Fashionably Woke Young Women Want to Make a Movie in "For Your Consideration"
Fashionably Woke Young Women Want to Make a Movie in "For Your Consideration"
A short subject narrative about conceiving a short subject narrative by those in unfortunate places of privilege.
Dear Moviegoers,
“We look like we’re having so much fun!” Indeed, in the short film For Your Consideration, fun for the rich and relentlessly privileged of a tragically exclusive Los Angeles is but a fantasy for the sake of fantasy. Living vicariously through ones own vicariousness, really. Living at the speed of and need for influence, absolutely. Grabbing coffee with friends (or like-holes) is just another opportunity to make a post, not to enjoy coffee and conversation. What would they talk about, anyway?
Poppy Gordon’s short begins with a young woman doing outdoor yoga at her L.A. abode. The camera shows her content self preparing for pose and using an elaborate mantra-creating device to find inner peace, but I’m wondering about the rest of her insulated neighborhood and those outside the gates. A slow zoom, a pause for an idea, and an interruptive text - sent. Thus is the start of a maybe movie within a real movie.
A roundtable-style chat with gal pals of different types - from the loyal one to the informed one to the “ethnic” one (I’m using the language and shamed whispering of these characters) - is the setting for a power-broker session of would be film producers, developing and shooting down one another’s ideas for a proposed movie of staggeringly and ever-escalating fake wokeness. For Your Consideration is, in this way, a satire through and through. It’s also a plucky horror and an empowering drama on how “accomplished” dramatic cinema can come from such vapid origins.
So… satire again.
It’s funny to me how the young women pitching and working on a movie with each other believe that the end goal of an Oscar is, somehow, a win. If they’re so connected and so social media savvy, they’d grasp something like #OscarsSoWhite as being a bad thing (on top of many other award show criticisms). Perhaps it’s not that they don’t grasp it, but that they really don’t have to worry about it. After all, people will keep watching these celebrations, and keep patting themselves on the back. When the topic of prison reform comes up, the excitable loyal one looks over at their (yes, their) black friend, approvingly suggesting that she “knows.” “Why would I know anything about prison?” That’s why she’s in the group, folks. That’s why.
I laughed, I got disgusted, and I laughed again. For Your Consideration draws upon familiar notions of L.A. “elites” and dials it all up by letting the characters just… just be characters. It’d be so cartoonish if it all hadn’t been played so convincingly. Some truly startling performances, these are. Dangerous even.
And the film they’re planning? Visuals pop up of what it could end up being, in various stages of tone, from dark drama to tear jerker and back again. The final vision of this film could actually be bold enough for an Oscar, and that’s… that’s not odd whatsoever. These are the seeds of hit movies, the fruits of which are only enjoyed by these types. It’s an inconvenient truth of sorts. The only thing odd here is that the coffeehouse roundtable might also be a secret excuse to diss and be catty, only because the virtual means to do so are already present. The damn devices are in their hands.
It’s all in their hands.
For Your Consideration excels on its surface and surprises with what’s underneath. A comedy on the ground, a shot of coffee just below. A shot, mind you. Who has time for a full cup? What would we even talk about, anyway? 3.5/5
Sincerely Yours in Moviegoing,
:)
