Your basic movie trying hard to be original

Rating: 6/10 (21 June 2005)

This movie is well-intentioned, but it ends up really falling in line with your basic movie... not necessarily a bad thing.
One reason why I say this is that movie stands stalwart behind it's two main characters. During the course of the movie they are inspirational, whimsical and seemingly never wrong, yet somehow they have highly-checkered pasts. They also conveniently don't spend enough time together to get into the guts of what their relationship would be like... a sort of post-Sleepless-in-Seattle phenomenon that this movie does nothing to break away from.
Of course there must be an enemy, in this case it is his father. I don't understand why he is made to play the villain. It is certainly not necessary. The character is designed to have excellent inner-conflict and motivation for his actions, he's also played by a fantastic actor, yet he is made to be a cold, plotting, one-dimensional villain from start to finish. A villain such that the movie can climax with him being put in his place by his son, as any cheap trick movie would.
The movie is nice, but utterly fanciful in the same way as say, The Shawshank Redemption or Forest Gump, where it has a realistic plot, but unrealistic execution. This is not Mean Streets... not that a movie has to play it straight to ring true. An outside-the-box movie can have an unrealistic plot, but realistic execution. Take Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; the plot is out there, but the movie is genuine. If you've seen both Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Garden State, think of the weight and depth of the central characters. In Garden State, the characters are fun and neat, but their depth is falsely created in a few sentences of plot-work that doesn't match what's on the screen. What's on the screen is NOT a study of an over-drugged boy (with a severely traumatizing incident) falling in love with a girl who has clinical mental issues. That topic is really left for documentary because how, as sane people, can we begin to structure the feelings behind such a plot? What's on the screen fits a couple normal slackers, there's nothing wrong with simply making them slackers and that's who these characters should be. Slackers can be clever and endearing like these characters, they don't have to be defined as insane and on drugs.
Maybe I was in a grumpy mood... but what was with all those barely funny sight gags? These 2-3 second, no-dialogue shots of stuff like, all of them on the motorcycle, or all of them wearing the plastic bags for the rain etc. It looked like the stuff on sitcoms, I was wondering where the laugh-track was (cue laugh-track)