Monkey Love

Monkey Love is a well crafted story about a young girl coming to grips with life as an adult. Actually, it's a funny, interesting, even quirky story about compelling people and their romances. The writing and directing are first rate, and performances by Amy Stewart, Jeremy Renner and Seamus Dever reveal new talent bound for bigger things. What a great way to enjoy a night at the movies...making Monkey Love. Even the music is not the usual collection of the first 8 bars of current pop hits. Enjoy.

I really wondered how this got made. The real genius here is the person that designed the DVD case. The producers owe all there money to this person. The Video would have been Awful but the writing got better. First video? What happened here, couldn't afford to do the transfer? The acting was questionable at best. The Girl (Amy Stewart)is cute, but in the beginning of the movie she had a whole different look. She got much better looking as the film went on. The one guy (Jeremy Renner) had this weird Corey Haim look but only if Corey Haim tried to look like James Dean. The sex scenes were videoed so bad, I wondered if the director ever saw a sex scene in a movie before.

This movie is so bad I can hardly contain myself. I feel like less of a person for watching the whole thing.

The performances appeared atrociously bad because of the student-project feel that oozes from the inexplicable, horrible choice of shooting to VIDEO(!!!!) instead of film, and more so because of the follow-up stinky editing. Sudden bursts of emotion seemed totally out of place. The story flow was totally disjointed. I could not care about the characters at all. I hated them for being in such a bad movie. The movie didn't know if it was quirky or funny or serious or romantic. The ending was jaw-droppingly shallow.

The car kidnap/ fight scene was comically bad. I mean, downright funny bad. I watched the scene again to see if I had just seen what I thought I did. It was even worse the second time around.

I could go on and on. This movie stinks. Bad.

Some serious questions: How do movies like this get made? It's like seeing a misused apostrophe on a neon sign. How can anybody be involved in something like this and not know how awful it is going to turn out?

Unbelievable.

I found the box made the film more appealing than it actually is. The script is interesting if not resembling that of a soap opera.

Despite a hard attempt to watch this film, I eventually ended up discarding it for few reasons; It feels like a long soap opera with static, repetitive shots in over-lit sets (or what look like sets), and it's visually dull. Examples being that the colours often seem saturated and dull, while all possibilities for visually boosting the appeal of the film are ignored - even something as simple as altering the depth of field, which is almost always infinite and again, dull.

The sound is well recorded, crisp and clear but again lacking a certain something.

Above all, this feels very much like a student film: undeveloped, simple and shallow on many accounts. The writing, however, could possibly be the saving grace of the film were to be backed up with equally appealing direction, lighting, sound and editing.

This does appear to be a film made in the youth of the said director's career which could explain why it is how it is.

Despite my negative views, I can say that there are no, or not many errors with boom shadows, editing errors, continuity errors in the shots, narrative or lighting and it's obvious much care has been taken to avoid such issues.

As a film that has been placed in the genre of comedy, I feel it has been misplaced. This is a very performance orientated piece which would sit neatly in the genre of drama or docu-drama along side a short such as 'Tape'. With this possibility in mind, it could still be seen as a comedy from a narrative perspective.

I do feel though, that this film could be very useful in a learning environment as something for beginner to intermediate film students to critique as a piece that's not too complex in an particular way, as something at a quality to aim for when producing their first short.

I hope this is a useful review, and that I haven't overlooked the direction the makers were approaching this project from.

Watched it on cable TV in 2020 during covid-19 pandemic. Wasn't sure if this was a student-diploma movie or a "normal" movie.... Either ways it was bad, very poor directed and filmed, very poor acting. It lacked on so many levels that I am wondering how even they let this movie hit the public? It brings nothing to the film arts.

I was amazed when discovered this movie was filmed in 2002, it looked like an early 70's movie. Jeremy Renner looked like he's 18 y.o. in this one, but he is 31. lol

It was bad, but I've seen worse. My rating 2/10.