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STUDIO: New Line
MSRP: $19.99
RATED: R
RUNNING TIME: 86 min.
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Commentary
• Featurette
• Deleted Scenes
The Pitch
“It’s Crash without the self-importance!”
The Humans
Hilary Swank (The Core, Sometimes They Come Back… Again), Henry Thomas (ET, Hijacking
The Nutshell
In an ordinary small town, the events leading up to a moment in time (that’d be 11:14, to be precise) on one particularly uncommon evening are viewed from the perspective of several humans whose tales catastrophically overlap when a pedestrian meets a speeding vehicle. The confluence involves a number of improbable incidents that include a botched holdup, a graveyard coitus mishap, a police officer’s unusually demanding shift, a feigned pregnancy, a corpse disposal and a severed penis, all of which somehow lead back to a troublesome young woman named Cheri.
It’s true — selling your soul in Hollywood leads to critial acclaim and eternal glamour. A-hyuck!
The Package
The film is presented in anamorphic widescreen that, considering the entire film takes place at night, looks quite good. Another great surprise: a DTS audio track that won’t exactly make the Bose suffer but has lots of vivacity, especially the twangy score that bounces behind all the black comedy. There’s also an audio commentary with director Greg Marcks, who casually but intelligently chats about the film’s various production details and difficulties, and a basic 10-minute mass-market featurette in which the talent praises the script. There are also a few deleted scenes, some trailers, and a neat little “Character Jump” feature that lets you follow concomitant storylines. Considering the movie’s release has itself been frozen in time until now (it was made in 2003), this is a stacked platter.
"Hey, nobody puts baby in the La-Z-Boy. Ahhh, for the love of Wong Foo, just bring me another Schlitz."
The Lowdown
Although fractured narrative and multiple viewpoints existed in cinema for decades, it was popularized as an overly stylized storytelling form by Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, creating a tidal wave of self-indulgent imitators that mostly landed on the video racks with little fanfare. 11:14 is as guilty of hipness as any of them, but it’s also a confidently constructed and clever kaleidoscope of cruel irony. I can recall hearing buzz about the film around two years ago, after which the film was apparently dragged into the Negative Zone before finally getting unleashed after serving some mystifying penance.
Filmmaker Marcks smartly collects plenty of recognizable talent (the cast also includes Clark Gregg, Colin Hanks, Ben Foster and Barbara Hershey), and hews closer to Coens than Tarantino copycat with his dark visuals and comic sensibilities. The meandering absurdity-packed story is perhaps too precious and ultimately inconsequential, but it’s still certainly worth watching the interconnected chaos unfold.
7.6 out of 10