Tight Jeans (2008, Destiny Ekagara)

In my opinion, Tight Jeans (2008, Destiny Ekagara|) was just a badly made short film. I thought some of the (minimal) plot and (excessive) dialogue was funny, but overall I thought it lacked anything that actually made me want to watch it. Essentially, there are 3 boys waiting outside a block of flats for their friend to pick them up, people-watching and commenting on passers-by. It opens with shorts of busy market high streets, similar to the opening you would expect of a documentary, and cuts to images of the 3 boys waiting. These two shots appear to be very disjointed aside from the fact they are both observatory. They appear to be from two different films, or even two different genres, rather than from the same. 

In addition to the disjointed opening shots, the camera is never still - it is always moving in one way or another, be it zooms, pans, tacking etc. While this does add to the impatience the boys are giving off to the audience, it also makes me want to just stop watching all together. In contrast to my opinion of The Arrival (2016, Daniel Montananini), I hated how the camera just didn't stop, I so desperately wanted it to just focus on the boys and their conversation, rather than tracking every little thing they commented on. For me it was more frustrating than interesting. 

One thing I did like was how in the dialogue, the boys weren't afraid to bring up taboo subjects, for example they discuss women with mixed-race children feeling they now have a 'ticket' into the black community. I thought this representation of ethnic minorities was refreshing, but it's just disappointing that it was in a film that lacked anything actually interesting. Is it ironic that a film about boys being bored could be so boring?