‘The Show’ a good start

Every prospective filmmaker needs to start somewhere.
With little experience and a bare-bones budget, Fort Frances resident Andrew George started with “The Show”—a 42-minute mockumentary centring around a day in the life of a 20-year-old Fort High student.
Styled after more well-known entries into the mockumentary genre, such as “FUBAR” and “The Trailer Park Boys,” “The Show” similarly tries to show a slice of small-town life that some would find unpalatable.
Sporting plenty of foul language and teen-twentysomething relationships, “The Show” does manage a relatively accurate portrayal of the social dynamics of a certain segment of the small-town population, Fort Frances included.
George’s eponymous character is a too-old high school student hanging on for parties, battles-of-the-bands, and young girls. He buys booze for under-agers, smokes dope between classes, and can’t seem to think of a world beyond his hometown.
He is the worst by-product of a sometimes uninspiring small-town upbringing.
“The Show” tries to prove a point about certain people in certain small towns. Namely, that people like George’s character exist—even when most would like to pretend that they don’t.
They exist here, and they exist elsewhere. George, however, ultimately fails to get his point all the way across. The reason perhaps being that unlike films such as “FUBAR,” George doesn’t go nearly far enough to make his point in an over-the-top fashion.
“FUBAR,” and “The Trailer Park Boys” for that matter, essentially have the same point to make—wrapped up in often offensive satirical humour. But their characters aren’t as real as George’s and, as a result, the notion of satirizing some of a small-town’s less desirable characters is lost.
They aren’t pilloried; they are simply reproduced.
Visually, the film is well-presented. The freedom of the mockumentary genre allows the cast and director a significant amount of leeway over more conventional scripted fiction films.
Thus, what would represent an egregious blocking error in another type of film is hardly noticed here.
The cast is made up of mainly local actors, including Jenna Nowak, Melissa Scott, Brittany Martel, Drew Donald, Jared Anderson, Maverick Judson, Wade Friesen, Josh Wilson, and Sandeep Sindhu who, along with George, gave good performances throughout the largely-improvised film.
Overall, “The Show” is not the best debut for a director you’ll ever see. Neither is it the worst. While many will find the film offensive because of the language, it is nonetheless the result of many hours of hard work by many local people.
When “The Show” becomes available to the public, pick it up—if for no other reason than to support local arts.
2.5 Li’l Amiks out of 5.
Editor’s note: Charles Fisher is the former co-ordinator of Ottawa-based Zoom Productions, and has worked on independent films including The Bonesetter, Final Courtain, The Bonesetter Returns, and Agent Double-Double vs. Le Sépérateur.