Events Transpiring Before, During, and After a High School Basketball Game (2020)
(On Cable TV, April 2021) Ugh. Writer-director Ted Stenson goes for very specific aesthetics in Events Transpiring Before, During, and After a High School Basketball Game (as if the title wasn’t enough of a clue) and it’s really not one that I like. The plot is in the title, or rather the lack of plot is in the title: There’s a high school basketball game that brings a few people together, and the film studies in little subplots the slice-of-life moments of its characters’ lives. In other words: No big plot, lots of little subplots, lending to the result not only a fragmented impression, but an uneven one as well as not all of the stories are compelling. As a matter of fact, most of the stories are rather dull — from stereotypically dramatic drama students to a basketball player trying to plug in The Matrix in each conversation (the film is set in 1999) to a referee with marital problems to an assistant coach trying to get his team to adopt a complex system of play — this is definitely small-potato drama, and that’s what the film is going for. Don’t expect any big climax. The dialogue isn’t all that interesting, and its repetitiveness goes against the idea of using dialogue to reveal new things or advance the narration — by the fifteenth minute, we already know everything about the characters. Worst of all, however, is the film’s obstinate decision to handle every shot in static cinematography, often letting the camera running long after anything happens. This is both clunky and completely intentional — while it matches the low-budget aesthetics of the film, all of these things are a deliberate attempt to create something… that I don’t particularly care for, nor is particularly successful. It’s possible for flatly-directed films to succeed if they have something else—dialogue, wit, acting—but everything comes up lacking. Despite its significant flaws, it’s a bit too likable to be a failure (I’ve hated better movies because they were meaner), but Events Transpiring Before, During, and After a High School Basketball Game is too self-consciously quirky and misguided to achieve anything it could have aspired to.