Bending All the Rules

From the sound technician to the female lead, this was by far the most unprofessional, poorly put together film ever put on video. Why on earth is it being tucked into RedBoxes and being treated as a new release? We see the name Bradley Cooper and think, "Ah what the heck, a little romantic fluff on a Sunday afternoon". WRONG!

While I think the female lead is a lovely girl, her acting was.... well, it just wasn't very good. Wooden describes her well. The carefree insouciance she is supposed to project falls completely flat.

Everything about this DVD was awful, and I still can't figure out why on earth I allowed it to play in it's entirety. I guess hope springs eternal, and I kept hoping it would suck less, but it never did. Awful, awful movie. I'll never get those two hours of my life back.

This film is so bad that I honestly thought maybe it was done poorly on purpose, like a "Blair Witch Project" kind of thing. I can hear the director saying, "Cut, it's just not bad enough yet". The cinematography, if you can even call it that, is reminiscent of an 80s B movie, but the lighting and the look change throughout. Some scenes look like a talk show, and some look like a Soap Opera. The audio is terrible. Most of the dialogue is production audio, and the few voice-overs that were done barely line up with the actors mouths. I rarely turn a movie off before the end, but I couldn't stomach another moment. I only watched the first 20 minutes. Oh, and the plot, you ask? I have no idea! If I could vote a negative number I would.

If you are an aspiring independent filmmaker, you must see this film. It will give you immense optimism when you see how low the bar must be to get a film into distribution. How they got Bradley Cooper to do this movie is beyond comprehension. The production quality of this film is abhorrent. The editing is amateurish, the fades ill-timed and misplaced. As to the sound, there is a scene where they tried to overdub the dialog and it looks like a Japanese Godzilla moment. There are moments when the audio is tinny and distant. And that is before you get to the essence itself. The protagonist character has no redeeming virtues. She is portrayed as a whiny, slutty, incessantly complaining, baggage-laden woman and it belies belief that the two male characters would have any reason to be infatuated with her. We simply do not care whether she redeems herself, and one is compelled to yell to Bradley Cooper to get out of there…both her bedroom and the movie. There is a particularly pretentious attempt at a montage that fails miserably…a crane shot above an empty art gallery where the protagonist is having her debut…the director shows the crowd filtering into the gallery..with interminable lingering on the small crowd, then dissolve to a small crowd, followed by a still small crowd, followed by…a still small crowd…as if they just couldn't get enough extras to sacrifice themselves on the altar of this embarrassingly misguided effort. The final assault comes in the form of the script. Most of the actors...Cooper excepted... look as if they are reciting lines off a cue card. The closing scene voice over is incomprehensible and leaves you shaking your head to remove the glaze from your eyes. To get this film sold to Liongate and into distribution, there had to be some very serious "Bending of the Rules"

This independent film doesn't follow the usual Hollywood prescribed script with the neat and tidy happy ending for all. I think that's why I enjoyed it so much. It was unpredictable. The film follows a young woman and shows us some of the choices she makes - most of them heavily influenced by her upbringing. Rather than have the character of Kenna experience some cathartic change and start on a new path in life, the movie simply unravels the course that she in on and ultimately continues on. It may not be as polished as a block buster, but it has charm. Top acting and the filming was beautiful. The carny scenes interspersed throughout the film were entertaining all on their own - some great characters hidden in there.

We couldn't even make it through the first 15 minutes of this pile of sophomoric dung. I've seen better acting and more compelling story lines in bad porn. Don't let the crooks that released this on video get another dollar from you simply because it has Bradley Cooper in it eight years before he got lucky and was cast in Hangover. Bradley cooper is a stiff, unskilled, dope in this movie. His acting is pathetic and yet still better than the others in the movie. This is simply something someone found lost on the floor amidst a pile of bad Pauly Shore movies for the last 9 years. Their greed coaxed them into releasing it on video with the hopes of suckering in a bunch of people to unknowingly fork over a couple bucks to taint their DVD players with this festering pus-filled boil of shame. I was hoodwinked. I hope you read this review before you're hoodwinked too.