Down Time

This is film that clearly shows it's budgetary limitations. It has stretches of muddy audio and some of the acting is pretty bad. Given that, I still like this movie. It has a raw scrappy feel, great dialog and some very evocative characters.

You get a tremendous sense of the tug-o-war between good and evil, raging inside the head of slim (the main character). The film starts off with a bang, and, although it lags a bit in the middle, there is enough humor and character development to carry us along. The scenes with the main convicts sitting around playing cards passing the time are funny and believable. I found myself almost laughing out loud. After that the film starts to meander a bit but pulls it together in the end and manages to deliver a anti drug message. Over all I would recommend it but know going in this is a low budget independent film.

I found this movie provocative and gritty. sometimes it moved along a little too slow for my taste but as a viewer of many films, i was completely impressed with the story the filmmaker introduced us to and the style in which he did so. there are some very funny moments and some very disturbing moments. for a first film on a shoe string budget, this director shows much potential for great future projects. good luck!

I was curious to learn what professional reviewers said after reading the mixed bag of personal raves/rants here so I looked it up in Variety, then rented the movie. Yeah, it's not fantastic but have some pizza and beer and it's entertaining. Forget the plot; the interesting stuff is in the prison scenes when the guys are sitting around talking story. Checked with an industry source and found this was made with less than half the budget of the originally released El Mariachi. Glad to see some true indies are pulling together films and getting big distributors to pick them up. Should encourage other filmmakers. Down Time ran in several indie festivals (SF Indie, No Dance, Lost Film Festival) plus a big festival in San Jose, CA called Cinequest. Obviously there is something worthwhile to it.

Some quotes from the "Daily Variety" review by Dennis Harvey. (I can't quote the entire article for copyright reasons, of course, but you can go to the Variety site and look it up yourself.)

"Loosely drawn from debuting director - scenarist Sean Wilson's own stint in the slammer, B&W indie drama `Down Time' is an interesting, albeit uneven effort...Still, it's worth a look by indie-focused fests; commercially, best chances lie in homevid."

"..Slim whiles away some years in the company of fellow abstainers from the population's rigid, race-divided power struggles. These scenes are often loose and funny, with David Burkson and David Fine particularly entertaining as two of the prison's more harmless `characters.' "

"Given that, plus some inconsistent tech qualities, `Down Time' still has enough quirky and intriguing aspects to hold attention."

Down time is definitely a low-budget film so don't think you are going to get some big budget Hollywood prison action film like the Rock or the ever so formulaic and forgettable Half Past Dead. No what you are going to get a inherently flawed indie film that never got the million dollar make over that films like El Mariachi and Clerks did. Both those films are classics but we would not be so familiar with if the studios did not put their muscle behind them.

Down Time has many technical problems and most of the acting is amateurish but the Dialog is great and it has lots of inside jokes for those who are familiar with the criminal justice system. I like the loose "ducu-drama" style that gives the viewer the feel of being inside a real prison. It has some very graphic drug scenes that to a trained I seem real. Over all I think this is one of the better low-budget films I have seen.

My Cousin kept telling me to check out this film Down Time. He thought it was great as did most of his friends. Somehow this film has taken on this cult like following. Lots of people I know have seen it and all of them have strong reactions to it, either they love it or they hate it. So, I logged on to IMDb.com to see what all the buzz was about. I reviewed all the statistics and viewers comments and then picked it up at my local independent video store.

I thought it was pretty good and yes, I can see how some people can make the comparison with the film Clerks (1994), but is that a good thing? I don't know why people hold Clerks in such high regard. There are so many better independent films. Sean Wilson's Down Time is a very low budget independent prison film that has some funny dialog and a few interesting and quirky characters. It has a unique style although a little uneven. Most of the acting is adequate and a few of the performances were quite good for such a low budget film. Overall it kept my interest throughout and I thought it was a worthy effort. I would say I am in the middle on this one. (FiveStars)