Come Into Your Own

It is a movie as the title would suggest if finding one's identity. It's a movie about picking your labels and how you define yourself. It has characters with unique back stories and relatable goals and dreams portrayed by talented actors. I think the best part was it is not a movie with stereotypical cliche gay characters that don't seem real in the slightest and are kinda offensive. The only reason I can't give it a 10 is because the ending was absolutely horrible if they wanted it to end on that sort of note there was many better ways of doing it but the one they wrote seemed insincere, rushed and untrue to the characters.

. . . I find the producer/writer/director/star attractive in a weird way, and I liked the sand-colored shirt/smock/jacket he wears in that looooog outdoors at early evening scene with the girl so fetching that I had it copied for myself. And I look great in it. So thanks for making the movie, Andrew.

Lirim (what a pretentious name) is upset with how charmed and successful his life is. Don't you feel bad for him? So he decides to devastate life after life in order to find meaning in his own. Then the movie ends. This movie has essentially four characters in it - the lead, his ex, his current love interest and the friend. Simple enough. The biggest problem is that the lead is the least interesting or likable of all four people. He is very closed off, cynical and is not trustworthy. Meanwhile, the three people who surround him are open, heart-on-sleeve people who don't deserve what happens to them, namely getting entangled with a heartless narcissist who is unable to have true feelings for others. I blame it on the creator of this film, who not only wrote the story, but directed it and played the lead. He is so wrapped up in this character he created that he can't see how much of a jerk Lirim is and because of all the duties he took on, probably wrote the lead to have less lines to accommodate the directing as well. This means that we don't really get to know Lirim as intimately as we would have had different people took on the different roles. Or maybe the writer/director/actor is himself a heartless narcissist and so can't see his reflection. Either way, the movie is a perfect portrait of self-absorption in an age where I'm tired of self-absorbed people. This movie is a fail.

I had no intention of reviewing this movie until I read some of the scathing, even nasty, reviews, and it's always been my feeling reviews should be informative, critical, and constructive. "Come Into Your Own" suffers from most of the pitfalls of first-time indie film making and feels like a film school thesis project with its low budget, rudimentary camera work, script, sometimes amateurish acting, and lose editing. It's modest strength stems from it's love and need to tell its story. It's a very personal film for the writer-director-actor about the bumpy road all of us take toward identity. Indeed the script can be opaque at times (feeling undeveloped and poorly etched) but the confusion and conflict of the lead is engaging, and in today's world that increasingly challenges a simply binary approach to sexuality seems authentic. I did not think the ending a cop-out. We might want as audience members to have the lead choose and be happy, but that's clearly not the point of the film. The film ends in the ambiguity of beginning a more honest and selfaware journey, and coming into your own is messy and complex for the artist and for all of us. We can only demand of ourselves that in each step we grow better both as human beings and better as artists, honing our craft to produce professional quality work.

Its a simple way of finding yourself or at least trying to find happiness if you feel you are not happy in your relationship. And we all know how stupid we act when we do...