julianne-102-213373

If you are an aspiring independent filmmaker, you must see this film. It will give you immense optimism when you see how low the bar must be to get a film into distribution. How they got Bradley Cooper to do this movie is beyond comprehension. The production quality of this film is abhorrent. The editing is amateurish, the fades ill-timed and misplaced. As to the sound, there is a scene where they tried to overdub the dialog and it looks like a Japanese Godzilla moment. There are moments when the audio is tinny and distant. And that is before you get to the essence itself. The protagonist character has no redeeming virtues. She is portrayed as a whiny, slutty, incessantly complaining, baggage-laden woman and it belies belief that the two male characters would have any reason to be infatuated with her. We simply do not care whether she redeems herself, and one is compelled to yell to Bradley Cooper to get out of there…both her bedroom and the movie. There is a particularly pretentious attempt at a montage that fails miserably…a crane shot above an empty art gallery where the protagonist is having her debut…the director shows the crowd filtering into the gallery..with interminable lingering on the small crowd, then dissolve to a small crowd, followed by a still small crowd, followed by…a still small crowd…as if they just couldn't get enough extras to sacrifice themselves on the altar of this embarrassingly misguided effort. The final assault comes in the form of the script. Most of the actors...Cooper excepted... look as if they are reciting lines off a cue card. The closing scene voice over is incomprehensible and leaves you shaking your head to remove the glaze from your eyes. To get this film sold to Liongate and into distribution, there had to be some very serious "Bending of the Rules"