There’s a great deal of technical skill in editor Joe Klotz’s furious cutting of the trial scenes. These stock characters are such visual cliches that they remove the menace from a story that calls for less gloss and more grit. ![]() ![]() Maybe it’s a misguided extension of the movie-of-my-life frame, but that snarling prosecutor, like the arresting detective and every vicious-looking thug prowling the prison yard, appears to be straight out of Central Casting. But Mandler barely leaves Steve’s truth any room to breathe. Sawicki keeps banging on in class about how every choice you make as a filmmaker reflects your point of view, your truth. And that happens long before a miscast Tim Blake Nelson as Steve’s high school film-club teacher, Mr. But the intrusive impact of all that artsy overload and trippy structuring on the movie’s dramatic integrity becomes impossible to ignore. The director, along with cinematographer David Devlin, shows a sharp eye for interesting visual compositions, and the sleek widescreen images initially are striking enough to make you forgive the purple writing. He stretches what should be a taut courtroom thriller into two hours of stylistic tricks that draw attention to themselves while rarely energizing the drama. The bigger problem, however, is Mandler’s insatiable appetite for distracting directorial flourishes. “Now that it’s actually happening, all I want to do is find a way to rewrite the story.” Steve proceeds to punctuate the action on and off throughout with shooting-script scene references, in a meta-cinema overlay that serves mainly - and maddeningly - to distance us from the story and its scared-stiff central character. ![]() “Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a movie,” says 17-year-old protagonist Steve Harmon (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) in the first of countless streams of voiceover.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |