Push the little daisies (and make them come up)

Rating: Null/10 (1 January 2006)

I thought I'd add some lyrics by the band Ween to the review as I've never been to America, let alone L.A.
The film is all about mistakes. Mistakes that someone living in a British community reading newspapers and watching television news know will not burden their lives through laws which they are not governed by, most directly, gun control. Or dreams of living as large as America, and making errors of judgement from thinking on such grandiose scales which is where the racial tension inherent in this movie could well be derived from.
What the movie does is show a big city interacting on a very small scale from the police department to television producers and petty criminals on the wrong side of the fence and pick their lives apart only to fake a reformation of the jigsaw puzzle at the end.
In many ways the Stella cast reminds me of a group of conniving union delegates who know they have done wrong and commissioned somebody to write a movie that doesn't hide this fact, and quite the opposite, implores you to join them. Bums on seats? No, more go out and buy a Matt Dillon shaped dildo and sit on it the night before your first period starts.
What the film can't hide from the back of my mind is the tragic occurrences witnessed recently in the US, not the ones that happen daily; things for which someone is to blame and no matter how hard I try, watching this movie brings to mind but one answer: blame America. There, a happy ending, after all.