At the risk of repeating myself, my thanks again to those who came to the film, and those who were there in spirit.

And especially to Mousepod, for going above and beyond.

Heheh, I peppered the credits with polite applause so that our cheering for Tom wouldn't seem quite so singular and friendobvious.


It didn't work.


I have a feeling the other 3 people in the theater caught on that we knew the editor.




Ok, i'll start off the talk about the movie:

Tre is a relentless asshole, and i just don't see the character arc that redeems him in the slightest.


mousepod, you missed the post-show reveal that the story is an autobiographical work of non-fiction. Does that alter your perception of the film in any way?


(We had a private Q&A session after the film. Sorry you missed it. But yeah, the Sunset-5/Former-Virgin locale has the lamest parking in Los Angeles, and thus it is double-doomed. Good luck with that remodel now that Virgin is gone. Uh-huh. Did I mention there were 8 of us in the theater? That's going to be a big night for them.)

Redeem? Definitely not. Change? Certainly.

He exposed some redeeming qualities, but in the end failed his attempt at redemption.

Bummer that I missed it. I'll have to watch it when it hits DVD.

No, indeed. But though Kakela earns sympathy at the beginning of the film, she gradually destroys that through the narrative. (She gradually destroys herself, too.) Tre is "trying not to," while Kakela is "trying to." They're both responsible for their behavior, but in the end, I think I favor Tre more than Kakela. And what of the last scene? Was she lying to him? Well, obviously she was, but which was the lie?

I don't even think Kakela is really clear herself on what's her truth and what's her lie.

But neither do I think Tre's shell was cracked open more than a pinch. And I don't think that crack revealed anything but that the asshole exterior concealed a tender heart of total asshole.


At least I found Kakela complex and sort of fun to loathe, whereas I found the title character completely annoying, unsympathetic and dreadful throughout.







I liked the horse, though.




(But it all went downhill from Gabe's nude scene in the first two minutes, heheh ;) )

Interesting that it's autobiographical. I imagine that the innocent character who did no wrong except love his woman and stick with his friend is the author (whine, sniffle). Personally, I'm not a fan of infidelity movies (and how much of a telegraph was it to name the guy "Tre"?), so I decided to focus my attention instead on Tom's work, which was excellent.

My biggest gripe had to do with the 'print' that I saw. I'm not sure if it was a result of the video it was shot on or the video it was transferred to, but the blacks weren't black. I'm not sure what the technical term for it is, but the scenes that take place in the dark - the party scene, the final scene - were difficult to watch because the darker parts of the frame glowed gray...

That's funny, because the print at Sunset was TOO black. It's a film that takes place a lot at night, and I thought that perhaps they could have used a better lighting budget, but Tom assured me that the film he worked with was perfectly well lit.

The transfer was bad - you're definitely right - Wednesday's projection of it at the Sunset 5 was worse than Thursday's, at least.

I'm not that much for infidelity movies, either. But no - you've pegged it wrong - Kakela was the screenwriter.

Hmmm. Interesting. Still didn't make the story any better for me, but that's probably because I've been tainted by seeing this story told so many times before, in varying degrees of success.

It did make me want to go home and watch "Bad Timing" again, but there's no way I could have sat through it at midnight. Maybe Sunday...