To begin, and to be brutally honest, this film is absolutely terrible. Even for a movie made by college kids, with limited time, budget, equipment and resources, this is still an absolutely horrible film. I am sad to say that while I was in college, I helped work on this film and am therefore privy to certain inside information. Basically, if we judge this movie as an independent film made by students we can forgive certain flaws, but only to a point. Ignoring other flaws, this movie completely fails at the basic level of any movie, and by that I mean the story.
The story for this film is awful. In a nutshell it chronicles the four separate problems of angst filled 20 something's in four separate stories, and then tries to connect the stories together with a confusing, pretentious and pseudo-intellectual metaphor of an author writing a book. Besides the fact that this plot format has been done to death and is already cliché, each story itself is a teenie bopper cliché. These include teen pregnancy, over coming a failed dream, suicide and depression and finally an unachievable love. In each story there is no real character or story development, no dramatic buildup, no real climax and finally no resolution. Not to mention the pacing is agonizingly slow and the dialogue is terrible and each story is just plain boring. Basically this movie offers nothing new or insightful nor does it even portray old ideas in an entertaining or original manner.
It was my idea during the initial pre-production of this film to focus one on interesting developed story rather than four under developed ones, but as the original idea of a group project was hijacked by three egomaniacs, group input ceased. Also, Tweed the director was completely unresponsive and outright hostile to any real criticism or suggestions. So, what we are left with is the failed project of three egomaniacs instead of the group project that was originally intended. Which is sad, because the group had many good ideas as well as talent, but went unused. Also, as a director, Tweed fails terribly. His pacing and scene times are awful, he rips off tricks from movies such as "Requiem For A Dream" and when he isn't stealing ideas from other movies his camera work is boring. He also would not allow the films talented composer Calhoun the appropriate time to score the film properly, so what we are left with once again is the wasted talent of the composer.
How this movie even won an award at a film festival is beyond me, but I suppose that some artsy fartsy Indy movie people eat up this kind of junk. But even on an Indy level this movie fails. It is not high art or even artistic, it is not poetic, it is not intelligent, it is not new, it is not edgy and it is not cutting edge in any way. To sum it up, this movie is cliché, dull and pretentious because it thinks it is everything that it really isn't. This movie is a complete waste of time.
