Bella and Roger meet his parents.
Directors Steven Lai and Leonardo Giovenazzo wrote and directed an 11-minute short entitled “Bark.” It will have its Southeast Premiere at the 56th Nashville Film Festival on Friday, September 19th at 9 p.m. in Regal Green Hills Theater #4. The film features veteran actor Eric Roberts as Albert, the father of Roger (Kiser Shelton). Roger has invited his girlfriend Bella (Brianne Tju) home to dinner to meet his parents. Albert’s wife is played by Karen Culp.
Brianne Tju, who appeared in “I Know What You Did Last Summer” (2021).
As Bella is driving to her boyfriend’s house, she accidentally hits and kills a large Black Labrador Retriever that is smack dab in the middle of the road. She then has to put the dog out of its misery using a large rock. By the time Bella arrives at Roger’s house, she is in no condition to enjoy the meal or the dancing afterwards that Albert (Eric Roberts) suggests, and is having flashbacks involving the sudden appearance of the hapless animal in the middle of the road.
ERIC ROBERTS
GLENDALE, CALIFORNIA – OCTOBER 07: Eric Roberts attends the 7th Annual HAPA Awards at Alex Theatre on October 07, 2023 in Glendale, California. (Photo by Olivia Wong/Getty Images)
On June 4, 1981, Eric Roberts was driving in Connecticut with then-girlfriend Sandy Dennis’s German Shepherd in the passenger seat when he crashed his jeep into a tree. While the dog escaped serious injury, Roberts spent 72 hours in a coma and was hospitalized for more than a month, forcing him to drop out of the Broadway show Mass Appeal. I wondered if the “Bark” plot involving a car crash and a dog spoke to the veteran actor and factored in his decision to take the small, but necessary part. Roberts is known for having more IMDB credits than anyone, listed today as 882.
When I interviewed Eric and Eliza on my Weekly Wilson podcast (#6 on this blog) during the pandemic, as he was appearing in the indie film “Lone Star Deception,” a 2019 film, he had 569 IMDB credits. In the intervening six years, Eric Roberts has racked up 313 more credits, which means an average of 52 roles per year, or roughly one role a week. Needless to say, these are not leads, nor are they necessarily feature films. When I asked Roberts about leisure time back during that interview, he said he hadn’t had any “leisure” time in 5 years. (He used to enjoy horseback riding, but had given it up, he said.)
I asked Eric about his work ethic in deciding what parts to take (something which his wife, Eliza, handles). He answered, “Once you’ve established yourself as someone who’s worth their salt, who’s good, you have to live up to it. So every time you’re offered something, you have to ask yourself, ‘Can I be my best?’ And if you can, you take it.”
OTHER CAST
In this 11-minute short, the photography by William Albu was good, the Production Design by Claire Huber was superior, and the music (“Meet Me Halfway” by the Black Eyed Peas) was more than adequate. I watched Kiser Shelton as Roger wolf down a dessert in an overdone fashion from a beautiful piece of china and realized that this was my mother’s pattern, “Allure” (Japanese Noritake). Since Mom was born in 1907, this was definitely antique china and beautiful. It’s odd to see weird things you identify with in a film, whether it’s Tony Soprano’s bedspread ( I own it in Texas) or the silverware fork that was supposedly used by JonBenet Ramsey in 1996 the night she was murdered, (which was also my mother’s pattern.) I found the production design—the house, the setting, everything about the house and table to be extremely well-done. Kudos to Claire Huber!
THE BAD?
I have only one small criticism, which can perhaps be attributed to the fact that “Bark” is described as both comedy and horror. Three of the four actors played it straight. Kiser Shelton went for the comic aspect and came out looking and sounding over-the-top.
Since “Bark” is billed as a comedy/drama, the overacted (and overwritten) proposal by Roger to Bella in the dining room (“You are the sunshine in my garden“) can be attributed to Kiser Shelton’s attempt to ham it up for comic purposes. For me, it would have been better to follow the lead of Eric Roberts, Brianne Tja and Karen Culp and play the part straight.
There is an interesting ending for the short and it was professionally done and enjoyable.
