danebecky

i have a pretty high tolerance for science fiction, even goofy campy science fiction, heck i liked lexx, but this the some serious dreck. a few of the episodes rise up towards mediocrity... sort of like a bad episode of the 80s show "tales from the dark side", with obviously telegraphed twist ends and sub par acting but at least a decent narrative structure and look. the others look like they are plays written and produced as class assignments for a middle school creative writing class and acted by people banded from normal TV for gross incompetence. i'll admit some of the problems may be from the source material, i remember the magazine when i read it in the 80s had a tendency toward ham handed plots and obvious twist endings, but you would think the producers would have at least cherry picked their story lines from the publications long run of issues.

okay i admit i'm giving this movie a couple of extra points because i know some of the cast, its set outside my home town and the director is a distant cousin. i love the look of the film, but in some ways it does seem like an extended short more than a real feature. it is not really plot less, the plot is just a little thin for an hour and 20 odd minutes, but the imagery makes the movie worth the time.

perhaps my prospective is too subjective to be of value to anyone else. i live in a small town and relatively little film making goes on here. seeing locations and people i know in my life transformed into these stark dreamlike sequences was fascinating. the mixture of complete familiarity and utter otherworldliness was a profound experience. i just not sure it would be the same for someone who hasn't driven those same roads and met those same people. i can't judge it in the same way i would judge any other movie. movies are perhaps too often compared with dreams, but this film felt like it was a dream i might actually have had and forgotten.

I thought this movie's opening sequence was very funny, and there were a few other moments where i laughed out loud. unfortunately throughout most of the movie i was either bored or annoyed. this movie has every cliché and every obligatory plot element of a band movie without their parodying them or adding anything new to them. I like Rainn Wilson and i enjoyed him in this movie, but he couldn't carry all by himself and he was given almost nothing to work with. The rest of the cast gave at least journeyman like performances but the plot and the music were somewhere between weak and abysmal. I was also left with the distinct impression that this movie was written for Jack Black and I really think it was a bad career move for Wilson to accept his cast offs, or try to fit into the second tier of the niche Black has created for slobby but amiable over aged rock star wannabees... it can't be that big a market.