Customer Reviews

The Singing Forest

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4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

What a disaster. A good example of of a talentless writer/directer who has no flair for making movies. Jeorge Ameer is really a no talent wonder. His script is so light, if you were to drop it from the ceiling, it would take two weeks to reach the floor. And somebody should tell him "directing" a film calls for more ability than to simply let a camera aim and shoot. I don't find anything about this tripe worth praising. It is void of any artistic vision. And the low budget is no excuse for it being so bad! Case in point: "The journey of Jarred price," was made for $20,000 and it was a very good gay themed movie.I could elaborate, but why bother? A movie this terrible deserves no attention. The only reason I am posting this review is to possibly save other people from having to watch this.

After renting this film last night, I promoptly returned it today and demanded my money back.That is how discusted with this so called movie. It is just about the most terrible thing I ever have seen. There is nothing good about this movie. It is just lame. Non-artistic, poorly directed, with annoying background sounds that overwhelm the viewer so you cannot even understand what the actors are saying at times.I really hated this movie and will go out of my way to warn others not to waste their time on it.

I hate it when I pay good money for a movie only to realize I will never watch it again and would feel too guilty to sell it to another smuck here at amazon.
I could not even get through it the first time. TOTALLY unbelievable, the daddy must have had the daughter when he was what? 14!!! And the fiance falling into bed with the daddy {NUDE} was so fast you would have thought they knew each other from an adult bookstore instead of another time! Bad sound, bad acting, in short..BAD! So when you hear Micheal Jackson sing "who's bad" you can reply.."The Singing Forest...that's who!"

"The Singing Forest" DVD has the 69-minute feature film, four short films (about 19 minutes in total), a trailer to the feature, and a film gathering highlights of the director's career.

"The Singing Forest" is a story of reincarnated love. Columnist Christopher Hayes (played by Jon Sherrin) has learned from psychic Elvia Flores (played by Toni Zobel) that he is the reincarnation of a man named Jo who helped the Jews against the Nazis. Jo had a boyfriend named Alexander. It turns out that Christopher's daughter, Destiny (played by Erin Leigh Price) is getting married. When Christopher meets the groom-to-be, model Ben Ross (played by Craig Pinkston), Christopher believes Ben is the reincarnated Alexander. Matters play out from here to an unstable conclusion.

I had a hard time believing that the belief in a past-life romance would be a sufficient inducement to flip two nominally straight men into an age-discordant gay relationship with so little resistance from either. The Nazi-era Jo-Alexander relationship was not shown effectively. The daughter's reaction to all of this was initially believable but drifted into the fantastic.

The film tries to make all of this palatable with skin shots of Christopher and the very handsome Ben and by having Christopher look only about five years older than Ben or Destiny, instead of the twenty-plus he would normally be. There were no Jo-Alexander skin shots.

The DVD cover shows a shirtless Alexander (Pinkston) with Jo (Erik Morris) in blatantly inaccurate Nazi garb (e.g., the swastika is not symmetrical). These scenes do not appear in the movie. The two small stills on the DVD back are variants of what happens in the final scene.

The sound was intrusive, with breaking waves, barking dogs, or loud music often drowning out the dialogue.

The black and white Nazi scenes, with a mix of new and stock footage, had some effective images. I found annoying the title card announcing the Nazi scenes took place in 1933 but showing photos from 1945's concentration camp liberations. Jo was said to have been executed as the Soviets approached Berlin, in 1945. There is a big time gap that was never explained.

The opening shot shows an ill Christopher vomiting his alcohol into a toilet with Ben standing nearby. An essentially identical scene happens later in the film. I could spot no good reason to start the film this way. Additionally, Christopher catches Ben taking drugs once but complains about it some time later only once in private and in anger.

Two of the four short films are pretty good. "Uninhibited" maintains good suspense as a man comes home to discover a straight couple having sex in his bedroom. "Misguided Piss" shows a misadventure in cruising in a men's room. The other shorts, "My Straight Boyfriend" and "Popcorn & Coke" are less engaging.

Jorge Ameer has created the most unwatchable film I have had the misfortune of watching. Ameer seems to have no knowledge of how to direct a movie. Waves crashing and dogs barking are just some of the background noise that drown out the actors. I don't know if that is a good or bad thing though, as the movie is alful. Dreadfully stupid writing, badly edited, bad bad bad. The longest 90 minutes I have ever spent trying to watch a movie.My advise: stay away from this trash at all costs! It is dreadful!

Jorge Ameer has made a shockingly terrible movie. My boyfriend and I watched this surprisingly bad movie last night. The cover art on the DVD case made this seem like it was going to be a really good movie. But we really hated it. As an openly gay couple, we both were very insulted by this movie. It really lacked morals and suggested some very seedy situations.And the directing was just about the worst you could ever imagine. No, scratch that. I really could never imagine a film being directed with such sloppy directing. Ever. Jorge Ameer has no business making movies. I don't know what his talents are but film making is not one of them.

How do films like this even get made? The story, about a father who's daughter is marrying a man he believes to be his gay lover is a past life, is so lame. The acting is even worse. But the writing and directing is the worst I have ever witnessed. It really makes me puzzled how something so terribly made could be released to an unsuspecting public. I feel sorry for anybody that chooses to watch this thing. It will leave you screaming and running to the remote control to turn it off and demand your money back. If I was on an airplane and this was the in-flight movie, I would jump out of the plane without a parachute.

Writer/director Jorge Ameer may just be another edgy filmmaker waiting for larger budgets to set his ideas afire (think Gus van Sant, Gregg Araki, etc). Reading all the comments and reactions to this film is fairly good evidence that he is a controversial filmmaker - and that will probably work in his favor. He has technical problems with his product: the dialogue, which is really fairly good when it can be heard, is drowned out by ocean waves, dogs barking, street sounds, and the worst pastiche of heart-tugging micro-excerpts from classical music (Adagio from Mahler's 5th, Albinoni, Tchaikovsky ad infinitum); he fails to adequately introduce his characters' motivation which would further the storyline; he opts for some pretty cheap effects borrowed from the archives of WW II.

But given all that, THE SINGING FOREST has good thoughts about reincarnation, a stable cast some of whom show real promise, and an overall feeling of commitment that is so often lacking in these startup movies.

Christopher Hayes (Jon Sherrin) is an alcoholic man in mourning for his lost wife, who decides to attend the wedding of his daughter Destiny (Erin Leigh Price) and upon meeting her fiancé Ben (Craig Pinkston, eye candy in looks and with signs he just may become a good screen actor with some body language training). Christopher has met with a psychic Elvia (Toni Zobel) who has confirmed his thoughts that he is a reincarnated spirit of a lad named Jo who while protecting the Jews from the Nazis in WW II fell in love with a lad named Alexander: they both died in the war. When Christopher meets Ben he immediately knows that Ben is the reincarnation of Alexander. Destiny is a hard working girl, giving Christopher and Ben sufficient time together to talk, get loaded on drugs and alcohol, and act out on their hidden sexuality. Many confrontations occur, some including Destiny's discovery of the two men en flagrante, the psychic is re-consulted and the concept of reincarnation and the questions of reality/fantasy/fiction/illusion are addressed. The ending is a bit abrupt but the point is made.

Many subplots are touched upon (a rape scene that has more significance than we are allowed to understand, adequate exploration of the father/daughter relationship or the childhood histories of Christopher and Ben) and it is obvious that budget restraints prevented development of points that should have been clarified. But Both Pinkston and Price prove promising talent that needs developing.

Accompanying the film are several shorts that, while crude in nature, are funny and irreverent and again show some clever thoughts underdeveloped. In all, for a first film this is not a bad outing - if only there were some way to Dolby out all the background noise so we could actually hear the story Ameer is trying so hard to tell! Grady Harp, October 06

And along comes yet another "no budget" gay themed film with terrible acting, horrific directing, choppy editing and a bad soundtrack with horrible sound quality. While gay cinema has had many wonderful films the past few years, it has also encouraged some wanna-be film makers into releasing complete trash. This film makes no sense. It's just a complete waste of time for the unsuspecting viewer.And it's billed as a gay version of "ghost?" Only in the eyes of the publicity machine. I turned this dvd off after 47 minutes.I finally realised I was better off as this film was agony in terms of trying to watch the entire thing.

I'm not even going to pretend that I understood what this movie tried to be - it has been so incredibly badly made that I don't care. Bad sound, bad picture, bad dialogue, bad script - it has nothing going for it. If it was going for a couple of bucks I probably wouldn't be so hasty to warn people off buying it but at around $20 people should be made aware that they are buying an extremely badly made amateurish effort.