Director: Adam Sherman.
Writers: Adam Sherman, Dave Reeves, and Rachel Hardisty.
Stars: Lukas Haas, Madeline Zima and Jake Busey.
Review :
I wanted to like this. I liked the look of it, I liked how from the opening scene on it seemed like exactly the kind of movie i would stumble onto at 3 in the morning on cable and try to keep watching just to see where it'll go. The 2 leads are plenty charismatic and definitely deserve to be in a good off beat movie, but oh man was this definitely not worth my, Mr. Haas or the appealing Ms. Zima's efforts to either watch or act in. (i really hope she gets a better movie to showcase her offbeat charm elsewhere tho as even here you can tell that the camera loves her)
Film is another movie about a guy trying like crazy to drink his various problems away--and is more than happy to be doing his thinking in a drunken state. At the beginning he gets approached and kissed by another seemingly crazy perma-drunken young woman--and from that point forward is determined to have a relationship with this "crazy eyed" girl at any cost...or would if he was capable of having relationships with other people, etc, etc.
Its not a terrible premise--and you've seen this kind of anti hero plenty of times before in films like Leaving Las Vegas, Barfly, or Factotum among many others, but what separates this movie from every other movie about a very troubled alcoholic trying to carve out a relationship with someone whom they feel understands them is um well to put it bluntly--the dialog here is awful. Tremendously awful. Laughably awful. Awful, awful, awful...as well as really really forced sounding as well. Almost nothing anyone says in this movie feels especially real. There's a great scene in the last half hour where Ms. Zima after being presented with a gift of a snow globe (along with a monologue about said snow globe) complains to Mr. Haas "what kind of a person sits around all day thinking of what life in a snow globe would be like?" she then tries to make a point of how empty and how miserable Mr. Haas's life is and how she could never give herself emotionally to him because of that---a scene that is pretty bad by itself, but is made much worse about twenty minutes later when replayed in a string of flashbacks that Haas is having about the people throughout the movie who've been complaining to him about his life. Was that snow globe slam really supposed to be the emotional highpoint of the movie???
Haas has a best friend (who is of course the bartender in the bar that Haas frequents) played by Jake Busey--who it should be said is actually quite good as the would be sidekick. The scene where he describes how much he would like to f--k an entire town is one of the few times i actually laughed at the dialog the way it was meant to be-for that alone he should get special mention. Haas also has an ex wife, two parents (one of whom is played by the great Ray Wise and is for the roughly three thousandth time ridiculously underused) and a young son with whom he has a running conversation about the existence of G-d. The running convo wouldn't be so bad if it didn't sound so forced yet again. We get from a string of run-on commentaries that are shown throughout what Haas thinks about humanity and the problems of society and blah, so the stuff with him and his kid doesn't really seem so necessary--and also the stuff with the kid itself--i get that this is supposed to show that Haas is a redeemable character and that the love he shows his son shows that he's capable of loving someone else unconditionally--but none of it really washes since well the film keeps going to the trouble of pointing out that he's really, really not--which i guess may be the point but why go through the effort in the first place then?
On the bright side--the dialog that the 2 leading actors have to say to each other in their bedroom sequences together are as awkward as anything Adam Sandler said to Emily Watson in "Punch Drunk Love" a film i reckon this one would very much like to be seen as a companion piece to but can't pull off the energy level of, or the melancholy strangeness of (remember how romantic it was when Sandler said to Watson that "he wanted to smash her face in with a sledgehammer???" dialog makes a couple of attempts to match that--there's a quick scene where Zima asks Haas to strangle her and he gamely attempts to put her in a headlock-- but again, like the stuff with Haas and his son--it just comes off as more forced sounding then anything else.)
I will give it this tho--at least when the ending comes--the movie doesn't try to shoehorn in this ridiculous resolution that would probably feel very false given everything else that's happened-but like almost everything else in the movie--the impact of it is completely lost in the fact that its deliver with almost complete and total ineptness. I honestly rarely dislike things to the point that i will actually backpedal and try to convince myself that there were things in the movie that i liked--but the 2 or 3 things i liked here just seem to get lost in the truly lousy everything else that makes up the bulk of this movie. That's an accomplishment tho right? Maybe if i wasn't holding the movie to somewhat higher expectations thanks to the first scene i wouldn't have the reaction i had? let the backpedaling start!
Credits by Matthew Stechel (mateob25@aol.com)
Source image : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1663631/
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