{"id":8816,"date":"2008-02-15T05:37:56","date_gmt":"2008-02-15T10:37:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=8816"},"modified":"2008-02-15T05:37:56","modified_gmt":"2008-02-15T10:37:56","slug":"pencil-fighting-the-life-and-times-of-team-balderdash-2007","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/15\/pencil-fighting-the-life-and-times-of-team-balderdash-2007\/","title":{"rendered":"Pencil Fighting: The Life and Times of Team Balderdash (2007)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"MV5B\"<\/a>I wanted to really like \u201cPencil Fighting.\u201d I mean, granted, in the end the concept is interesting, the scenes are humorous, and the direction is tight, but beyond that \u201cPencil Fighting\u201d left me generally apathetic to the entire story and I just didn\u2019t really know what I thought of it. Then watching it a second time, I realized that I just didn\u2019t enjoy it as much as I wanted to. While you have to really appreciate what director and writer Fro Rojas is getting at, often times \u201cPencil Fighting\u201d left me unsatisfied, especially since there seemed to be so much more that could have been done with the concept and story.<\/p>\n

Instead we\u2019re really only given a constantly erratic tonal change along with a format switch of documentary and narrative that\u2019s often pretty jarring and spastic to sit through. Pair that with the melodramatic narration and it doesn\u2019t completely win as a comedic short that really succeeds in respective areas of genre, and production. Aside from that, the acting leaves much to be desired, with performances that are either much too weak to stay focused on the narrative, or over the top to where it makes the film feel more like a wacky comedy instead of a comedy based around eccentricity.<\/p>\n

Rojas strives for a Wes Anderson atmosphere and while it can almost resemble it, \u201cPencil Fighting\u201d sadly has a noticeable uneven pacing, and a story that sadly goes on longer than it really should. At twenty three minutes “Pencil Fighting” can feel stretched and the ultimate resolution is much too trite to really enjoy. Fro Rojas is no slouch as a director, and it’s clear from “Pencil Fighting” that he has quite a big future in filmmaking ahead of him. “Pencil Fighting” looks very much unlike the typical low budget short documentary and that’s a good thing because he builds his film to look much more like a combination of Wes Anderson and Jim Jarmusch.<\/p>\n

Rojas definitely has an eye for the eccentric and I look forward to seeing more from him. Rojas really has his ducks in a row, it\u2019s just the delivery of his concept that doesn\u2019t completely win with me, in the end, in spite of the potential this has to be a launch point for a career. In spite of the great direction and atmosphere, \u201cPencil Fighting\u201d really wasn\u2019t a home run cinematically. Years from now when this movie is a cult classic, I\u2019ll be one of the minority proclaiming that it really didn\u2019t work with me in spite of the deserved status. Whether that\u2019s a compliment or a caveat, I\u2019ll leave it up to you to decide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wanted to really like \u201cPencil Fighting.\u201d I mean, granted, in the end the concept is interesting, the scenes are humorous, and the direction is tight, but beyond that \u201cPencil Fighting\u201d left me generally apathetic to the entire story and I just didn\u2019t really know what I thought of it. Then watching it a second […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[219,501,672,748,752,938],"class_list":["post-8816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-comedy","tag-indie-film","tag-mock-documentary","tag-online","tag-p","tag-short-film"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8816"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8816\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}