96 Minutes

This movie follows four young people struggling in their own way with their education. The main male lead is a senior high school student (Evan Ross) who grew up in a terrible environment, and tries to escape his "fate" (or what people expect him to become) by studying hard and trying to get a good education. An excellent, excellent movie! The two leading actors (and most others) just did a great job! We saw the part of the movie crew at a premiere; they explained that beyond the heavy tension of the movie, they actually had a hard time not spending their time laughing with each other... This totally did not show up on the screen, the movie is tensed throughout and the acting (again) just excellent. The directing is just sublime as well, excellent shot decisions that gives the proper atmosphere to the movie with a lot of close up shots to focus on the characters.

This is the movie obviously made in the vein of an Alejandro González Iñárritu movie or a movie like "Crash" if you will. Problem however is that it's clearly a less clever or well written version of a Alejandro González Iñárritu movie, made with far less talented people involved as well.

There is plenty wrong with this movie and its story and way of storytelling, so I don't even know where to begin really. But I do believe that the biggest problem is not even necessarily with its story but lies more with its characters. There is not one likely enough character in this movie, that you could ever start to care for. It's also because none of them ever get developed properly enough but also because most of them simply don't do anything likable at all in this movie. You just don't feel any sympathy or involved with any of them, which makes this a very distant movie to watch already.

And no, it clearly doesn't help that the characters aren't played by the most talented actors. It actually shows how these type of movies can really benefit from a strong, all-star cast and how terribly uninteresting these sort of movies can work out, without an impressive cast.

But there is also clearly plenty wrong with the story itself. It's just not connected very well or cleverly all. It doesn't feel organic in any way, which is also partly due to some poor dialog. It's all too forced and unlikely and not everything comes together very well, which also results in a pretty abrupt and unsatisfying ending.

Also the constant switching around between 'past' and 'present' events in the movie is not balanced out too well. With this storytelling technique the two things should strengthen each other and add to the movie its tension or mystery but in this case it only mostly works out as redundant and even somewhat annoying. It sometimes spend too much time in the 'present' while not showing enough the events that led up to the movie its 'conflict', which already is a pretty ridicules, unlikely and poorly handled conflict to begin with. Some of the choices that some of the characters make in this movie just aren't very likely at all, which makes you feel even less involved with all of it.

And yes, I'm probably still being too kind about this movie with my rating. I don't completely trash it because it's a smaller movie, with a small budget and with all some very average people involved. Still it's not really worth seeing, though at the same time it's also far from the worst thing you'll ever see.

5/10

http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

I saw this at sxsw and it's been hard for me to decide if I really liked this movie. It was shot very well and the director obviously knew what she was doing but the exposition in the writing ruins the story for me. Everything is just made too obvious and is too cliché. The actors were okay, but they didn't really help this problem. It could have been much better and I really liked the idea of the story, but I think that it was just too poorly written. There was one scene where there's a black kid walking home from school with his backpack on and is randomly stopped and basically beaten and searched by cops who are yelling at him and being bad cops and drive off when they don't find anything on him. Then a black lady in a house shakes her head and closes the blinds. I hate cops too, but they don't actually do stuff like that in the middle of the day. Not since like the 1960's anyway. It's just bad writing and way too expositional and it really takes you out of the story and to me ruined it. It's like the writer wouldn't let you think for yourself about the movie, everything needs to be explained to the audience in very simple terms and I don't like that. But I think a lot of people will like this movie.

There is no doubt that director Aimee Lagos has talent and she may go on to bigger things. Some moments of this film are exciting and others are moving. The actors, though largely unknown, give capable performances. Based on a true story, this is a film about how four lives come together in a dangerous carjacking which spirals out of control, even for the perpetrators. The time sequence jumps back and forth and while it's easy enough to follow, it gets irritating. It's also filled with thoroughly unpleasant people and drops the f-bomb repeatedly, and although it's probably an accurate portrayal of the big city, it's hard to care too much even for the innocent victims. Besides the constant flashbacks and flash-forwards, the worst part of this film seems determined to wallow in squalor. There are also a lot of early scenes which contribute little to the central story and clutter the film. The last half hour of the film is the best, when the film no longer has flashbacks and flash-forwards. I was disappointed even though there were moments that were well-done and compelling.

I was fortunate enough to catch this at SxSW a few weeks ago and it's continued to stick with me. I can see the obvious comparison to CRASH although it's a bit unfounded as this movie really didn't seem to be about race at all to me. It just felt like it was about four kids struggling to make their way. Four kids who were all searching for something. Sure their circumstances were different and so they were searching for different things, but what unified them was that they were all just looking to be accepted by their families or their peers. To me, that's a universal story and one that lots of people can relate to. Evan Ross and Brittany Snow gave really amazing performances - well beyond what we've seen of them previously and both stand out to me a real talents to watch. The movie isn't perfect and I'm sure some will find it to be on the nose, but that's only because so many people don't have the life experience to know that this is the way it goes. I've worked in a shelter for homeless youth for several years and the stories these kids tell me are not too dissimilar. I would encourage all of those who see the themes as stereotypical to get outside of their own box for 2 minutes and spend some time with those who will you give example after example of how the youth in this country still struggle with the same things as they did 10, 20, and 30 years ago.