Danielle (Juno Temple [IMDB]) is the titular “Dirty Girl”. She doesn’t play well with others, is rebelling both at school and at home and tends to look out for number one. When she’s placed in the “Special Education” class as punishment for her behavior, she’s paired with Clarke (Jeremy Dozier [IMDB]), a closeted teen with a troubled home, on a parenting exercise. They’re to take care of a “baby”, a fragile bag of flour they name “Joan”, together to see how difficult raising a baby can be.
It’s a high concept kissy-face movie! With the ups and the downs, and the highs and the lows, and the will-theys and the won’t-theys! There’s smoochin’ as well, lots of it, but this is a serious kissy-face movie, not a laughy kissy-face movie, so there’s some sad stuff too.
This is one of the new breed of hybrid found-footage movies. In the past filmmakers invented all new classes of mental gymnastics to explain why somebody would continue filming while a monster gnawed away at their ankle. Here, as in other recent offerings, “found” footage is intermixed with traditional cinematography to provide flavor without tying the whole production down.
Call them what you like – bottle movies, gimmick flicks or just plain “single location films” – they are an inherently mixed bag. Completely dependent upon the audience being intrigued enough by the single location and the few characters, they have to grab your attention early and hold it to the end. This one does pass that test, but only barely.
George Miller’s [IMDB] original Mad Max trilogy is an enigmatic classic. 1979’s “Mad Max” [IMDB] told the story of a vengeful cop losing his humanity against the backdrop of civilization on the brink of collapse. It was the only offering not set in a desert wasteland and, more importantly, the only story about Max, himself.
[This review was completed at the request of the filmmaker. No other consideration was given.]
Written, Directed, Produced, Edited and Starring Erik C. Bloomquist [IMDB], this is an enjoyable experiment in genre storytelling. Set in a posh New England prep school (thus the “cobblestones”) it follows Archer, the hard-boiled, no-nonsense editor of the school newspaper in his single-minded pursuit of the truth.
This is a good, if utterly formulaic, feel-good movie. Bill Murray [IMDB] plays Vincent, a classic Hollywood curmudgeon. He’s a gambler, thief and racist. Seemingly an altogether horrible human being. Jaeden Lieberher [IMDB] is Oliver, a lonely kid with an overworked mom, Maggie (Melissa McCarthy [IMDB]), who just moved in next door. Struggling to pay for his enfeebled wife’s nursing home, medical care for the prostitute, Daka (Naomi Watts [IMDB]), that he’s knocked up and, of course, gambling debts, Vincent agrees to watch Oliver.
There has been an unending glut of young-adult fantasy romance adapted to film since the successes of “Twilight” and “The Hunger Games”. Authors are going to have to start leveraging love trapezoids because we’ve literally run out of triangles.
Still, it was my daughter’s 13th birthday and she wanted to watch this with her friends. They were deeply invested in the books and they promised – cross their hearts! – that they would watch it.
Teenage girls lie.
Teenage girls lie a lot.
Giving the benefit of the doubt, I don’t think that they intend to lie, but lie they do. I was able to capture this timelapse of them “watching” the movie. Does it look like much watching is getting done?
Phones, giggling, moving around, phones on sticks, snacks, jumping on each other and jumping off the furniture. These are, I remind you, huge fans. Personally, I was less animated and able to pay more attention.
Not that I really needed to. The basic framework is so terribly familiar: a blank teenage girl discovers that she’s actually incredibly special and is part of a fantastic hidden world. She then spends the whole movie moaning over, but never choosing between, two guys. The teenage girls squealed like… well, like teenage girls, when the blank girl started kissing the amazingly effeminate guy, but a few did argue for the merits of the nerdy guy.
The plot is built from common ingredients in a different blender: angels and demons, werewolves and vampires, secret societies and ancient feuds. The good guys have hidden a magic cup that the bad guys want. Really important information is delivered with a British accent, because.
The special effects are nice enough and the pacing is pretty good when not bogged down by the kissing parts. Teenage girls seem to enjoy ignoring it while looking at their phones. The whole thing is basically harmless.
At some point in his life, Tom Six [IMDB] thought that sewing people’s mouths to other people’s buttholes would make for a cool movie. He was so enthralled with this idea that he’s spent the greater part of the last decade writing, directing and producing three movies about it. You probably already have an opinion about whether his time was well spent or not.
Zombie alert!