2/10
Like an ambitious student film: contains many showy images but no coherent point
15 August 2004
Anyone with a half a brain can tell this was made by a group of amateurs with a budget that couldn't be more than a couple thousand dollars. I liked the film's use of lighting, as well as the costume design, but other than that there's nothing good I can say. The story's an incoherent mess. It's one of those confusing story lines that goes in many different directions and is hard to follow, yet at the same time it's not worth following. Besides the lighting and costume design, the film is a stylistic mess. It's like one of those student films where the director is simply trying to show the professor all the different things he can do with visuals, but totally ignores the concept of making a "good film." The sound is terrible. There's one scene where we're watching two characters get out of a car, from a distance, and it sounds as if the characters are right in front of the camera (an obvious use of ADR). Some of the camera-work is shoddy as well. In one scene, two of the characters are in an amusement park, and it's shot on a cheesy home video camera. And no, it wasn't a stylistic choice. I guess the filmmakers weren't able to sneak a film camera into an amusement park, so instead they used a mini-camcorder. That's the kind of stuff you can only get away with in film school. And like in many bad films, there's a good deal of nudity. Some of the girls have pretty nice bodies, but the use of nudity is simply a ploy to distract us from the fact that this movie really sucks and doesn't make a lick of sense. Some viewers may be able to interpret something from this micro-budget flick, but I was lost. Then again, I'm not a fan of movies that jump back and forth, nonchalantly, from one reality to another, and there's no surefire way of telling what's real and what's fake ("The Matrix" being a big-budget example). I'm sorry, but I actually like to understand a movie. Is that too much to ask? There are some complicated films that are worth uncovering the mystery in subsequent viewings, but this is not one of those cases. Besides, why should I take any film seriously that's made by a director who doesn't even bother to put any effort into hiring good actors or using good cinematography?
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