Bellflower

"Bellflower" opens and continues with guys being guys. They have no regard to how they live, they just get drunk and build flame-throwers. They are similar, I'm assuming, to how writer, director and star Evan Glodell behaves with his male friends. If it can blow-up, Aiden and Woodrow will find a way to make it blow-up. And then Woodrow meets a girl and falls in love.

The romance element is played out quickly. Because, as I said, the film is about guys being guys. It's also about girls being psychotic. It's hard to stay in love with that explosive mix going on. Seeing as they will throw gasoline on any fire that's burning, the flames just leap up higher and engulf everyone and everything.

Not being a guy myself, I didn't connect with Aiden and Woodrow in the beginning, although I certainly have met guys like them. The girls, Milly and Courtney, are way more destructive than any girls will admit to being. The characters, the acting, and the dialogue are the weaker elements to the film, but the story that they insist they are telling is just so intriguing you won't want to turn this off.

As the poster suggests, and their past-times, "Bellflower" gets very violent. But the interesting thing is that it's not just mindless violence. The characters are just so calamitous, that they have their reasons for everything that burns, explodes, crashes or dies. It is dark and devastating, and unfortunately, a little more empty than it should have been.

So, here we are my first review. First of all, you must know I'm a really BIG watcher but I've never wrote a review for the simple reason, i never had to. But this time, it's different. Why? Because the phenomenon of this "3.0" generation really start to exasperate me. In fact I'm pretty sure all the people that destroy this movie did it on their smart-phones while "watching" it.

It's amazing how the bad reviews are incredibly long and detailed. And if i put that in parallel with some pretty popular movies for that same generation, the conclusion i come to is that you aren't capable of watching a movie in his "fullness", you just watch a succession of "scenes".

I know, i know, I'm not really talking about the movie, just go read other good reviews if you want to know why it's a f*ck*ng pretty good movie.

I wrote this review only to give you an advice if you decide to watch it: JUST DO IT, it's a real journey. Don't judge it, appreciate it, and do that until the very last moment. At the end, maybe that you will have liked it, maybe not, but at least you won't have lost 2 hours of your life, because it's unique and mesmerizing. Something you won't be able to appreciate if you analyze every seconds of it.

I almost didn't watch this movie because its IMDb plot summary (something about 2 guys building a monster car in preparation for the apocalypse) made it sound like Beavis & Butthead vs. Road Warrior. That couldn't be further from the truth.

True there are a couple explosions, flame throwers, firearms, a few pints of spilled blood, and a super souped-up Buick Skylark 1972 that would make James Bond hop on his tricycle and pedal furiously away. But essentially this is a love story. The apocalypse here is not a literal one but a personal one. Writer/director/principal actor Evan Glodell says he wrote it while in the painful haze of a bad breakup. Indeed, I would say this is one of the best post-breakup films to watch, because it perfectly captures the feeling of emotional desolation, hope & obsession associated with that mixed bag we call "love".

The story centers on 2 friends Woodrow (Evan Glodell) and Aiden (Tyler Dawson) who, contrary to their pastime of blowing things up, are NOT Beavis & Butthead type morons. They're just a couple of average-to-nerdy 20-somethings who live life one day at a time on the outskirts of LA. They drink a lot of beer. They try to pick up girls at the local bar (unsuccessfully most of the time). And when all else fails, they build the car of their dreams.

Enter Milly (Jessie Wiseman) who becomes Woodrow's love interest. In a very sweet way, Woodrow & Milly develop a charming relationship. But then things get complicated. Very complicated. I'm talking flame thrower complicated. The 2nd half of the movie is a suspenseful, tense, explosive ride that comes to a powerful climax with great, passionate acting.

The story is from Woodrow's point of view, the male point of view. Female characters seem peripheral, and I figured the IMDb demographic would show "Bellflower" to be preferred by males. Surprise: it's evenly split down the middle. Perhaps it's because, even though it's from a male perspective and has a lot of "manly" things like beer, whiskey, guns and cars that slurp a gallon of gas to pull out of the driveway, it's still a very sensitive film that can be appreciated by anyone. It exposes the vulnerabilities of heartbreak, the thrill of obsession, and the nature of friendship. And these things are not gender-specific.

A word about the cinematography: wow. As the story becomes increasingly complicated, the visuals become more expressionistic and hallucinatory. This is the masterwork of Joel Hodge, director of photography. Visuals are often very striking, with heavy color saturation, hazy filters and occasional lens grit, making it a very dreamlike presentation. I read that the cameras they used were mostly home made, scrapped together from cheap parts... much like the car "Medusa" which was actually built for this film. "Bellflower" was nominated for the 2012 Independent Spirit Award for Best Cinematography, but lost to the blockbuster Academy Award Winning "The Artist".

Another highlight: the music. Beginning with a dark acoustic guitar & vocal piece, the film keeps the soundtrack minimal (no melodramatic symphonies here) and toward the end throws in some powerful trip-hop, industrial house stuff. I didn't recognize any of the bands on the soundtrack, but it felt similar to maybe Jeff Buckley for the acoustic/vocal pieces and Portishead or AWOL Nation for the heavy stuff. Undeniably cool stuff.

"Bellflower" is an artistic, slow moving film that keeps gaining momentum all the way to its roller-coaster finale. There aren't any popular movies I can compare it to. But if you've seen the indie flicks "Entrance" (2012) or "The Tracey Fragments" (2007), or my favorite "Buffalo 66", then you can expect a similar off-kilter approach to filmmaking that makes this a challenging and ultimately satisfying movie.

I tried to like this movie since I watch a lot of indie films that are similar, but I just couldn't get into this movie. I don't know if it was the pacing, or just because there is no real build up to anything. The acting was pretty solid in the movie, maybe one of the only things it has going for it. There was a lot of cool artsy scenes that I found to be cool, the contrast on a lot of the scenes is high giving the scenes a nice glowing look that seems ever so popular in indie films. All in all, it just wasn't enough to keep me interested. I could see people liking the movie though, and I'm not saying it's a terrible movie. If you dig the whole indie thing, I'd say check it out and make your own judgement of it.

Bellflower is an interesting film because even in it's flaws it kind of speaks to the kind of film that it is. Unfortunately for me though, that doesn't mean crap when the flaws are so blatant and intrusive. The film starts off interestingly, a really in-your-face turn back the clock montage that takes us to the beginning of our characters, two wild twenty-something youths who spend their free time (which it seems is all they have for some untold reason) preparing for their Mad Max vision of the end of the world. In their mind it's perfectly normal to spend their time building flamethrowers and tricking out muscle cars, which is so dumb and idiotic and an absolute perfect depiction of men at this time in their life.

The first hour takes a relatively standard approach to following these guys, but despite some pretty awful amateur performances and awkwardly obvious pieces of dialogue, it had a certain charm for me. Writer/director/star Evan Glodell gives an aesthetic feeling that was off-putting at first -- the focus falls off every so often, flecks off dirt come up into the lens -- once I settled into it I really began to embrace the tone he was going for. However once the film started to really get a rhythm going it decided to awkwardly jump forward a period of time (you can tell because the main character has a beard now!) it really caves in on itself.

It was going along smoothly but then decided to move the plot forward into more serious territory and then none of it worked anymore. Those bad performances became worse as the scenes progressed further and further into laughably horrendous melodrama with some of the most obvious and artificial character progressions and dialogue stretches I've seen. The film spirals down and down until it gets to it's last two chunks where I was just hoping they would clip the wings off and stop tarnishing the promise it once showed. There's a disastrous fifteen-minute sequence that felt absolutely worthless even before we find out that it actually is worthless, followed by the final act which just nonsensically rambles on for what seems like an eternity.

Ultimately, it felt like this was a premise that would have worked great as a short feature, but in stretching it out to something full-length Glodell really destroyed everything he had going for him. Still, despite ultimately being a failure, I think Glodell shows some promise here as a filmmaker and I'll be curious to see what he does next.