Telling lies and Soft review

Soft is a shocking and violent 14 min feature length film directed by Simon Ellis. Only film critics can describe as "...Ingeniously, intimately upsetting in a way I can only compare to the controversial scenes in Gaspar Noé's Irréversible" The main topic this film is based around is bullying and happy - slapping. The first scene of this short film jumps straight into action and shows flickering mobile phone video footage of a teenage boy getting brutally beaten up. A very interesting opening. The film is about a teenager and his father who are harassed by a teenage gang with a swaggering ASBO - type leader, bullying and scaring a grown up middle aged man outside a newsagent. The man makes his way home and is closely followed by the teenage gang, he reaches home and finds his teenage son is bruised and bloody, it is clear that the same boy from the video has done this.

The gang have now started to cause a disturbance outside of their home, sitting on their car and taunting them both, this leads to a discovery of the son finding out that the man is scared. The film from here on escalates to a violent last final scene which made me feel uncomfortable. Revenge had taken place for the boy. As seen clearly from the film the relationship between the father and son is very fragile. When the dad arrives home from work he asks the son to go buy him a bottle of milk but with the loud music being played and purposely trying to avoid him shows that he is too scared to approach his father. Soft is a amazing film to relate to grownups as we forget how scared we often were as children themselves, of bullies or anything else. For a parent to be scared in front of his child? an unthinkable humiliation. The father found it difficult for him to overcome his fear of the gang which then lead the boy to get his revenge.

Telling lies is another short film directed by Simon Ellis. What would it be like if people actually saw what we were thinking of as we were talking to them? In this clever short film he gives us precisely that ability. This is a short film where we hear one man's phone conversation with his mates and ex-girlfriend even though they broke up the night before, Sarah is still jealous that Phil went home with another women. Not so upset, however that it prevented her from sleeping with Phil's best friend. In "Telling Lies," Ellis lets us eavesdrop on an increasingly outlandish series of phone conversations between Phil and Sarah, Phil and his older mistress, and Phil and his sheepish buddy. The clever thing about Ellis's short film is that there is a difference between thought and speech and this is clearly being shown in the film itself. For example, at one point in the film the main character Phil is asked when he split up with his girlfriend and he responds saying "last night at the club", but the text reads "none of your business". As Phil slowly starts to piece together what happened the night before facing more and more phone calls in the process, his frustration and lies are shown on the screen by the animated text. The film eventually progresses with the main character being disturbed by interfering phone calls from his mother, his ex-girlfriend phoning to make him jealous because he left with another woman, and then finally the women he slept with phoning saying she doesn't want to see him anymore.

In comparison to the first short film I watched "Soft" they have many differences between them. I find "Soft" a much more entertaining and interesting film in my opinion, to watch as it provides me with visual and the narrative behind it is much clearer whereas for "Telling Lies" it took me some time to figure out what it was about. Both films made me feel interested but "Soft" made me relate it to myself making me feel like as if I was in the movie itself and relate it to how society is today around us. But for "Telling lies" it made me feel like as if I was silent suspect trying to listen into people’s conversations but in this case it made me feel like a spy on someone’s relationship and making plans to jeopardize it etc. I believe that's how director Simon Ellis wanted us viewers to feel like as if we were in a relationship or the spy itself and point out all the traitors and cheats in this whole scene.