One-Day Seminar (2008) - By Duane L. Martin

Film Reviews: One-Day Seminar (2008) - By Duane L. Martin
Posted on Wednesday, October 01, 2008 @ 00:05:00 Mountain Daylight Time by Duane

I don't know how many of you have ever been to one of those business seminars. I went to a management one once, and basically it was this long, drawn out thing that was a mixture of useful information and boring chatter. One-Day Seminar is about one of these seminars, and more specifically, the guy who teaches it.

Benson Mountebank (Tommy Murray) is the teacher of one of these seminars. This one in particular is for managers and focuses a lot on how to deal with problem employees and other such matters. The problem? Benson isn't really a seminar teacher. He just happened to fall into that position after being turned down for a janitor position with the company, which by the way was a pretty amusing scene that we don't actually see until the end of the film.

Once the class commences, we find out just how inept he is, and on top of that, he has some other quirks as well, including a fear of public speaking that has him asking everyone to not look directly at him until he becomes more comfortable. At the end of the class, there's a seminar evaluation questionaire that everyone is asked to fill out. The funny part was, they all filled in the answers saying it was a great class for various goofy reasons. There were several funny ones, but one I thought was really funny was that a guy thought the class sucked big time, but marked that it was great because if he had to suffer through it, then damn it, someone else was going to have to too!

Anyway, now for the review bit...

This film was generally good, but it was kind of a mixed bag for me. I'll cover the bad stuff first so I can finish off the review on a positive note.

I think my biggest problem with this film really was some of the acting. Not the acting itself so much, but the line delivery. I'm going to coin a phrase right here in this review because it applies to lots of films, so I might as well come up with a term for it. Much of the dialogue in this film was RRR (read, rehearsed and recited). What does this mean? Well, it's rather self explanatory actually. It basically means that the dialogue delivery was very lacking in any sense of naturalness. It sounded as though the cast were simply reciting their lines as written rather than truly interacting in a normal, natural way. This gives the dialogue a rigid, somewhat stiff feel, and often the way we write is not the way we speak naturally, so when reciting "written" dialogue, it doesn't sound natural like normal spoken speech. Now, that said, I'm not saying here that any of the cast did a bad job in their performances really. The cast was actually quite good, it was just that the flow of the dialogue needed to be smoothed out.

That basically is my only real complaint. Everything else in this film was quite well done. The film is well shot, well lit, the sound is passable, though semi-quiet at times, and the editing moves it along nicely. There was a really nice scene where Benson forgets his room key at the coffee machine, walks out of the shot, and then suddenly dives back in and grabs the keys really quick. That was quite amusing, and I would have liked to have seen more of that kind of stuff done with the character. Another scene that was quite amusing was the end of Benson's interaction with the check-in girl at the hotel. The end of that was pretty hilarious. I don't want say what it was and spoil it, but man it was funny. This character was made for that kind of goofiness, but we ddidn't really get enough of it. Still, it was a nice shot. There were a few nice shots, and the commercial for the seminar company at the beginning of the film was also quite well done. There's really not a lot to complain about here on a technical level.

Overall, this is a well done film and was pretty enjoyable. Although I feel that more fun could have been had with the character in various ways, the film still plays out quite nicely, and if you get a chance to check it out, it's definitely worth a look.

If you'd like to find out more about this film, you can check out the Movies by Martin website.