Pretty in the Face

Pretty in the Face is outstanding. The middling scores on this site seems to reflect only the Dogma-style production values and not the overwhelming quality of story and sincerity. I just saw this film (and a couple of other great ones--see Jake's Closet and Father G and the Homeboys) at the Dances with Films festival in Los Angeles and found it truly inspiring. With pretty much a one man crew and almost entirely non-actors, Nate Meyer has come up with probably the most affecting narrative film I've seen this year. It ranks up there with the Celebration and Lars Von Triers' work (when it comes to this bare bones genre) and should serve as a lesson to filmmakers that shooting on film or shelling out thousands of dollars to create Hollywood style production value is not necessary to make a truly compelling film. And I'm saying this as someone who has spent those thousands of dollars, not a critic. This film should empower any filmmaker with limited funds and enough heart to be driven to capture a moving story in the visual medium. Watch it if you like real drama.

Pretty in the Face is a depressing look at two individuals--Maggie, a homely girl with little self-image who constantly suffers her own blahness, and Daniel, an overweight fourteen year-old who resents his mother for being appallingly obese--who, uniting through individual tragedies, serve to help each other by finding a commonality of confusion and want of transgression in a world of banality and commonplace.

While the film's premise is an interesting one--and it's certainly important to focus on the problems of vanity in today's society--it just didn't seem to work for me. I never found myself sympathetic of the characters or their plights. And on top of that, the quality of the film was really poor and grainy. Because of these issues, I left the theater unchanged and in search of something a bit more gratifying.