Anne B. Real

It would be nice if someone were to tell all those budding filmmakers that all it takes to make a film is to assemble a few amateur actors and a video camera.

This film looked like a home video! It was so poorly shot it gave me a headache and almost made me sea-sick.

As to the story, it was annoying as with the majority of those movie that try to appear "real" but only come across as being caricatural. It should be called Anne B. Unreal.

In my video store, the copies were up for sale right away because nobody wanted to watch it. What a surprise! Do yourselves a favor and pass on Anne B. Real

What first drew me to rent, "Anne B. Real" on my weekly trip to Blockbuster, was when a friend picked up the dvd and read off the back that "GirlFight" and "8 Mile" were recommended for those who enjoyed "Anne B. Real" I had seen both movies, so I decided that I would give it a chance. And, I must say, I am overly glad I did.

When watching, "Anne B. Real" I felt as if I was there with the characters, especially the main character, her inner turmoil brought tears to my eyes. I truly enjoyed it, it's one of those movies that for whiles to come, you'll still gasp "Fantastic..."



ManiacMallRat

Take a bunch of amateur wanna-be actors and shoots them with Dad's camcorder.

Take the resulting "brilliant" footage and slap it together on the home computer and you get Anne B. Real.

Now don't get me wrong, I have nothing against people getting experience by making a feature-length project

I do have a problem, however, with hyping it as if it were a real movie when in fact it is a painful-to-watch home video that you would only sit still for if it were made by your family.

In other words, avoid at all costs.

I'm the kinda of person who enjoys watching low budget, critically acclaimed indy films. When I came across "Anne B. Real" on the wall of the video store, I was intrigued by the story. I didn't expect the movie to be that awesome, but with comparisons to "Girlfight" and "8 mile" I thought it was worth checking out.

I wasn't disappointed. The story was great and engaging and the characters were believable. I really like the perfomance of Janice Richardson as Cynthia. She was great and I hope to see her in more films in the near future.

The film does address a lot of issues without being to preachy. It touches on things such as sexism in the rap industry, being a product of your environmnet, and trying to rise above even when it seems the people closest to you are against you. However, the story also shows that one positive influence can be enough to give someone the boost they need to rise above.

I think that this film being on IMDb's Bottom 100 list of the lowest rated films of all time is a bit sad. Sure, it's NOT a good movie but it's not quite that bad. I might put it in the Bottom 500 if they had such a list.

This is a story about a teenage girl who loves to write rap songs and sulk. Her family situation is pretty bad--with a drug abusing brother (who she lets walk all over her) and a sister with a baby. There's more to the story than this, but frankly I didn't care much for any of the characters and had a hard time caring when a particular teacher of the girl tried hard to encourage her to go to college and pursue her dreams.

The biggest single problem about the movie is that the characters are unappealing. While you are supposed to care about Cynthia, her semi-catatonic character was not particularly endearing. In addition, no one around her was particularly interesting. While a few story elements were good (such as the theft of her music), you just didn't care. It also didn't help that the film was so slow-paced and the characters behaved rather stupidly.

The second problem is that there is a tie-in between this character and Anne Frank--a completely ridiculous thing to say the least! Anne frequently reads the writings of Frank and it almost seems, at times, that the film makers are trying to almost make a sort of moral or situational equivalence between the two! Offensive, yes. Dumb, oh yes.

Perhaps this film might mean more to some others--particularly inner city teens (in particular Hispanics and lovers of hip-hop). But for this 45 year-old White guy, there wasn't much appeal. Actually, while I think about it, my 19 year-old also disliked the film...as did all those who rated it so poorly. Wow...perhaps this film ISN'T for much of anybody.

By the way, the film seems to have a lot of very, very poor reviews as well as some that give it a ten. While perhaps the ones were a bit too low, the tens would imply that this is a perfect or near perfect film--which it clearly is not. While I could understand someone liking the film, the characters needed work and the film lacked focus at times.