Hopeless

I wasn't sure about this movie, and I took a long time to getting around to seeing it. I shouldn't have worried; it's a consistently entertaining, and often hilarious, movie.

It was also nice to see a movie that's recognizably set in Wellington.

The tv series that spins off from Hopeless, called Love Bites, isn't bad, but it's sabotaged by changes made to the characters to soften them. They are played by the same actors, and many of the episodes are written by the same creative team who made the movie, so I can only assume it was due to studio interference. Shame really; I would have loved to have seen a genuine continuation of the characters from Hopeless, instead of a toned-down version (which was put out with no promotion in a terrible timeslot and then pulled when it, unsurprisingly, failed to rate - way to go TV3).

The funniest scenes in the movie involve the character of Richard, who slowly evolves from being a harmless weirdo to seeming quite dangerous. I'd recommend it highly - particularly to Kiwis.

To say this movie had a shoestring budget is to overstate considerably (less than 50,000 dollars!!). Yet the result is not only watchable but very funny.

The characters for the most part are caricatures of people that I'm sure we have all met - even though they react in outrageous ways to the situations they find themselves in, the real humour is in how close to reality these characters actually are! Writer Sean Molloy deserves a lot of credit for his perceptive look at suburban New Zealand culture.

The movie is not perfect and I am sure there are things the creative team would have liked to do better, but I am genuinely astonished at what they have achieved with no money!