NOTE: I made this film.  So I can't be totally objective.

I had some qualms about posting my own work on this site.  But a) this film is both mine and Hillel's, and b) if this is going to be a personal site, you should know where I'm coming from.  It was always annoying when professors at film school refused to show you their own work.  Put up or shut up, right?

I like "Citation".  The first few scenes are kind of uninteresting, they're more about the mechanics of getting the guy from here to there than anything else, but it picks up around the stairs and into the basement, and is, I think, well-constructed from there to the end.

The whole shaving premise is for me based on an elaborate subtext, which Hillel doesn't really buy into.  But I'll tell you about it anyway.

When we were putting this film together, we had to decide what we were looking for in the protagonist for the casting call.  I was more than a little bit troubled that it was "Caucasian Male, 20-something" because it seems like just about every student film you see is by and about us young white males.

The only way I could reconcile this is by making K.W. (the actor, bless him) into the Uber-Protagonist, Hero of All Student Films.  And the only logical denoument, then, was to wrest him of his goatee, mark of the hip white male film student/actor.

So, it's a right-of-passage movie, a loss-of-innocence movie, a coming-of-age story.  All that.  Complete with shadowy executives and a Paper Moon-esque girl sidekick.

So glad to get all that off my chest.

This film is funny. Really. It's wrapped up in a bunch of 'subtexts' that Kevin will try to sell you, but this film, to me, is straight up farce of 'The System' (always a ripe subject), and guess what, it works. Amazingly, that's tougher to do than most people think who haven't ever tried to make a satire. Hillel and Kevin do a great job, though, for the simple reason that they don't keep it subtle.  Who says film school doesn't teach you anything?