This review is about a 12 minute 24 second short film called The Drive which features a mother called Liz (Amber Paul); who is school carpooling on the day of the Kennedy assassination.
There is a strong delivery in Paul’s performance, and the nature of the overall film’s dark theme is conveyed fairly well; of an everyday routine turning into a distressing experience when millions of Americans heard on their car radios and watched on their televisions about the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, this had a large impact on the country and its future.
Although, during the film, there is also something that doesn’t make sense to me in terms of scene structuring; it’s the double pullover by the driver (Andrew Arrow), right after the first pullover, with the first having an inaudible conversation which seems to not be informative, and then seemingly acting surprised about being pulled over again. The dialogue of the characters confused about what is going on yet could be seen as shock, while at the same time already hearing about what happened and not asking that during the first pullover? The short film could have cut out one of the pullovers, improved on dialogue and explored more from that day on the drive.
Great work on maintaining the accurate aesthetic from the 60s time period; through well-researched fashion, makeup, and cars which are specifically pre-1963, instead of anyone making an error of any 60s cars made after the assassination in that same decade.
The music by David Robbins added to the intensity. I thoroughly enjoyed the cinematography, especially for the montage intro scenes of the American landmarks and various buildings accompanied by Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Concerto for Harpsichord and Orchestra in D Minor”.
Overall, The Drive could have made much better use of the 12+ minutes, however the film does succeed in capturing the initial feeling of a small slice in time of a distressing day about the JFK assassination.
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