4085: The Kids Aren't Alright, Bookstacks, Lakeside Occurrences, & Iowa
By Jiwon Lee
On December 3rd, I had the privilege to attend the first film festival hosted by a USC student-run production company, 4085 Productions. 4085 screened six of their works for the audience that afternoon.
Overall, I was very impressed at the sheer quantity of the works that came out of 4085 over such a short period of time (and amidst a pandemic too!). Despite the overall not-exactly-top-notch production value of these works, I sincerely respect every cast and crew member who has worked on these projects over our insane back-from-COVID semester. Below are my comments on a few memorable works from the festival. Mild spoilers ahead.
The Kids Aren’t Alright: This was definitely my favorite film of the afternoon. Student films are made on a very limited budget. This comes with an obvious disadvantage — low production value. But the disadvantage can also be an advantage in that it shines a light on what, at the end of the day, makes a good film actually good—the story. The Kids Aren’t Alright is a hilariously written piece with both lovable and loathsome characters who have amazing chemistry with each other. The trope of the family dinner scene has been overdone in film and television, but The Kids Aren’t Alright does it so classically well that you can’t help but enjoy every second of it. The amazing performance of the actors—especially those who played roles that were obviously too old for them—is the cherry on the top.
Bookstacks: Another film with great writing. The best kinds of horror are the ones you can imagine yourself in, and Bookstacks definitely spoke to me as a USC student who has been lost in that creepy basement of Doheny and thought they’d find me as a literal skeleton five hundred years later. The real punchline of the story, of course, is its ending. I am an absolute sucker for ‘horror story within a horror story’ and have not seen it done on the screen before. The slow handheld camerawork at the end left the film on a pleasantly haunting note. While I try not to critique student films with their production values, as, again, I know the constraints they are working under, I do have to admit the ‘big scary monster’ was a bit too poorly done. The evil doppelganger who was supposed to be the scariest bit of the film was not scary at all: to be honest, he was more on the funnier side. I appreciate that they tried to be creative with the shadow work, but it was not enough to make a college boy walking slowly in a basement seem even remotely horrifying.
Lakeside Occurrences: This was clearly 4085’s proudest work of the night. The production value of Lakeside is visibly much higher than that of the other ones. It is shot on-location at an actual forest. It involves multiple talented actors and a wide variety of vehicles and props. Creepy mystery films have the danger of coming off as dull and too full of themselves if they fail to hook the audience into its world, yet, Lakeside successfully hooked me into its strange, eerie world. This was only possible due to the use of impressive atmosphere-building through sound design and editing. I was especially surprised at the creativity of the abduction scene, which cut between action and the coffee machine to build dramatic tension. While the ending left me confused and unsatisfied, I had a pleasant ride through the mystery of the film throughout it, so I won’t complain.
While I did say I will comment on three notable films, I feel obliged to add one more just to express my discomfort toward it.
Iowa: Iowa is a micro-short comedy about how a group of college kids from California at—presumably, USC—treat a girl from Iowa like an “international student.” While I understand how this can be funny, the joke of it all feels a bit too old-fashioned—and even uncomfortable for me as an international student. They treat the Iowan girl like some total alien—“oh she can’t speak English,” “oh, it’s her culture to do this or that”—all under the excuse that she is an “international student” from Iowa. As a Korean international student who speaks fluent English and does not eat kimchi in someone’s living room, I can confidently say that the writer would not have written this short if they had one single international student in their friend group.
I’m honored to have attended 4085 Productions’ first film festival. The newly found production company has the potential to bring even more amazing films to life in the near future. If nothing else, I hope its success has inspired many more student filmmakers out there to start creating — now!