buff-29

I nearly wept at the end of this movie, over all the acting talent gone totally to waste on this dumb little story. It is more than dumb; it doesn't make any sense. I think that one scene sums up the problems this film creates for itself and then fails to solve. One of the characters (it doesn't even matter which one) breaks into a store by shooting a handgun through the window. When the window conveniently falls into a billion pieces, the character leaps through the open space and steals some stuff. Then he and his pal and girlfriend roar off, tires squealing. The event is presaged by nothing and leads to nothing. One is left only with a sense of mystification that anyone (even a film director) would think that a logical way to commit a burglary would be to shoot out the front window of a store with a gun. The rest of film is like that. One silly contrivance piled on another to create a nonsensical melodrama.

I went to see a movie about a failed family, expecting characters I could identify with or at least recognize. Not at all. This is a straight Nightmare/Friday the 13th/Freddie Chops Your Head Off screamer. I suspect that fans of horror movies won't like it, since it mostly lacks the scenes that sneak up from behind and make you jump and holler, but that's their tough luck. Tilda Swinton, who must have been suckered into this project, does her (very able) best, but she can't make the material anything but what it is.

I don't know what John C. Reilly is doing here. I wonder if he does. I stuck it out to the end wondering why I was there.

This is such an awful film, it is hard to know where to begin. At its best it is corny; at its worst it is a confused mess that is impossible to follow. It seems almost as if three or four scripts were shot and then the results cut together willy-nilly. I love the leading actress and can only wonder how she was persuaded to sign on here. I am reluctant to mention her name. Let me just say that tonight I am going to get out Paul Thomas Anderson's Hard Eight and watch it, so I can remember why I like her so much. I wish there were something positive I could say, but there just plain isn't. The writer/director is a newcomer. It is hard to believe she will be given the chance to become a veteran.