Hey, who wants to watch a "dark comedy" about a trailer park teen who gets knocked-up and decides she wants to tell her lifer dad about it at the upcoming prison picnic? It's got Jenna Malone in it, that girl in "Saved!" and "Donnie Darko". Sounds like fun, huh? Honestly, it totally does to me, though I tend to gravitate to dysfunctional family indy flicks. But, and I really hate to say it, this movie was a really, really boring watch - every time I looked at the DVD display I was shocked anew at how little movie time had elapsed compared to the eons it felt like. Some kind of reverse "dog years" effect kicks in when one is profoundly bored.
And closing my eyes didn't help because I could still hear the atrocious dialog. I found myself wondering aloud how much of it was ad-libbed because I couldn't imagine anyone would sign on to the script if the lines I was hearing were actually put to paper. Whatever the secret to its non-success, the end result was the same: either the writer, the cast, or both were unable to milk anything from the weak setup almost every scene was saddled with. Yes, there was the occasional one-liner that was obviously too witty to have been made up on the spot - but those bright spots stuck out like sore thumbs because they were drowned in oceans of pointless, rambling, non-interactive dialog. You could probably scrape together enough of those snappy lines to make a good trailer, but that I can't confirm as there was no trailer supplied on the DVD (for this movie anyway - lame - I consider the inclusion of a trailer the minimum standard for "special" features).
Also the half-hearted suicide scenes were not fun at all to watch - not because I imagined that she would actually kill herself (this time), but because such botched attempts in real-life would likely yield permanent neck injuries or severed wrist tendons, so I was left with nothing but a cringing response. The plastic spork, the broken photo frame glass, and the flimsy macrame noose tied with a bad knot to the rickety old branch (which of the three will give out, you wonder, because one absolutely must for this overly simplistic movie to drearily continue), I mean, come on. And the suicider as a humorous element has been to much better effect in other movies ("Crimes of the Heart" comes to mind), though I can never fully get into it myself.
I don't make the rules, but the bottom line is movies that don't have much in the way of action must then rely on and have some kind of payout in the dialog department. The cardinal sin of this movie is that it has nether. Maybe for dyed-in-the-wool Jenna Malone fans, definitely for film school freshmen who need instruction on how NOT to make a movie, others should sit this one out (consider yourself warned). After our viewing the DVD went immediately into the "give it away, sell it, but for pity's sake keep it away from the collection or we might accidentally watch it again someday" pile. Two stars.
And closing my eyes didn't help because I could still hear the atrocious dialog. I found myself wondering aloud how much of it was ad-libbed because I couldn't imagine anyone would sign on to the script if the lines I was hearing were actually put to paper. Whatever the secret to its non-success, the end result was the same: either the writer, the cast, or both were unable to milk anything from the weak setup almost every scene was saddled with. Yes, there was the occasional one-liner that was obviously too witty to have been made up on the spot - but those bright spots stuck out like sore thumbs because they were drowned in oceans of pointless, rambling, non-interactive dialog. You could probably scrape together enough of those snappy lines to make a good trailer, but that I can't confirm as there was no trailer supplied on the DVD (for this movie anyway - lame - I consider the inclusion of a trailer the minimum standard for "special" features).
Also the half-hearted suicide scenes were not fun at all to watch - not because I imagined that she would actually kill herself (this time), but because such botched attempts in real-life would likely yield permanent neck injuries or severed wrist tendons, so I was left with nothing but a cringing response. The plastic spork, the broken photo frame glass, and the flimsy macrame noose tied with a bad knot to the rickety old branch (which of the three will give out, you wonder, because one absolutely must for this overly simplistic movie to drearily continue), I mean, come on. And the suicider as a humorous element has been to much better effect in other movies ("Crimes of the Heart" comes to mind), though I can never fully get into it myself.
I don't make the rules, but the bottom line is movies that don't have much in the way of action must then rely on and have some kind of payout in the dialog department. The cardinal sin of this movie is that it has nether. Maybe for dyed-in-the-wool Jenna Malone fans, definitely for film school freshmen who need instruction on how NOT to make a movie, others should sit this one out (consider yourself warned). After our viewing the DVD went immediately into the "give it away, sell it, but for pity's sake keep it away from the collection or we might accidentally watch it again someday" pile. Two stars.