Venice Bound

Seeing this film was a pleasant surprise at the Hamburg Film Festival back in '95-96. "Venice Bound" is just the type of U.S. indie film one used to expect at smaller European film festivals in the not too distant past before Hollywood co-opted the occasion in order to stage B-grade world-premieres of flashy feature films soon to be available on pay-per-view. Everything about this movie worked for me because it was so soaked in genre. The mid-nineties, post-Nirvana, pre-"Friends" lost generation, back when a well-meaning kid from the hood could still get mixed up with the mob if he got into money troubles. Back when it was o.k. to be a drifter, find yourself, or just be weird. More than specifics about the film, I remember being interested, engrossed, vindicated while watching it. Go see this flick if you ever find a VHS-copy somewhere (I haven't seen one, though). Go on, you'll like it.

This film was an interesting display of how ingenuity can outshine Hollywood's sometimes overabundance of money. While obviously shot on a shoestring budget, this clever caper movie for Generation X has an honesty and grit to it that makes it far more memorable than the usual Hollywood fare. Each of the three main characters stands out dramatically from one another, and yet there is no suspension of disbelief required that they can all share the same goals, however briefly. It's worth it to stay with this one until the characters all meet as the story takes on a new dimension from this point on. Produced before "Pulp Fiction", this is an example of how modern filmmakers of the world use experimental structure to their story's advantage.