Reviews

Beautifully and powerfully acted by young Michael McDowell -- the lad holds up the film with the camera being on him in nearly every scene. Director Clay Riley Hassler is able to portray the isolation and hopelessness of the homeless as embodied in this single character. What makes it all the more poignant is that this is such a young man, poised on the brink of manhood who should be filled with optimism and joy facing his future in the world, but here he face only abject despair.

Where Hassler falters is that he is unrelenting and gives us not even a moment to breath. There is not a glimmer of hope for this young man. THe director keeps us hoping that the kid will get a break....I heard myself saying out loud, "Somebody hug this boy!" I guarantee, when credits roll, you will be screaming at the screen in both pain and anger.

If you were in a super positive, pollyanna mood before you sat down and hit the play button, you might get thru it unscathed. ON the other hand, If you were feeling anything less than the up-swing of your bi-polar euphoria, you may wind up cutting your wrists before the last reel. I won't say skip it, but but be prepared -- and remember, you've been duly warned.

Oh yah, the music, such as it is, is a minimalist drone of a repetitive three piano cords with some moody electronic loops going on under it. Actually, quite effective to enhance to utter despair on the screen, but it is so repetitive that very quickly those three cords become much too obvious and obtrusive to the point of distraction. Effective for 5 or 6 minutes...a dirge after a half hour of it.

Now can someone please hand me my Prozac.

And of course it's not a film, it's a video and of course it was never played in any theatre because theatre owners won't want patrons setting their cinemas on fire. I mean, it doesn't take a genus to realize how bad a movie has to be when if when you sort for the BEST review on IMDb, the very first one that comes up says don't waste your time and that it is simply a piece of trash! That's a BEST review. All I will add to that is to be really blunt and fair, YOU GOT ME is, needs a NO STAR category.

What we have here...is failure.... What's not communicating is, well, EVERYTHING -- the direction, the acting, the gawd-awful insipid characters and the stolen story-line is all so cliché that you can explain to your fellow viewers what is going to happen 5 minutes before it does. Nothing here you haven't seen before many, many times. This is nothing more than a FATAL ATTRACTION and a PLAY MISTY FOR ME rip-off, without the brilliant acting, without a master director at the helm, but instead, one so incompetent that you wonder if he was on the set at all. And of course this has a screenplay that has an exposition so convoluted going nowhere for what seems like hours (can you say painfully BORING?) that one begins to suspect that all the nonsensical rambling thru what the writer, director and all the other over 50 year olds involved with the production must imagine goes on at teen parties -- it's just thrown in to mask the PLAGIARISM of ideas from a dozen other good suspense movies.

Whereas the writing and the character development in those other classics was brilliantly crafted, the charters here are reduced in age evidently to appeal to an audience demographic which the producers seem to think are just as stupid as they are. So we are tortured to watch the most formulaic story around uninteresting and annoying people in an excruciating long (or at least it felt long) exposition before the plagiarism got going in earnest, but even that, executed with no skill, no finesse and with nothing at all that would cause an audience to be remotely interested in these people. A character gets poisoned? I say, who cares...poison them the lot of them and roll credits rather than have us suffer any more of these vapid, shallow mid-20 yr olds who are rich, insufferable brats and who we are expected to believe, are still in high school.

The high school "girls" are painted with whorish makeup and wear dresses so seriously skimpy that they could easily be mistaken for prostitutes trolling for johns on 8th Avenue. At one point the suspense (the ONLY suspense in this dog) was wondering if we were going to see a mammary flop out of her dress. And just to prove that we have here a director who hasn't a clue how to move a story along, there isn't more than 2 or 3 minutes that go by in ANY SCENE where he doesn't fad in background music to drone on practically non-stop. He can't get anything interesting on the screen so like any mediocre hack, he covers everything with background music that is as vapid as the characters it's playing under.

Wanna see a REAL suspense movie about a woman scorned? Rent FATAL ATTRACTION or PLAY MISTY FOR ME -- they are so good you can watch them again and again. Treat yourself to one of those classics and SAVE YOURSELF!! Save yourself from losing 2 hours of your life on this garbage.

Zooey Dechanel has got to be one of the most annoying actresses on the planet. Her "quirky" mannerisms that supposedly are her claim to fame, after about 10 minutes make you want to take up crack. And let's be clear, there is nothing even mildly humerus about this movie which for some unknown reason is called a romantic "comedy." Guaranteed you won't even crack a smile.

It goes from one banal situation to the next, all building up to a simple, easily understood conclusion -- he is smitten, she is not...bye bye boy. We should not have been tortured for what seemed like hours to get to this uncomplicated, uninteresting denouement. Everything in between is schlock and cloyingly creepy.

Joseph Gordon-Levit, an actor with some incredible chops, does his best to keep this thing from descending into pretentious stupidity, but in spite of his heroic efforts, he is unsuccessful. He handles the maudlin dialog as best he can, while his love interest seems to just wander thru her lines, totally unable to make you believe ANYONE would actually speak this inane dialogue. For all the effort of the cast (Levit much more so than Dechanel) to pull off dialogue that is so off-center, in the end, the sitcom-about-to-be-canceled quality of the thing becomes almost painful to watch. The only thing missing is the canned laugh track, while the director uses silly tech tricks in an attempt to make the mess seem "profound," like using spit screens with the word EXPECTATION on one screen and REALITY on the other and like adding intrusive narration that simply pops in with no apparent reason and in a voice that has a weird accent and timber which resembles one of those gravely trailer voice-over voices. There is even sequence where all of a sudden we are in a MARY POPPINS movie with the live characters actually breaking into choreographed dance, replete with a Disney-esque animated bird interacting with JG-L. The cumulative effect of all this is a disjointed, meandering, pretentious mess signifying nothing.

Bottom line...even if you find this title on Neflix for free, don't waste your time. If your girlfriend or significant other insists she wants to watch it (she might, it's been hailed as a "chick flick"), be sure you get a firm commitment to get something YOU want in return before you waste what I guarantee will feel like 3 hours of sloppy trash to you.

If "slick" was all you needed to give a movie a high rating, FREQUENCIES would be right up there with the characters in the film who have the highest frequency numbers, because it is that -- as slick as KY Jelly. It has a clean, beautifully photographed look, attractive actors and an engaging love story that is initially quite involving, drawing us into the story very early on -- seems like an interesting, even quirky story unfolding....initially.

It opens with the easily understood and familiar premise, a kind of caste system which seems intrinsically unfair and which thwarts a lover from reaching his beloved. In this version of unfair, unrequited love, there is a caste system based on of all things, some sort of frequency in their atomic structure of each individual makeup which is unalterable and which permanently relegates each to a specific level of "luck" or fate and lot in life, much like our present day SAT scores. And they are bound to it to the grave. What becomes immediately of emotional interest to the viewer is that this indelible frequency number (which right off the bat begs credulity of the highest order) not only marks their level of fate, but also predetermines who they can love (or not). Not an original cinematic concept by any means and we have seen it used as the foundation for love-stories in a myriad of other films, except here it becomes just too silly a device to be believable; their atomic frequency prevent them from even going near each other let alone touching or loving each other. The "science" behind this situation is just never explained so it remains glaringly bad science to the point that at times it's laughable.

OK, let's live with that hard-to-swallow "frequency out of sync" device...it's only a means to move the meat of the love story and the conflict therein forward. But that's only the beginning of the nonsense as the director/write then begins injecting more and more absurd arguments about irrelevant concepts like fate and predetermination and free will and irony(?!), all supposedly controlled by a "Manual" that we are told, without any plausible explanation, pops up throughout the centuries -- a kind of DaVinchi Code, only it's about patterns and fate. It's represented by three hieroglyphic looking symbols that appear here and there, again without explanation, and also you see them crudely paint on the backs of their cellphones. Oh, and yes, the discovery of how to control the "side effects" of frequency mismatch is made by the lead male lover who happens to be a mathematical, druggie/genius (even though he's vibrating at the LOWEST frequency, i.e. bottoming out on the SATs) -- HE figures out that WORDS -- yes, just speaking words out loud, stops the bad side effects when two people of divergent frequencies dare to try to interact. But wait...what about those musical notes. Ooops, more on that later.

Come to find out, if you take certain drugs -- lots of them...like mixing whole prescription bottles of them together, you can then speak certain words that a cellphone app will spit out which will quash the bad side-effects when individuals with incorrectly matched frequencies play hanky-panky with each other. Yah, that's right....it's the WORDS you speak that stop forks and knives from flying about when the lovers touch, but low and behold, another unbelievable discovery....it's MUSIC that will squash the flying utensils and vibrating doors and steam rising from the ground as well as cell app words. Will wonders never cease? In this movie, evidently not soon enough.

The "science" here is absurd; the philosophical conundrums of free will vs. predetermination vs. patterns vs. irony (irony?...really?!) are all over the map; THEN the mean military arm of the government jumps in just to make things interesting (and less coherent) because now humanity as we know it is threatened if the control words are spoken out loud. All the scientists now have to do is figure out how to restore frequencies so that the evil caste system is back in place and we are all really just machines anyway...or are we? Yah...it is just as idiotic as it sounds. Not a shred of any plausible science or philosophy or physics while all the incessant mumbo-jumbo discussions that the characters spout on these "deep" (read pretentious) topics sound as infantile as those commercials for Cheese-Its where the 5 year old kids give their explanations of how the cheese gets into the crackers. None of this means a hill of beans to whatever is emotionally engaging of the plot -- the love story and the social ethics of a society with such an unfair way of predetermining citizens' lot or why any of this is happening. Instead the sci-fi simply consists of dialog that sounds like the screenwriters hadn't the foggiest handle on ANY of these topics. Nor do we care an iota about any of it as presented.

While as a whole, this may have started off as a good attempt at a story that we COULD HAVE gotten emotional invested in, but one-third the way thru it they seem to have seriously lost their way and had no idea where they wanted to take the film. And that is sad because the film had great potential, but when you need to come in to save your splintered, unraveling, unresolved last reel with all this mess still flopping in the wind and you to have to bring in MOZART to tie up lose ends as well as turning one of your very minor supporting characters into an omniscient Star Trek-like "Q" as the denouement to the meandering, indecipherable last 20 minutes, well, you just wind up with a major disappointment.

...but this horse stumbles badly long before the finish.

We have here a story and film elements that seem to be going someplace but ultimately and unfortunately, everything -- story-line, motivation, emotional direction, all are left dangling and going nowhere.

We start with characters who are quite engaging with some very good acting by the two principals and even the minor characters are ably portrayed (except Light's girlfriend and her brother who are right out of college Acting 101). That said, as the film unfolds (or rather as the hard drive spins -- this is VERY low budget) nothing solidifies; the elements simply drift apart rather than together.

The director builds a kind of Waiting-for-Godot anticipatory tension and a palpable sense of frustration that pulls us in during the first 1/3rd of the film -- the brothers trying to start a better life in California -- and he does this very well. (SPOILER ALERT, although this is revealed in the synopsis) Then we add the element of a mysterious alien creature (is it real? is it symbolic? what's its purpose? is it a figment of the brothers' imagination? and finally, who cares), then add an amateur drug/drug money heist fiasco scene and from there everything veers into an ever-spiraling, chaotic vortex from which neither the director nor the writer were able to pull themselves, the characters or the viewer out of.

The last 2/3rds of the film simply do not work into any satisfying, cohesive "power of the whole;" for all the mystery of the alien "sufferers" and guardian angels, we are left with a void of any deeper meaning than "drugs-will-mess-up-your-life." If it weren't for Paul Dano and Michael Esper's engaging performances which keep one's attention, I am quite sure I wouldn't have watched this to the end.

Problem is, with a work like this that has such initial promise, it keeps you watching only in the hopes that all will be revealed -- the It's Got To Get Better syndrome -- but instead, you are just strung along and get REALLY disappoint you when you see the credit crawl.

The Sufferer," I am afraid in this type of effort in spades...it is the audience who is the real Sufferer. If it were truly a dog from the get-go, you would have been able to just walk away early on and save 70 minutes of your life.