Actor's Day

Daniel Martin’s relief from the JDR series and an amiable if not always logical precursor to The Prowling, Actor’s Day is a mixed bag of comedy, action and offbeat mayhem. Unfortunately for Actor’s Day, Dan’s style of directing is hardly suited to the material and as a result the pace of the movie is unnecessarily fast and convoluted. The director seems so impatient to get to the important areas of the story that on the whole Actor’s Day feels untidy and often the sense of déjà vu surrounding the narrative tends to bring it down. This is not to say Actor’s Day is particularly bad, nor is it much of a letdown. A short movie in the context of 3dmm (most successful with the recent Regime Of Terror), the movie plays on the program, the script itself actually a very dry and witty piece of work (“I’ll be there in eighty frames”). Dan sacrifices storytelling for observational comedy, at times this proves successful (Actors head banging to the Imaginopolis Theme is a nice touch) and other times not. Too much time is spent on activity and not enough sadly on an actual firm story. Subsequently Actor’s Day is left with a general haziness that not even the most open-minded 3dmmer could ignore.

The problem: the big problem with Actor’s Day lies herein. With JDR, Dan proved he could direct action. He is that kind of director, able to pull ridiculous stunts off with fluidity and punctuality. But sadly from a literal perspective, JDR storylines have been based moreover on action and the scripts themselves have actually been fairly mediocre. Ironically, contrasting reasons make Actor’s Day a well-conceived but run of the mill offering. There is a good story here, with at times a very good script. But Dan often spends most of the runtime messing about with car chases and explosive set pieces. Ultimately Actor’s Day therefore has no clear conception of what it actually wants to do or say to its audience, or exactly what the purpose of the movie is. At times it’s a comedy, other times (and this said most of the time) it’s a PAM. But working together proves difficult when handling the narrative; where the genres have so often complimented each other, the overall pitch of Actor’s Day is based on a bullet point list and not a lengthy synopsis, thus it is a very unspecific approach to a community movie.

Still, it’s a laugh in places and fans of JDR are sure to lap this up. Take it either way but I personally think Actor’s Day was a useful experiment for Dan. Like JP on Manhattan Folds, Dan has a confusing and taxing time making sense of it all, but as The Prowling is being written by Z-Man and JDR Requiem by Aaron Haynes, I suspect Dan’s future success will make Actor’s Day one of his more underrated if not underestimated movies. But on the whole, my viewing experience of Actor’s Day was a succinctly average one. The kind of movie you’d wait till it was granted a retail release. Take it with a pinch of salt, and the most appropriate word for it would probably be: fun.