Quality movies have a
combination of ingredients that make them great. These tend to include
compelling characters and moving arcs, a riveting plot, hope, love, sex,
romance and a happy ending. Scripts that don’t work generally fail in one of
the three main areas: plot, character and/or dialogue. A film that fails in all
three areas is a relative rarity and thus director Zack Bernbaum should be
congratulated from achieving that rare feat – making a movie that has a quality
cast and absolutely nothing else to offer, beside a couple of clever jokes.
The film starts with a decent
hook, an ad agency CEO who can only speak in jingles. From there it goes
nowhere really slowly – even though the film runs only 1 hour and 23 minutes.
Parker Posey, as a widowed mother of a precocious child (Karen Hillridge), and
Bruce Greenwood, as the aforementioned CEO (Adan Kundle), do their best to
create a romance out of one clichéd scene after another, but it all seems to
fall flat. The precocious daughter Meghan (Allie McDonald) has a funny scene
talking about kissing at the beginning, just so you can later be saved by Adan from
an over-eager boyfriend. She claims her life is messed up, though it is unclear
how and the big revelation is that her mother wouldn’t let her in to see her
father when he died two years earlier (what a terrible mother!). So we have a
messed up family that needs to be saved – so enter a quirky, advertising exec “genius”
who is fully aware of what is going on around him, but can only talk in those
clever little jingles that are really profound if you just really listen.
Alternatively, this could be the longest commercial people pay to see, even
ending with what appears to be a BMW ad.
To provide a little
distraction from the really dull story at the center of the film, enter a bad
guy, Lucas Foster (Callum Blue), who wants to take over the company from Adan.
In the end, he does, but I’m not sure why we should care. So we have a flat
love story that’s barely a love story at all, cleverly unclever dialogue, a bad
guy who just isn’t bad enough (and actually wins in the end) and a girl who
doesn’t really change in any profound way. In fact, no one really does, except
Callum, who now is the CEO of the company. Bad movies are made all the time, of
course, and the only thing surprising about this bomb is that two decent actors
decided to waste their time making it.
Why review it then? I
actually thought it provided great advice for what not to do to screenwriters:
1. Make sure your characters are interesting and have a problem (backstory)
that is compelling. A lost loved one always works in building sympathy, except
when you take forever to tell us and it just doesn’t seem that tragic. 2.
Stories need character arc – ie, the character has to grow in some way, learn
something, fail or succeed and thus change. 3. If a story isn’t really working,
make the bad guy worse. The bad guy here is just a cliché of the
over-caffeinated ambitious twat who, again, gets what he wants in the end. 4.
Even if a movie kind of sucks, a good ending can go a long way to giving the
audience what they want. But the previous three ingredients are important in
getting to four. A quick kiss on the lips and a hug before the main character
departs, with no clear indication of the future, just doesn’t do anything to
move the audience. And 5. Ending with a commercial is always the wrong choice.
I’m not sure if they were paid for product placement, but given the constant
barrage of advertisements, they should have been – and then the placers should
have demanded their money back. This is the worst movie I have seen since an
ill-advised decision to half-watch Break
Dawn: Part 1 on HBO a few months back. And thus the F.
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