparison to "Nosferatu". The audience, however, picks up what the filmmaker misses. The monster is a human one, a referenced one in "Shirkers", hiding in plain sight. Georges is Graham Dalton, the character that James Spader plays in "Sex, Lies, and Videotape", whom the Svengali insists was based on him. Graham recorded women, their most private thoughts and kept them, like a soul collection. That's what Georges did, in essence; he stole the souls of three girls who laid bare their celluloidal hopes and dreams for a sociopath.

A zombie comes back from the dead; a zombie is silent for the most part. Analogously, Sandi gets her reels back, but not the sound recordings, after Georges Cardona's widow informs her of his death. "Shirkers" was returned to her "a mute". Sophia describes their former mentor's love for the film as being "necrophiliac"-like. "Shirkers", an unrealized indie that preceded the Singaporean New Wave, is a zombie film in the sense that Sandi Tan brought it back to life, or as Sophia puts it, "Shirkers" was given "an afterlife". The unfinished movie will always eat at the filmmaker's brain. Sandi is something like Dr. Peter Bracken(Charles' character in "The Case") whose vaccine gives the zombie Alice Dainard plays a second chance at life.

Sandi is the final girl who survived.

Wholly recommend this to anyone with any interest in the creation of a film and film as a creative medium. The documentary is told in an engaging and thoughtful way by Sandi Tan and its tragic that their film could never be processed as it should of been. A reviewer mentioned that it was unnecessary to "denigrate the memory" of George, he was a "nice guy". To watch this film and come away with that is baffling...he not only ruined their dreams and changed the life course of these three women, but also anyone else that he worked with. Not too mention that he was an insecure, pathological liar, a thief, neurotic...etc etc