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Everyone in the movie gives a believable performance. The actors really
inhabit their roles, and they each fit the unique, quirky role they've
been given.
Where do I start? Ok, first of all, the accents in this movie are so
thick that subtitles would have really helped, because it's very
difficult to understand what the characters are saying at times. I
should say that I'm a fan of quirky British comedies. I seek them out,
so I was excited to see this movie. I don't really know where it went
wrong, but it did so early on. The lead character is a slacker who
doesn't do much with his life, but one night on a date with his
girlfriend he accosts some guy who puts the moves on her, and the
subsequent brush with the police and his girlfriend's pleading are
enough to convince him that he should do something with his life, so he
decided to become politically active. Meanwhile the man he
assaulted in the bar has problems with his overbearing father, and
everyone seems to be obsessed with his penis.
This whole movie is obsessed with penises. I'm a huge fan of cock, don't
get me wrong, but we don't get to see any actual penis in this movie,
and thus hearing everyone talk about it endlessly got old, even for me.
One of the characters (the leader of a militia group) philosophizes that
everything in a man's life revolves around the size of his penis, and I
think perhaps the filmmakers were throwing that line in here to justify
making a movie that revolves around penis jokes. I don't know if the
filmmakers realize the line between being edgily funny and being strange
and uncomfortable, but seeing a father grope his son's penis while
talking about the "strength of his seed" really isn't edgy or funny,
it's just weird. Seeing a strange old man crawl under the hospitalized
son's covers and sexually assault him while he's in the hospital? Also
not funny.
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The only thing that even keys me into the fact that these
scenes are supposed to be funny is the quirky soundtrack
playing in the background of the scenes, but I was caught
between being appalled and being bored, until finally the
boredom won over. I've decided not to take offense, I'm sure
the movie was trying to be offensive and funny but
ultimately, it ends up being boring more than anything else.
Boring and very, very weird. |
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This movie is full of weird things. The aforementioned militia group is
weird, and the guy who leads it acts a lot tougher and cooler than he
is, and the guys in the group don't really respect him and mock him a
lot and he makes a lot of speeches about how they would be nothing
without him. Meanwhile another local young man has some kind of epiphany
when sitting watching the television, and he starts to run around
spouting political philosophy at every turn, worrying his over-attentive
parents into thinking he's an anarchist.
Needless to say, as anyone could predict, the young man runs into the
lead character and his friends and they decide to start doing political
activism together (as members of "The Green Party") and they chain
themselves to trees, meanwhile the father who was groping his son is
also active in political circles, and he wants to expose the newly
christened "Green Party" crusaders for the reprobates he believes they
are, and everything comes to a head when the father holds a political
social gathering at his house and the "Green Party" and the militia show
up, and the son gets to confront the man who assaulted him, and the
idealists learn a lesson of sorts, and I hope I'm not making this sound
interesting and enticing you to watch it, because I'd hate to have you
sit through what I had to sit through.
I feel terrible saying all of this. I love and respect independent
cinema and I want it to succeed, but I feel I'd be a hypocrite if I took
mainstream movies to task for their shortcomings but failed to do so
with indie films as well. I like to think that I have a sense of humor,
and I tried very hard to find something funny about this movie, but I
couldn't. The only positive thing I can think of to say about this movie
is that the actors do a good job, because they do, and they really do
inhabit their roles... I just hope they find a project in the future
that allows them to use their skills in a worthwhile film. I'm really
sorry, but this just ain't it.
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