All Over Again

A man plays a song for a small crowd at a local open mic night.

In 2017, short filmmaker Joseph McGovern made a small film called All Over Again. It centred around the Bus Stop Music Café in Pitman, New Jersey, where an aging guitarist who had lost his mojo was encouraged to find his voice once again. This short film ran at about eighteen minutes long and seems to have been just as simple as it sounds.

Seven years later, McGovern decided to have another crack at the small film that seems to have made his name, and in the interests of re-promoting his work, hacked up bits of his already short film, or lifted clippings from the cutting room floor, and used these snippets to highlight the final song of the piece. At now only four minutes long we now have the music video for All Over Again, which seems to be taking on an ironic overtone to its title with this new production.

For the first forty-five seconds of the video all we get is setup, as the café comes into view, certain members of the crowd are picked out, and the MC (McGovern) introduces Gregory (Fuoco) to us as he comes up to play his one song. For those of us who have never seen the short film, or know who any of the characters are that are being shown to us, this is all extraneous and unnecessary, as there is no real narrative to follow during the playing of the song.

While Gregory plays his little two-minute ditty, composed by Fuoco and with lyrics penned by McGovern, we get a quick rehashing of the film, where characters are exposed to us doing mundane things, or simply just being there, which means absolutely nothing when we have nothing else to go on. A quick flash of a young couple clutching the girl’s belly tells us that at some point there was a baby on the way, but after that nothing is clear as to what we’re supposed to be witnessing in the visuals accompanying the song.

As a music video the audience is also let down by the audio, which was recorded live at the café complete with jerky chord changes, almost forgotten lyrics, and a sound like it was played in a tin-can. This is not a polished, studio version of a song that has had a video created for it, but a live recording of a guy singing in a local watering hole, while disparate shots of unnamed import are tacked on all around it. It begs the question if this is really a music video at all, or just another rehash at making a short film.

After the song has finished, there’s nearly another minute-and-a-half of credits to go through, accompanied by an instrumental version of a song that sounds quite similar to the one we’re supposed to be here for. In fact, in the entire runtime of the short film, we spend more time on build-up and credits than we do on the actual song we’re supposed to be listening to. Thankfully, it’s quite a nice song, in a folky, Neil Young kind of way, and Fuoco does his best to bang it out to the small crowd around him, while McGovern does his best work behind the camera to find the shots and the lighting he needs to film the performance.

Unfortunately, this version of All Over Again doesn’t work as a music video or as another short film. The song itself is just too short to take much notice of, and when it is couched in between a sandwich of filler that lasts longer than the meat of the video itself, it means that something is very wrong with what’s being presented. For what is, admittedly, a nice little song, what’s been attempted in the accompanying video adds nothing to the ‘experience’, and perhaps even takes away from the original short film, as it tries to bypass the need for spending the time to get actual involvement or connection from the audience.