Short Film: Fine Dining

Coming in at round the 9-minute mark, Fine Dining is a gorgeous short directed by Usher Morgan. At the end of the credits an intertitle actually tells us how the film came to be: “This film is the result of a screenwriting challenge in which the filmmaker was asked to replace the main characters in their favourite dialogue-driven scene with folklore characters and rewrite the dialogue based on the characters they introduced.”

In this case the scene chosen was the opening to Pulp Fiction and the characters replaced with the vampires, Vladdy Daddy, or Vlad Dracul, (Joel Bernard) and Lisa Bear, or Jusztina Szilágyi, (Elyse Price). Before I get to the dialogue, however, I want to touch on the look of the short. Done in an animated style the film is simply beautiful to look at and, I understand, each frame was individually painted and processed to give it its distinctive style.

I'll execute every...

As for the dialogue – if you are going to pick a dialogue driven scene then a Tarantino script would be the place to start. However, to pick that and then re-write it, and do it justice… well that is a tough call and, I’m glad to say, this was up to the task. As the scene progressed and Vladdy tried to convince Lisa that drinking from blood bags was something to be abandoned in favour of drinking from source, we hit a cracking line that verbosely rewrites the line from Dracula, “when men believe not even what they see, the doubting of wise men would be his greatest strength.” This becomes “Santa Clause is missing, the Tooth Fairy is in rehab and the Easter Bunny died of diabetes, there is no magic left in this world and if there is, humans are too f*cking cynical to recognize it!” Fantastic.

The imdb page is here.