In Star Drunk, All Phasers Are Set To Intoxicate
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Cinema is a kind of entertainment that goes well with alcohol. When watching a film like Withnail & I or The World’s End, it seems natural to be holding a pint glass or a flask in your hand. But because films are usually created in professional environments, you never expect the actors to be drunk while performing their scenes. Well, that is absolutely not the case when it comes to the non-cleverly titled Star Drunk, as seen above.
Directed by Chris R. Wilson and Zach Persson, it was a project to see just what happens when a short film is created entirely by people under the influence of liquid muses. It was written by Wilson, Persson, Jacqueline Gault, Tim Feeney, Roman Battan, and Josh Persson, who all got smashed and then wrote a script, with the agreement that anything the wrote down was going into the film. And as you can tell, drunk writers have the same approach to storytelling as sober hack writers. An obvious nod to space adventures experienced by those in Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek, Star Drunk falls into stereotypical territory from the first second and doesn’t let up. That said, I would watch an entire TV series of these guys slurring their mumbled exposition.
The Captain, played by Greg James, was top notch overperforming, even if it looked more like a sober man trying to act drunk rather than a drunk man trying to act well. One of life’s great synchronicities, I guess. You could almost smell the booze coming off of both Alexander Fraser, who played Ryan, and Adam Elliott Davis, who played LaBeef, who didn’t seem to be in control of the words they were saying. I can’t imagine trying to get all these guys in line to actually pull any of this off. Drunk strangers are hard to corral, but drunk friends are almost impossible. That said, Kaylee (Britt Harris) and Gorgonzola (Kyle Smith) both looked like they could have pulled off being drunk at any job, while Dee (Bethany Jacobs) could possibly blame her appearance on just having a really heinous day. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t perform any of this dialogue realistically while sober, so adding alcohol to the mix would render the seriousness of this dialogue useless.
For anyone who watched the video and thought perhaps the whole “acting while drunk” bit was just a ruse, a behind-the-scenes video was released. And I suppose somebody will say that the behind-the-scenes video was faked, but that person is just being a complicated dick.
Wilson notes that this short is the spiritual successor to another short film he made, Cleverbot: Do You Love Me, which was written through a conversation on the artificially intelligent website Cleverbot, which responds to anything you write to it, though not always in the genuinely intelligent ways. You can watch the short below, and then eagerly await the next interesting approach these guys bring to film-making.
