Sickness with a Cure

"Video is a sickness," says Adam M. Green '89. "Parody is the only cure."

This may be true, but parody is also an extremely difficult technique to master, and in the case of Green's film Video Sickness, the amount of hard work put into the project only occasionally results in brilliant humor.

Video Sickness

By Adam M. Green

According to Green, Video Sickness represents the first time a Harvard student has written, directed and publicly presented an original comedy on video. He and his colleagues shot the film over what the director describes as two "nightmarish" weekends, at locations as varied as Christy's convenience store and Green's roommate's house in Weston.

The movie, a 45-minute compilation of two and three-minute sketches spoofing everything from Hyatt Legal Services to a capella singing, is a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the wonder of video. At its best, the film is a well-worked parody of television's silliness; unfortunately, the script's tendency toward cliche and its occasional poor editing detract from its potential humor.

Video Sickness has its moments. Its best efforts come through in short, crisply edited clips like "Arnold's Favorite Love Songs," an advertisement for an album collection of Arnold Schwart-zenegger singing Don MacLean's "Crying" and Roy Orbison's "Pretty Woman," among others.

Another product sketch, this time for "Sculptionary," (a variation on the game "Pictionary") succeeds mainly because of its quick-shifting camera shots, its high-energy acting and the brevity of the clip itself.

Perhaps Video Sickness's most valuable asset is the quality of its acting. Its fourteen cast members, the majority of which are drawn from Harvard's improvisational theater groups, add a real vivacity to the film and often save it from lapsing into contrived, run-of-the-mill bad jokes.

The movie's problems lie chiefly in the script itself. Lengthy jokes about condoms and parodies of Morton Downey, Jr. (one skit called "The Morton Downey Family Show" is a depiction of what "Leave it to Beaver" would have been like with Mort as Ward Cleaver) have been done too many times to be funny anymore. Script problems combined with poor editing lead to skits that come off as stale and cliched.

This brings us to Video Sickness's other main problem: clips that are not allowed to end before they have, in the words of one of my favorite professors, thoroughly tenderized the proverbial dead horse. The longest sketch, one about "drinking and dating," starts off on a weak premise-- a twist on studies of the effects of drinking and driving--and actually becomes less humorous as it drags on.

On the whole, Video Sickness is an energetic and often entertaining piece of work. It's worth seeing. Its problems in editing and cliched writing may cause a few yawns at some points in the film, but its fast-paced variety and skillful acting save it from growing stale.