Long Bout Of Randomness

Rating: 2/10 (29 March 2013)

Scenario: Father has a week to live. Son and wife visit him. Father tells a story to son, who knows it's another one of his many, many tall tales he has told throughout his life, and son is irritated because he had hoped his father was going to stop telling such stories and tell him what really happened throughout his life.
Some examples: In his younger years, the father has fought in the Korean War and helped a set of Siamese twin ladies to defect. He goes through a dangerous wild forest to visit an idealized small town where nobody wants to leave, and in fact the father was expected to visit, albeit he arrived too early, so he leaves it. He meets a poet and a giant living in a nearby cave. Both characters would eventually leave the town themselves, and the town falls into decay.
There is more, but this should be confusing enough. None of the individual stories, or the characters who are part of them, are developed enough to become interesting. We never learn why the father tells all these stories. Could they really be true (as implied by the ending)? Yet there is no overall payoff, and we don't figure out in the end why things happened as they did. The idea might have worked, but they dropped the ball.