Reviews

There really is a very good movie to be made from the film that's here. I'm not sure how long that film would be, but probably no more than half the length of the current film. In its current state, this is pretty much unwatchable. WAY too much repetition. The animation is very good. I was interested in the main character for the first 45 minutes or so. There is a lot of innovative stuff in the film and I thought it would be a wonderful film until about an hour into it, when I started to realize that this might be an interesting file to the filmmaker, but maybe not so much for others. But by the end, it was very hard to sit through.

The making of this film was the subject of a class at Baylor University in Waco. This probably would have been a great class to be part of and the film looks very good for a school project. Unfortunately, I don't think there was a great film to be made from this script. There were some very funny bits, but just not enough of them to stretch out for a whole movie. It's a mockumentary about a man who thinks he's a messiah. Not THE Messiah, he thinks he's just here for the residents of his home town.

The art direction added some funny touches. The characters ate from packages labeled Generic Cheese Snacks and Vomit Plopps. I liked the Warhol-styled Jesus poster on the messiah's wall- it was like the four different-colored Marilyns.

The director, a professor at Baylor, was at the screening and mentioned that the relationship between the messiah and his brother is similar to that of the main characters in American Movie, a real documentary and a better film that this one.

I saw this one at the AFI Dallas festival..The story of a young guy who has a very bad family environment, a medical condition and an attitude toward football, all of which serve to alienate him from his surroundings. He works at a gas station and helps out at an old movie theater. He tries to keep the bills paid at home, where he lives with his mother, but he doesn't always succeed. Stephen Berra, a pro skateboarder writes and directs, and from what he said after the movie, you'll be seeing more of his work. Mark Webber (Jesus' Son, Broken Flowers) stars with Zooey Deschanel (Trillian in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) Harry Dean Stanton and Bill Paxton. Webber is very real and sympathetic and Zooey does a good job as the almost angelic and quite strange Frances. A moving, intimate film.

I saw this movie at the AFI Dallas festival. Most of the audience, including my wife, enjoyed this comedy-drama, but I didn't. It stars Lucas Haas (Brick, Alpha Dog), Molly Parker (Kissed, The Five Senses, Hollywoodland) and Adam Scott (First Snow, Art School Confidential). The director is Matt Bissonnette, who's married to Molly Parker. All three actors do a fine job in this movie about 3 friends, the marriage of two of them and infidelity involving the third. It all takes place at a lake house and it looks wonderful. The film wants to treat its subject as a comedy first and then a drama, and I thought it needed to be the other way around.

First of all, David Mamet wrote the screenplay. If Mamet thought it was worth the time to write it, it's probably worth your time to watch it. Paul Newman is great as the desperate lawyer. The rest of the cast is wonderful, too. She's on screen only briefly, but Lindsay Crouse's Caitlin Costello burns her way into your memory and just won't leave ("WHO WERE THESE MEN?"). And Newman's (Mamet's) final summation is just about as good as a film speech gets. "So much of the time we're just lost..." Am I over estimating this film? See it a few times & decide for yourself.