'Ever Since the World Ended'

Comments (0) By Ed Gonzalez Tuesday, Jan 2 2007

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Ever Since the World Ended
Directed by Calum Grant and Joshua Atesh Litle
January 10 through 17, Two Boots Pioneer

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Filmmakers Calum Grant and Joshua Atesh Litle embrace their budgetary limitations, conveying life after a devastating plague through the eyes of two fictional documentarians, also on a shoestring budget, who attempt to catalog the lives of San Francisco's survivors. Subjects include a man who hopes to build a museum about the plague, a biker dude who dangerously travels outside the city, and a woman trying to conceive and raise a child on her own. One gleans possible causes for the plague from the story's talking heads, but more important to the documentarians within the film are the survival instincts of their subjects. Like Emmanuel Lubezki's phantasmagoric images for Children of Men, the performances in the film are so remarkable it's easy to ignore the implausibilities that surface. But even as its self-aware approximation of the doc format startles, Ever Since the World Ended lacks vigor. Because it's been a decade since the tragedy, everyone in Grant and Litle's dystopic tomorrowland has learned to cope with a new existence. Anger subsided, the characters have resumed a way of life that is strikingly similar to our own—which, in this case, resembles something close to a banal indie.