curiousviolet

Being an Alia Shawkat fan, I had to watch this. And I must applaud her, not so much for her performance here, but for her guts in taking on a role of a character who is going to be resented a lot as a narcissistic ego case who is a drag on everyone else.

When you start watching this, you think this movie will be the classic Slow Motion Train Wreck. Those are fun movies, because you know the disaster will happen, and you get to watch and satisfy your curiosity. But it doesn't happen. Instead a new band member Pat arrives and changes the tone from hopelessness to one of positivity. So the movie becomes a "personalities under stress undergo changes" slice of life movie. That's a hard movie to make, I think, because the interactions have to "smell right" -- that is, be believable to a deep extent, so that you KNOW that what is happening HAD to happen, because of the characters, and there have to be AHA moments. But it doesn't make it. Too many tiny question marks pop up, and this ensemble doesn't pull it off. I have to blame the director for this, because there should have been many scenes done differently and subtly and edited better, and maybe it could have been pulled off. Again, I think the task was gigantic and this crew just could not pull it off. Unfortunately, failure in this case makes the film such a dreary watch that a lot of the audience is going to tune out, walk out, or otherwise bail.

I get tired of seeing the one star ratings by "reviewers" here who think they can elevate their self esteem by slamming a movie. It's entirely as bad as the ten star reviews by the movie staff. Let's be honest. This one has a weirdly paced story, but the writing is not too bad. However you can tell that the writing was patched at the last minute in many places to accomodate footage that was shot, and the availability of the staff or cast. Clearly this was put together from pieces under severe budget restraints. Plot holes and nonsequiturs result. One of the first things you notice is that the fighting scenes are clumsy and amateurish, so they probably could not afford a fight choreographer. That's a severe restriction for a movie with combat sequences and perhaps they should have adjusted the script to minimize that problem. Another thing you notice right away, is that the two sisters in the movie have very different accents, so it's clear they were not raised together. Why didn't the director cast this better, or get his cast to fix their accents? On the plus side, some of the music is fun and the nice robot is endearing. And the lead actress is dressed to attract the eye. On the whole, this might be enjoyed by 14 year old boys. In a world used to movies with a 400 million dollar budget, it should still be possible to make a $400k dollar movie (my guess), a thousand times smaller budget, and it is, but this one has too many faults to be enjoyable by megamovie fans. But for the rest of us, it's barely watchable, and for a few of us, it's possibly sort of fun. Four stars is the right rating. A substandard movie, but still one that someone will enjoy.

This could have been a reasonably entertaining movie, if the scenes had been rehearsed more and if the director had gotten the right tone. But we are left with, for instance, cringy scenes where the actors don't know what to do with their hands while speaking, and the director keeps their awkwardness in frame. Halting lines delivered with entirely wrong emphasis. Some of the premises were not believable -- if the young lesbian had spent so much time watching lesbian porn, as shown, she surely would have had a better grasp of some basic moves. And the idea that her best friend did not know was too farfetched. The film had heart, but it needed a director who could perceive how weak the shots were, and it needed a scriptwriter who could fix the obvious flaws. This movie is better than a "class project" level of competence, but only just. There is not a single moment of brilliance or hilarity. Yet, it's sort of worth watching, if you're determined to watch EVERY lesbian movie you can find.