I'll admit that I've sat through films that were more emotionally, physically and intellectually painful than Overnight Sensation. However, when it comes to a complete lack of any redeeming virtues, I'm not sure I've seen anything worse than this movie. That's because it's not just bad, it's arrogantly bad. It's a limp wristed, frazzled, myopic indictment of the film industry, created by people who aren't qualified to clean the toilets in any studio in Hollywood, let alone critique the way they do their business. Watching this bewildering disaster is like listening to someone who flunked kindergarten finger painting criticize the work of Picasso.
Recapping the plot of this miscarriage of cinema in any detail would be quite a challenge. That's because there's what these filmmaker did and then there's what they apparently thought they were doing, two things which frequently have nothing in common. When watching Overnight Sensation, you can just barely tell that moments or scenes or lines of dialog are meant to be one thing, but they actually turn out to be something else or are so garbled and misformed that they're really nothing at all.
Let me try it this way. Matthew Wells (Sean Dugan) is an aspiring filmmaker. He's also an awesomely self-important git you want to slap almost every second he's on the screen. After quitting his job as a production assistant on a film in a childish huff, Matthew decides to go to the Sundance Film Festival to see if he can get someone to read his script. When he arrives, Matthew meets his old film school roommate Rick (Seth William Meier). Rick acts like an amateur Ben Affleck impersonator, and a terrible one at that. I'm not sure if that's the way Rick's character was supposed to be or if Seth William Meier is that awful an actor, a conundrum repeated with many different things about this movie.
Anyway, Matthew and Rick connect with this disgraced and seemingly medicated agent named Abe Pollard (Mark Goddard), who hatches a thoroughly impractical scheme to drum up interest in Matthew's screenplay. They create a bit of a buzz at the festival, attracting the attention of the over enunciating and childishly Machiavellian super-agent Mark Connor (Maxwell Caulfield) and entertainment reporter Jackie Cartwright (Michelle Federer), who also happens to be Matthew's plain looking ex-girlfriend. The basic idea is that Matthew, an idealistic a-hole, is caught between the old school integrity of Abe Pollard and the slick, smarmy corruption of Mark Connor. The problem is that idea is so poorly established and played out that this movie might as well have been about the jumping yaks of Northern Tajikistan. There's also a running subplot about a greedy young filmmaker (Dave Rosenberg) and the bidding war over his popular festival entry and if you can figure out what the ultimate point of this subplot is, I'll give you $20.
For such a small tale, Overnight Sensation is epically terrible. The cast seems to have spent most of the production in a collective haze. The camera-work is fractionally better than what you'd see on public access cable. The writing is almost autistic in it's inability to express or comprehend normal human behavior and feeling. And what makes it all the more appalling is the clear conviction of these filmmakers that they're representing something superior to the conventional studio product.
The only appropriate response to this movie is to throw rotten fruit at it. Not at the screen as you watch it, but to literally throw rotten fruit at the DVD itself. I didn't listen to the director's commentary because I was afraid it would send me into a paroxysm of rage, but the only commentary track Overnight Sensation should have is 90 minutes of continuous apologies from everyone involved in the making of this barren waste.
Recapping the plot of this miscarriage of cinema in any detail would be quite a challenge. That's because there's what these filmmaker did and then there's what they apparently thought they were doing, two things which frequently have nothing in common. When watching Overnight Sensation, you can just barely tell that moments or scenes or lines of dialog are meant to be one thing, but they actually turn out to be something else or are so garbled and misformed that they're really nothing at all.
Let me try it this way. Matthew Wells (Sean Dugan) is an aspiring filmmaker. He's also an awesomely self-important git you want to slap almost every second he's on the screen. After quitting his job as a production assistant on a film in a childish huff, Matthew decides to go to the Sundance Film Festival to see if he can get someone to read his script. When he arrives, Matthew meets his old film school roommate Rick (Seth William Meier). Rick acts like an amateur Ben Affleck impersonator, and a terrible one at that. I'm not sure if that's the way Rick's character was supposed to be or if Seth William Meier is that awful an actor, a conundrum repeated with many different things about this movie.
Anyway, Matthew and Rick connect with this disgraced and seemingly medicated agent named Abe Pollard (Mark Goddard), who hatches a thoroughly impractical scheme to drum up interest in Matthew's screenplay. They create a bit of a buzz at the festival, attracting the attention of the over enunciating and childishly Machiavellian super-agent Mark Connor (Maxwell Caulfield) and entertainment reporter Jackie Cartwright (Michelle Federer), who also happens to be Matthew's plain looking ex-girlfriend. The basic idea is that Matthew, an idealistic a-hole, is caught between the old school integrity of Abe Pollard and the slick, smarmy corruption of Mark Connor. The problem is that idea is so poorly established and played out that this movie might as well have been about the jumping yaks of Northern Tajikistan. There's also a running subplot about a greedy young filmmaker (Dave Rosenberg) and the bidding war over his popular festival entry and if you can figure out what the ultimate point of this subplot is, I'll give you $20.
For such a small tale, Overnight Sensation is epically terrible. The cast seems to have spent most of the production in a collective haze. The camera-work is fractionally better than what you'd see on public access cable. The writing is almost autistic in it's inability to express or comprehend normal human behavior and feeling. And what makes it all the more appalling is the clear conviction of these filmmakers that they're representing something superior to the conventional studio product.
The only appropriate response to this movie is to throw rotten fruit at it. Not at the screen as you watch it, but to literally throw rotten fruit at the DVD itself. I didn't listen to the director's commentary because I was afraid it would send me into a paroxysm of rage, but the only commentary track Overnight Sensation should have is 90 minutes of continuous apologies from everyone involved in the making of this barren waste.
