Somebodies

I just saw this film at the Cleveland International Film Festival and it was one of the best films this year. The combination of African-American family and cultural humor with general college humor was great, and I think anyone who's lived "on-campus" at a college will find this a very funny movie. There were several times in the film where the audience laughter was so loud you couldn't hear the dialog. The acting in the movie was impressive, especially since my expectation was that it would be marginal for a first-time writer/director and a low budget production. It turns out that several of the actors are from the Atlanta comedy club scene and their strong comedic skills are put on display in this production. Hadjii, the director and principal actor in the film has a great future if he can do so well in his first feature-length effort.

This was the first of three films I saw at the Sundance film festival and was the best one we saw (much better then the ones Timberlake and Aniston starred in). We laughed so hard during the entire movie, we ended up missing half the movie due to our laughing. Where can we buy the DVD to see the parts we laughed through? The movie did not use typical stereotypes of young black men. Instead of listening to the stereotypical rap music, one scene had Hadji blasting REM. The female lead was wonderful as was the preacher. Please put this on DVD, I am beginning to forget some of the best lines in the movie. Having never been to a independent film before, I will now be more open minded, there is a lot of talent out there and a lot of it is not in Hollywood.

I saw this at Sundance this week, and it was one of the funniest movies we saw. There are a lot of laughs but also some poignant moments. The story is about a young college student who is trying to discover who he is. He insists in the beginning of the movie that he's "not a Cosby kid" and he's far from that, but as the movie goes on, he begins to question his life choices.

This was written by Hadjii, who (from the info in my Sundance magazine) is a part time teacher at University of Georgia. He also stars in the film. Many of the actors in the movie are his real life college friends, but he also used a lot of the "locals" from the Athens, Georgia area.

I LOVED this movie. It was funny, smart, well-acted, well written, and new! It was so WONDERFUL to see a "black movie" this Unique and inventive. With a perspective that was both relatable and satirical characters were sometimes realistic and sometimes exaggerated, but the performances were as a whole fantastic. I'm sorry to see this movie get any bad reviews because as a black viewer so bored with so many tired clichés in films, it was so refreshing to see this movie so intelligently display a new perspective that I related to on so many levels. Above all this movie made me laugh to the point of tears SEVERAL times throughout feature. That in itself is enough to get a good rating from me. I applaud Hadjii and I am so grateful that he was able to make this movie and I encourage other black filmmakers to keep trying to make the movies that they want to make that step out of the box and shed light on the infinite black perspectives that have yet to be seen on screen.

A coming of age story about a college low life who decides it's time to grow up. I really love rooting for the little guy and this was the first truly low budget independent film I saw at the Sundance Film festival. I overheard that critic Roger Ebert liked it the day before we saw it, so I was pretty jazzed. It was also one of the few film's we had tickets to before we even got into Park City, but sadly it turned out to be my least favorite film of the festival.

It started out pretty funny, with a couple funny lines and goofy characters, but quickly turned out quite bad with the characters (except the lead, I guess) never going anywhere as they were all stereotypical and one dimensional. The film ran long and ultimately became boring.

There were a couple exceptions (lead actress and preacher) but overall the acting was stiff (mostly from director/actor Hadjii himself who was in every scene). To be honest I don't know why this film made Sundance; however, I congratulate the filmmakers for accomplishing that milestone and I will leave it at that.