The New Year

I found this movie to be too episodic to be entertaining. There is Sunny working at the failing bowling alley, there is Sunny dealing with her dying father, there is Sunny in her empty relationship with her boyfriend (which by-the-way the two appear totally mismatched), there is Sunny the ace bowling expert, and then there is Sunny getting involved with an old high school flame.

The only thing we really know about Sunny is that she had been the high school valedictorian and she dropped out of college to care for her sick father. In my opinion not one of the characters are developed enough for the viewer to actually care about. There are other reviews here that praise this movie but for me it came across as a shallow experience.

Maybe it was the editing that made the movie choppy. It's not a bad movie! I just couldn't get involved.

"The New Year" is a touching, funny and engaging indie from 2010, a little formulaic, but it held our interest to the end. Trieste Kelly Dunn really connects as Sunny, an ex-high-school star, now in her early twenties, who's put her life on hold to care for her ailing father. She works the counter in a failing "bowling center," which provides a great location, along with Pensacola stripmalls and wintry beaches; it's also the perfect metaphor for the hometown service economy that sustains most of the characters. Script avoids coming-of-age clichés; dialogue is funny and imaginative—a peculiar coworker is asked why he's hanging around the bowling center on his day off. He spreads his arms wide. "I like to stay in the realm," he says. The holiday reappearance of Sunny's "high school nemesis," already launched on a standup career in NYC, is the catalyst for the wispy plot. Strong supporting cast led by Marc Petersen as Sunny's father, Linda Lee McBride as her smart-mouthed BF and Ryan Hunter as the standup guy. Trieste Kelly Dunn projects intelligence and intensity by the bucketful; seems like she deserves more by now than just a steady gig on "Banshee."

I suppose that most movies are pretty unrealistic. People rarely speak in real life, the way they do in movies and in real life you don't have a soundtrack following you around.

In this sense, The New Year was almost like a documentary or reality show. But I'm not sure if that is a good or bad thing. You could say that this little film is much more true to life than most Hollywood blockbusters. But we don't necessarily watch a movie for realism. We usually watch for escapism, or at least compelling storytelling.

Clearly these film makers started with good intentions. It's a slice of life in Pensacola, Florida among the college aged. They attempt to tell one girl's story and show how an ordinary person reacts to their circumstances in a nondescript workaday town. But I'm not entirely clear on why our main character, the daughter of a professor, must work in a bowling alley, have a really low grade best friend, and date working class type guys.

You have to accept the premise in order to accept the movie, and those were the elements of the premise. Why couldn't she get a more upscale job and upscale boyfriend? Also, she hates Pensacola, but she never officially explains why. We are supposed to assume it's because she's educated and worldly, and the town is a provincial backwater outpost for rednecks and yokels. She can't find peers, so she has to hang out with ineffectual losers.

But surely there must be young professionals in town. The soundtrack mostly comes during transitions, but not during dramatic moments, so it maintains its' pseudo documentary or reality movie status.

The acting is excellent, unless the people are just being themselves. I see that the female lead and the guy who played her boyfriend, both went to school in North Carolina. They must have known each other. The others may not even be regular actors.

The writers and directors did a more than adequate job of conveying the angst and confusion associated with a person's transition from young adult to full fledged adult. But in this case, the person's life is super depressing.

If you like pure storytelling and you can relate to the birth pangs of youth, you will probably find this film reasonably stimulating. I did not "enjoy" it per say, but it held me 'til the end. For that I give it credit.