|
Directed by: Efram Potelle and Kyle Rankin Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Elden Henson, Amy Smart, William Sadler, Kathleen Quinlan "The Battle of Shaker Heights" was the product of the second season of the awesome reality series "Product Greenlight," in which a first-time directing team was awarded the chance to create a film from a similarly chosen first-time screenwriter. The series is addictively engrossing, but the movie tanked, and with good reason. There's pretty much no reason to bother seeing it unless you were a fan of the show and wanted to see what actually came out of it. The movie's about a teenage kid named Kelly who's into war and re-enactments. He becomes deeply infatuated with his new friend's older sister, who's preparing to get married. He also has to deal with a hippie-ish mom and a dad whom he can't forgive for spending most of Kelly's early years in a drug-induced stupor, although the guy's clean now. In theory, there is nothing wrong with a movie dealing with multiple disparate storylines. In theory, there's also nothing wrong with a movie that's only 75 minutes long. But if your movie's got three storylines, each of which could potentially carry a whole film on its own, and it's still not even an hour and a half, that's a pretty good indicator that your movie sucks. And that's what happens in this case. The characters aren't developed very strongly, and the relationships between them are exposited in dialogue instead of being explored. Nothing in the plot is especially interesting on its own, so there's very little to actually engage the viewer. The show gave the impression that the script was perfectly fine but the directors were completely incompetent, and it's hard to tell how accurate that impression is. There aren't many obvious mistakes on the part of the directors; just watching the movie, it seems to be about the same level as a lot of major releases with experienced if mediocre directors. But the film's got no shape, and a good director would have been able to see that and pre-emptively avert it. It's impossible to know how much they cut out from the screenplay that could have made the movie better, but from what we do see, the script has a few nice observations and some funny dialogue. My hunch is that if someone had told the screenwriter, Erica Beeney, to cut out the stuff with the older sister and add a lot more scenes with the kid and his dad, the end product would have been much improved. But we'll never know. RATING: 1.5 PROS: It's not offensively bad CONS: It's boring as heck and the main character's obnoxious ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0357470/
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2005 22:08
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 26, 2024 12:26 |
|