You want to give a picture like this, the work of a college kid in some small town who read about Sundance one too many times with unrealistic expectations and some relative with a trunk full of costumes, all the slack you can.
You really do. The basic idea that DV cameras should be out there with anyone with the guts to try and fail at the old "lets put on a show!" routine is an awesome one. And you have to give credit to anyone who can get anything feature length actually put together into something even close to a movie, when they're doing the DIY thing in the boonies.
But if you praise EVERYONE with a camcorder and an Apple computer's editing program TOO much... you're going to end up with a lot of really bad movies floating around with vanity DVD pressings and unnecessary IMDb entries.
And this is one of them.
A shaggy by-the-numbers romance pieced together from the plot of every middle-nineties slacker-romance-comedy-whatever thing as filtered through the exaggerations of that 13 year old kid in study hall talking about how some day he's gonna "get to second base".
Two-shots of a tripod of two people talking for three minutes cutting to... a one-shot of one of them talking for two minutes to... that two-shot again for another two minutes.
Then the two-shots move to a video store. Or a comic book shop. Or a high school football field's bleachers.
Characters wander in and out, that 13 year old's cardboard visions of characters from... Slacker, Reality Bites, Mallrats, Dazed and Confused, Singles, whathaveyou... crackwise on pop culture and float through the arc of a 13 year old's vision of a John Cusack lead taking an entire movie to realize that...
You know, the girl he thinks he loves is all sorts of misogynistic stereotypes of a pretty girl and his plucky tomboyish female best friend has really loved him all... etc etc etc.
Extra points for having renamed Jay and Silent Bob... Julie and Someoneorother... down to having the director play Someoneorother, supposedly as a streetpunk sympathetic to the main character's plight but only being able to channel him as... Alton Brown at 16 sneaking a cigarette from his mom's purse.
The point is... it's the teenage shame that a lot of aspiring filmmakers make in a bunch of shorts in college, to be shoved in a drawer and learned from except... the guy made it as a feature and never seemed to have gotten that it was only worth learning what not to do from.
Instead, there's a website for it and apparently three or four slightly-less-bad sequels with the Julie and Someoneorother recurring (!) and one of the plots revolving around (...get ready for it...) a brilliant independent filmmaker who isn't appreciated until he's mistaken for dead.
Ultimately, you just... kinda wish someone had told the filmmakers that, no, it's great you got a "movie" made and there's moxie in that but... no, write-ups in local newspapers don't mean that you shouldn't stick this in a drawer somewhere and actually learn how to make movies.
If this had been made in Los Angeles instead of the rural Adirondacks, it would BE "The Room"... a relentlessly mocked "so bad its good" cult hit, forcing the director to eventually pretend that he was in on the joke from the beginning.
You just feel bad that some aspiring filmmaker put the cart so far in front of the horse and then, long afterward still, doesn't realize that the cart goes in back.
But a movie review isn't a series of excuses and justifications to say "aw, this was a labour of love by a bunch of kids in the hinterlands, be nice"... it's an assessment of if you believe other people should see it.
And... no. You're only going to enjoy it if you're into the idea of watching the "Plan Nine From Outer Space" of middle nineties slacker-romantic comedies. If that's your bag then go for it.
Or, I suppose, if you're the family of the fifth-lead or something.
I just feel bad telling that truth because, hey, some kid had the moxie to put on a show and made it happen. Christ knows I never did when I was that age. Or ever.
You just wish that the people who had the guts and madness to do it... had the wisdom to know that the means and will to shoestring together a little picture doesn't mean anything unless... you have a script or actors or basic technical knowledge.
God, I feel like I kicked a puppy.
Thanks, internet.
