SPF-18

I'm pretty sure this movie was written by a 13 year old girl with rich parents who could bank roll the entire thing. The parents must have some horrible dirt on Keanu, Goldie Hawn and Rosanna Arquette in order to get them to be in this huge pile of garbage. The whole thing made me angry and I don't even know who to be most angry at the writers, director or the poor unfortunate souls who had to perform in this train wreck.

I make a habit of watching awful movies for fun and this is the first movie I could not finish. I made it halfway through the movie and there was still no plot. The acting is atrocious and the outfits are absolutely hideous. The celebrity cameos were embarrassing to them and their careers. The characters were poorly developed and did not represent the proper age range they were supposed to. Everything in this movie is predictable and cliche. DO NOT WATCH! SAVE YOUR EYES!

To start off this review I would like to say that there should be an option for 0 stars out of 10. This movie was so god awful it doesn't deserve even a quarter of a star. This movie gave a whole new meaning to the word god awful because it was so bad. This movie had all the right components for a great movie but they were in all the wrong places and in a movie with no plot whatsoever. If you are a parent wanting to give your child a punishment, SPF-18 will do justice. In fact, if you are any human being whatsoever wanting to punish yourself, a family member, a friend, or even your fish go ahead and put this movie on. My first question of many is what drugs the screenwriter, director and producer were on when they a) thought of this movie and b) decided to actually go through with it. My second question is how did this movie even get any funding? My final question is with the funding from this movie how much of it went to therapy for the actors and viewers for their ptsd of having to be in or see this movie? I've been in elementary school plays that had better acting than this one. While writing this review it got deleted up until this point and I've had to recall everything I wrote before. At first, I was thinking, "Wow I don't know if I can do this". But then, I remembered that I got through watching all of Spf-18 so surely I could rewrite this review. So here you have it. You're welcome for this review that I've taken so much time for which clearly the producers of Spf-18 didn't care to do.

SPF-18 is a bad movie but not bad in the same way Fast and the Furious; Geostorm or any other mainstream movie is bad, it's bad almost exclusively because making movies is hard and this is the first movie Alex Israel has made.

In fact, I almost feel empathetic toward Alex Israel, the film now hitting Netflix is going to result in a barrage of negative reviews and some really amazing negative reviews like the one above mine. We might even see this movie join the ranks of "Troll 2" or any other "so bad it's good movie." Yet, when I watched this movie it had a strangely positive effect on me. I think this is because I watched SPF-18 while taking a break editing my own short movie. In fact, it was exactly after I had finished the first cut of my movie and felt nauseous after seeing how unwatchable it was. Taking a break watching a "nice" movie - I thought - might make it easier to edit and distract me from the the reality of what I had made. Instead what I watched was SPF-18.

During the movie there was a lot going on in my brain, the first scene played with the main character doing a type of Vlog or whatever and I thought the movie was shaping up to be interesting. Then the film proper started. I noticed the bad acting first, as it's the most noticeable, and to begin with I considered stopping the movie - but instead I continued watching it. As the movie played, I started just feeling bad for Alex Israel. I thought of what went into making my own movie; how hard it was trying to find good actors; how long it took to film; how high the hopes we had going in were and how mediocre and quite frankly unwatchable the results were. All this while watching the cringe delivery of lines frankensteined together with drone footage made me imagine Alex Israel on set trying to explain each character's motivation in the hot sun, when probably he was unsure himself; the millions of takes it took to get a shot of a Jeep turning off the road that was ultimately for a scene that turned out to be so unnecessary i'm surprised it even came up as an idea. But most of what I was thinking is that Alex Israel knows SPF-18 isn't good, just like I know the movie I'm currently editing isn't good. Not only that, anyone watching the final cut of SPF-18 knows it's not good. The actors, the grip and Pamela Anderson doing her completely necessary cameo - they all know it's bad.

And yet here we are watching this movie on Netflix. This is certainly not what Alex Israel imagined in his brain when thinking of the movie and I can feel that deep deep deep down the movie has some goodness in it. If the script had better dialogue, if the acting was better we might have been watching something like Garden State, instead of what the film now is. But that's not what happened and this is what we are ultimately left to judge the movie by. What we are left with, while probably not what Alex Israel wanted, had a profoundly positive effect on me. As soon as SPF-18 was over I went back to editing feeling invigorated, for one reason alone: However bad my movie was, it wasn't going to be SPF-18 bad. I felt permission to suck. To a further extent, I, like Alex Israel, am going to make tons of bad movies before I make a good one. This is ultimately why making movies or choosing any creative pursuit is hard. Not because it's hard to technically make the film - though that too - but rather because it's hard to make bad things when you know that they are bad during the production of the bad thing. The slow and tortuous dynamic of making something bad and then getting a little bit better and then making something bad again but being a little bit better is how art works. You only get better by sharing it with the world. While there are certainly savants who have made perfect movies on their first try - that is not an accurate picture of how ordinary art is made. David Bayles and Ted Orland highlight this extremely well in their book "Art and Fear." Ordinary art is a skill that you get better at by getting humiliated most of the time. This message of "Art and Fear" and others like it, is hard to remember on it's own and it certainly is easier to remember when you are in between projects and harder to convince yourself of in the process of them. But to me SPF-18 provides the perfect reminder of "Art and Fear", "The War of Art" and others like them. Pressfield puts it best in this single sentence:

"It's better to be in the arena, getting stomped by the bull, than to be up in the stands or out in the parking lot."

SPF-18 is exactly what Pressfield meant by that line. Being in the arena is not pretty, but it's worth it, because eventually; after getting knocked down enough times you will have made something worth making.

I look forward to Alex Israel's next movie because I know that it will be better than this and, perhaps, in a couple years we might be looking back on Israel as a talented director.

In the meantime I'm going to get back to editing my movie and perhaps, in the future sometime, watch SPF-18 and read this review again - when I need reminding of this message and how crucial it is to any creative endeavour.

The only things I liked about this movie was the 80's music, and seeing a lot of Noah Centineo without a shirt 💦👙(this is the emoji closest to panties 😆😉) The plot is horrible, and the acting is awkward. The IMDb rules says I have to write 5 lines in this review. You should not waste your precious lazy Sundays on this. I'm just using space now. Lol.