jblacktree

Mathieu Demy has made a vanity piece about nothing, except what a charmless pompous and humorless man looks like brooding and boring an audience for hours. This guy leaves his beautiful girlfriend, about whom he is oddly, babyishly equivocal, for a mindless senseless and deeply ugly excursion into SoCal and Mexico, where he makes all the wrong solipsistic empty-headed moves of a spoiled rich reckless and cowardly dope. The director is obviously a rich kid, spoiled, with cinema bloodlines that allow him to shoot self-indulgent nonsense with truly great co-stars. I was embarrassed for them. The film is to self-serious to be hilariously bad, it is just inept and annoying. Sad.

The film starts fast with an ominous, eerie sense of family tensions and unease in a glorious setting, worth the price of admission alone. It writes its own cinematic language, with camera placements and framing slightly off and camera movements kinetic and unexpected. There are surprises, switchbacks, shocks, and fine acting from everyone. As for this pre-teen obsession with spotting "product placement," nothing is spotlighted in a way to garner sponsor backing, trust me. Spain and the actors look great--hot and sophisticated and summery and tense--and the young actors are attractive, the bad guys complex, the relationships original and refreshing. If your only reference for cinema is the Bourne series, stay away. If you know about movies and the syntax of cinema, a must see.