Emotionally distraught female hotel guest meets hotel manager. In the midst of her sadness, she has become an interior decorator; she rearranges furniture as she tries to determine a new layout to the already well-maintained and orderly hotel room. It is early in the morning— 4 a.m. to be exact— but she is more awake than ever. She creates a clutter— a disorganized mess— that closely mimics her own confusion and her attempt to reorganize her thoughts and perhaps, even her life. Hotel manager walks in with a replacement pillow in hand, and offers not the pillow (because the pillows on her bed are actually fine, she later says) but instead, despite his emotional disconnectedness, offers his much needed company.
Sounds familiar? Like many films of today, Lost in Translation for example, strangers are apparently better company than most because they offer new and unfamiliar perspectives. But unlike Lost in Translation, a 2003 film that was nominated for four Academy Awards, this plot was much too forgettable.
In the nine-minute long webisode, Company, part of the the Suite 7 web series sponsored by Lifetime, Shannen Doherty plays the role of the hotel guest, coping with a recent breakup with her lover. Wilson Cleveland plays the hotel manager, who offers to help her rearrange furniture and figure out how and why her relationship ended. Their performance is not going to win any awards for sure, and their dialogue is shallow and somewhat bland. The script is clichéd and their reactions are excruciatingly agonizing to watch. Even with such entertainment sponsored with the efforts of corporations and big-name performers, Company definitely failed to please.
Web series, which are posted on the Internet, provide a new facet of entertainment for a widely different audience that scours and surfs the online world. Often they are children born in the Internet Age, or right before— they are the ones who know how to navigate through the multiple layers of the Internet world.
Oh, Inverted World, on the other hand, a black-and-white film low-budget web series, produced out of Long Island, leaves viewers in just the first episode, hanging. We are left to wonder to ourselves why the moon is to come crashing down and why the three bearded men have been bound and gagged. There’s no denying that this was an unbelievable storyline that was a far stretch from reality, but I preferred it to Lifetimes’s butchered attempt at portraying one example of a low point many of us experience in life.
I didn’t love it immensely, but overall, on first impression, the film made me more curious than Suite 7 ever did. The performances weren’t stellar, but for novice actors, their efforts were laudable.
Sherese Francis, however, said, “I did not like Oh, Inverted World because the acting was not convincing enough for me. She also stated, “The lines were delivered awkwardly and I could not take it seriously.” True, maybe not too seriously, but it certainly left me wanting more.
It definitely seems the case that “polish” plays on cliches. And though I hate to admit, I think they tend work and entertain us a lot of the time. Maybe I have to see “Company” to make sure I agree with you in this case though.
And I agree, though I didn’t like “Oh, Inverted World,” it left me hanging and that’s usually a good thing. In this case, I was contented with a summary of the next episode than sitting through it. You win some, you lose some, right?