Putty Hill

This is a drama about a wake that's kind of coalescing just after the death of a young man from an overdose. The cast includes ex-cons, skate-kids, dropouts, long-suffering retirees, generally low status folk sat on the sidelines of modern America doing their own thing. It's shot well enough that it looks like a documentary even though it's not. Lots of folks are interviewed about the dead guy and end up having a karaoke wake. The guys in the movie seem pretty anaesthetised most of the time, they're just trying to get along, and take things as they come.

There's some nice stuff, including a memorial graffito sprayed as we watch, of the words Rest in Peace spelled out on three Japanese bridges that look like they could come from a Monet painting.

At the end the film unfocuses on a road scene (an old trick) and you get all theses spheres of coloured light dripping across the screen. Like I say, an old trick, but it's done well here, and the unfocus is meaningful for this film, as the folk we see try not to focus too much, for example they go paintballing a week before the service, they just get on with it and don't mope. The wake at the end is actually fairly moving, and fleshes out the film a lot, adds meaning to some of what you see beforehand.

I have a lot of love for this film, and I can see what it was trying to do, it's grown on me a lot since the night I watched it.

I must warn you though that some shots are held for too long, and I'm a guy who likes long takes, furthermore there was a spalling walkout, which quite astonished me, probably the first time I've seen it happen in a film which wasn't violent, overtly sexual or confrontational. In fairness the film was shown quite late at night, and folks may well have seen several films beforehand and been tired (this was film #4 for me of the day at the Edinburgh International Film Festival).

Some may call this or what happens in it, mundane. Everyday life or death - and how people are dealing with both those things. We get a lot of characters and we get a lot of ... well skits. While you can relate to certain things or characters and what they go through and what they convey (be it joy or pain), I think something is missing to push this over to great territory.

But that is me, there are many people who cherish the vibe the movie gives, the independent low budget nature of it and all that. And in that sense, the movie is consistent! In that you can't credit the movie enough. The director has a style and you can tell what it is ... and you can also tell if it floats your boat or not. Well made, if not really for the masses

I usually don't turn off movies, but wow. WOW. who ever came up with this story should not be in the business. Stop wasting peoples time and find something you are good at, definitely not writing!

If you accumulate all prior reviews that have rated this film 4 out of 10 stars or less, then you'll gather enough eyewitness testimony from those of us who are now miserable, poor saps who were so misfortunate to have been subjected to this train wreck of a film -- a very slow-moving train wreck. Sound editing and general editing are performed with such cluelessness that you feel confident this film can serve as a guide on how not to make a film. I like slow-paced films when they have vision and substance and POV, but when there's no cement or glue to the story...to keep the narrative and plot moving somewhere, then you have problems. Lots of problems. Acting is fine. Writing and direction is beyond problematic.

This film has: no plot; countless, pointless, extended shots of virtually nothing happening (a guy getting a tattoo for ten minutes, a girl crying on a dark porch for eight minutes, people swimming and smoking weed, people with nothing to say driving around in the dark, etc.); no character development; and apparently no script. Take a camera, go to a poor neighborhood and film the most boring people you can find sitting around doing nothing, and you can personally recreate this waste of time disguised as film making. Apparently, this guy had $50,000 on hand to accomplish this feat. What? The backdrop for the end credits is actually more interesting than anything else in the movie (which is why I gave it a 2 instead of a 1). Well paid critics apparently like the novelty of seeing what poor people do all day, but for those who already know, this is utterly pointless.