Tilt (2017)

Very well executed

A Masterpiece!

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

The acting in this movie is really good.

I see there are a lot of negative reviews for this movie and I honestly don't get why, certainly if you rate it the lowest possible. I won't say it is the best movie ever but to watch once it's certainly decent enough. I was just a bit dissapointed by the end, that's the only part where I expected more. For the rest the movie is entertaining enough to keep you interested. Watching the main character Joseph Burns (played by Joseph Cross) losing his mind after his wife got pregnant, and this while he has issues with his project and with his political views and life in general. It's not like Falling Down where Michael Douglas lost it and became extremely violent nor like Jack Nicholson in The Shining losing it also, but there is definitely a tension, a bad tension. The other movies mentioned became cult movies and are still very good, way better than Tilt, but Tilt is just different and yet the same as a person can't cope with reality anymore. The acting was not bad, the story could have used a bit more violence to me, and a bit more explanation at the end, but it's certainly watchable and doesn't deserve those ridiculous low ratings.

This film is a good example of what people that fail exams at film schools have to show as their thesis film. This hour and a half time wasting machine is full of cheap tricks that are surface level filmmaking. Calling this pile of garbage a film is a disgrace to film industry and filmmaking in general.You may think that this is a psychological game, that it's much deeper and not for everyone, but it is not. This movie is not mysterious or challenging, it is very easily understandable, bad version of simple and not that hard to take in. The problems arrive when you watch a scene, know what it will end with and what will it lead to, then watch it do exactly that with no enthusiasm and emotional and visual attraction.This thing is a pile of film-school-garbage made by someone who needs to repeat their program.

"Tilt" is billed as the first horror film of the Trump Era, although it was filmed before the actual 2016 election took place. Joe is a documentary filmmaker living in LA with his pregnant wife, nurse Jo. He has been working on a new doc that aims to expose the "myth of the Golden Age" in American history, specifically the post-war period roughly from 1947 to the advent of the Beatles. Trouble is, Joe keeps expanding his vision, but Jo needs him to buckle down to work in a "real" job, one that brings in money, and oh, by the way, to become an adult already. But Joe's sense of reality is unravelling, one scene after another…. I could see what filmmaker Kasra Farahari was going for here, but despite the excellent acting by Joseph Cross and Alexia Rasmussen, the film ends up being just too disjointed to work. Like Joe's documentary, "Tilt" really needs a sharper focus on a smaller theme.

An unemployed documentary filmmaker (Joseph Cross)'s behavior becomes increasingly erratic in the months after his wife becomes pregnant.This film is something like the next generation answer to "Falling Down". A man is stressed out by his life, and it manifests itself in ways that are not really helpful to society. However, whereas Michael Douglas simply became increasing violent, our protagonist here also seems to be heading in a direction of mental derangement, and the viewer may not always be able to predict what will happen next. This subtle difference is what would make "Tilt" a so-called "genre" film, but "Falling Down" not so much.What also makes the protagonist interesting to watch (and really, this is essentially a character study) is his own inflated sense of self. He goes through the struggle and stress of compromise with his wife, and this is really laid bare when he confronts another man and asks that man about his single status. We are then informed that a dichotomy exists: marriage or freedom. Our protagonist chose marriage, and therefore (under these limited guidelines) sees that he has forfeited his freedom.And his ambition may be ill-placed. While he is certainly knowledgeable and passionate about his film deconstructing the fallacy of the "American Golden Age", he also seems to have delusions of being the next Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn. He is ironically convinced that there is great commercial value in anti-capitalist material. And while that may be true, the ideas of America's "war profiteering" or "evolved propaganda" are already out there. He would be adding a whisper to a scream. (Does the viewer recall Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story"? Even with Moore's sizable influence, it had little impact.)Then there is the Trump connection. While this inclusion of the 2016 election cycle makes for a perfect counter-balance to the anti-establishment views of our subject, it has the unfortunate side effect of making the movie sort of dated. Will it have the same impact five years from now? Though it brilliantly have me wondering if it was filmed in "real time" or after the fact, given its early 2017 release. When our subject says "the day of the blustering angry white man is over", was this scripted with the knowledge in mind that Trump had won, or still at a time when that decision was unexpected? "Tilt" was screened at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival. Though it may not have been the best of the "midnight" offerings, it is still an excellent film. Anyone drawn to character studies or overtly psychological movies is encouraged to seek it out. Most likely, it will have either a wider release or appear on demand by the third quarter of the year.