Jimmy und Judy

Jimmy and Judy is a shared journey exploring the love, idealism and romance of youth set against the forces of mental instability and aggression. The self-filming style added greatly to the drama and immediacy. I was constantly wondering if I would get to keep seeing what was coming next. Sometimes I could see where it was heading, other times I was surprised, even shocked by the turns of events.

Great dramatic tension, wonderful acting and complex, believable characters. The actors were well cast for their parts. I was totally immersed in their performances.

This film is superb. I highly recommend it.

Hands down this was the best film at the festival. Realistic, haunting, and down right disturbing, I couldn't stop thinking about this film for days - in a good way.

The chemistry between the two leads, (Edward Furlong and Rachael Bella) is amazing. I hear they are now a real life couple.

My friend and I saw it Sunday night at the Women's building and we were nothing short of amazed. Got to meet the directors and they were very open to questions and explained some of the challenges they faced while making the film.

This film will be known for quite some time. It really will make you think.

When I saw this title I thought, Woo hoo another crappy film to watch and then to comment on, but what I didn't know was the reality of this movie was so real that it made me think really hard of what this world is like for kids who are not blessed to have parents and friend's to care for them.

After watching this movie I found my self in a daze, sorta like a trance (something I always find myself in when watching these kind of movies') and I knew that all the things that Jimmy and Judy went through were things that could and DO happen to teenagers ever day. And to put things into perspective and to tell a beautiful story of two VERY misunderstood kids and their problems with everyday life. I now know that life can be hell and that without someone to talk about it to you, you can really go crazy.

People need to look outside of their own home and see what happened's when kids (mostly teenagers) can do with one gun a camera and a misunderstood life.

Jimmy & Judy overcomes it's limitations to be a film I'd definitely recommend even if intriguingly it points to greater things that it never achieves.

It's the first time I've seen a film filmed entirely from a first person point of view and I found this very striking. In many ways approaching film narrative through this device is very fitting for our age. We are surrounded as never before by video cameras, on phones, on CCTV etc and we spend more and more of our time viewing the end products of all of this on the internet. It stuck me watching me Jimmy & Judy just how rich the possibilities are here, developed further it could become a new genre of film. These possibilities aren't deeply explored here, but none the less where they are, it's surprising who naturally they seem to fit into the narrative. We see this as a story told about Jimmy, yet he's it's creator. People are frequently aware that they are speaking to camera, yet somehow we feel they are being filmed speaking to camera, as if there was another camera there filming this. It's a tribute to the skill of the directors that all of this works as smoothly as it does.

As other reviewers have pointed out another arresting feature of this film is the chemistry between to the two characters, fortuitously helped by the fact there was real off screen chemistry there as they actually ended up getting married in real life. Although I'd no idea watching at the time, this helps to keep their journey intriguing and watchable. Edward Furlong in particular gives it all with this character and as OTT as it can be it's all very watchable. I'd have to point out some great dark humor at the beginning to where Furlong's character films some scenes between Mommy & Daddy that really should have stayed secret – very funny.

This is a great film and all the more impressive for being made on a budget of close to nothing in 15 days. However it's not without it's flaws. All things considered it would be nitpicking to go after anything small, but there are two things that stop it being in the ranks of real great film making for me.

The first is that cliché of clichés in American cinema, guns. I know Raymond Chandler said whenever he ran out of ideas when writing he always fell back on having a man walk into a room with a gun. Perhaps it takes a non-American from the outside looking in (I'm Irish) to see it but characters with guns has become utterly tedious in American cinema. It's been cinematic shorthand for drama and angst since the days of film noir and while it's been reinvented successfully over the decades, it's formulaic in the extreme. So hence Jimmy & Judy's Bonnie & Clyde style crime spree becomes a little, how can I say this, done so many times before. People using guns, dealing with guns, or having guns seem to be in about three quarters of American films. Boring, boring, boring – can't you find some other way to talk about the human condition.

The second problem is their characters motivation for this angst driven spree. The film has a brilliant monologue near the end from William Sadler, a sort of white trash Declaration of Rights that speaks rivetingly of alienation, anger and despair. It seems to form a sort of denouement, the trouble is it's nothing to do with Jimmy or Judy who seem to have grown up in nice, well off, middle class homes. It's a shame having established this brilliant level of passion in Sadler's character, something similar couldn't be found for the leads, but apart from their love for each other it never is. By way of explanation we're offered their characters social ostracism in school but given their reaction to it, it doesn't come across as convincing. So as watchable as their journey, given its level of alienation and anger, it's never truly credible or believable.

Still that's not to gripe too much, as a debut this is excellent and well worth watching.

As a very open-minded and avid fan of film, I must say that this movie was distasteful and over the top for a variety of reasons. Basically, sociopathic teens turn to murder in the most predictable of steps while subjecting the viewer to grotesquely graphic images that only serve to disturb. It's a concept that has been done before, and done in a far more provocative way. The film has some different elements (i.e. the concept of the video diary and the extremely long, single-take scenes) and there are a few occasions where something genuinely interesting and unique is produced. But these moments are few and don't in the slightest make up for the one-dimensional, tired formula of "youth spinning out of control".

Edward Furlong is inarguably flawless in his delivery of the role, but that's really the only slightly positive statement that can be said for the acting. The directing grows sloppy in the second half and loses all the intimacy and realism that made the film mildly interesting at first. The sound editing is irritatingly unrealistic and sometimes takes the movie to a place dangerously close to kitsch. And the writing is dull at best; every scene is PAINFULLY transparent in its intended character or plot development and basic, simple points in the setup of the story (why is Judy so horribly harassed at school?) go entirely ignored.

Lacking any real style or purpose and with an irritating, smug arrogance, "Jimmy and Judy" is a self-indulgent parade of predictability and shocking images with no real counter-point. Frankly, not worth the time.