Absolute Artifice From Frame One

Rating: 4/10 (10 April 2011)

This film is exactly the thing I rail most against in cinema. More so than crappy low-budget films, or bad genre films or obviously tinny dialog... it's this kind of thing. Where obviously capable, talented people pretend to be artistically ambitious by tackling very real lives and very human situations, then turn around and create the most fake, trite, saturated approximation of life you can imagine. This is what I call the Sundance Factor. Movies that claim to be about life but are really less true in their minutia than a "Lord of the Rings" movie. Every glance, every human interaction, every performance, every depiction of struggle, misunderstanding and realization, every character is acted up, tarted out, over cooked and absolutely full of crap. Which would be alright if it was funny. But it's not funny. Not at all, despite the terribly stereo-typical, shallow, cringe-inducing, comic-relief character played by Bobby Cannavale.
If you as a filmmaker are going to have this much of a disregard for the way people really act, speak and think then for god's sake, have someone in your film pull a gun out so at least I won't be bored.
Suck Suck.