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STUDIO: Pathfinder Home Entertainment
MSRP: $14.98
RATED: NR
RUNNING TIME: 84 Minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Short film, On Some Consequences of a Passage by Guy Debord by director Zachary Winestine
• Trailer
• Photo Gallery
• Cast bios
• Filmmaker interview
• Music tracks from the film
The Pitch
Bored with life, contemplating suicide and need that last little push? Here’s the movie for you.
The Humans
Jennifer Van Dyck, Stephen Bogardus, John Cunningham, Ellen Greene, Jennie Moreau.
"What’s the matter, honey? Do I bore you?"
"You and everything in this quagmire…"
The Nutshell
Lisa (Van Dyck), an office worker at a New York theatre, is utterly bored with her life. Her husband, Abel (Bogardus), won’t screw her, her job is uninteresting, and her semi-autobiographical novel is going nowhere. When she meets the new director of the theatre’s latest play, she slowly starts to embark on a journey of self discovery that leads her to almost experiment with sex with a stranger, watching porn, and later, attacking a mugger, stealing a car and making a bomb. After she’s had enough of her mundane life, she takes off for parts unknown to see what there is to see.
The Lowdown
My God this was the most boring movie I can remember seeing in the last five years, and that’s being overly generous. This is an exercise in plodding, thunderously dull scripting, introspection that you couldn’t give a shit about, and character study of characters not worth studying. Life is boring and full of endless layers of bullshit. That’s the message of this film. Whoa. Thank you for letting us in on that. Call Mike Wallace.
A little something for the underserved middle-aged, hairy man flesh demographic.
Van Dyck looks like she has talent, and she tries her damnedest to make this dreck work, but there’s just no way it can be done. The last ten minutes does take some semi-interesting turns for her character, but by then you’re trying to decide what would be better: the razor to your wrist or the gun in your mouth. The dialogue, mostly between Lisa and the much older director, Paul (Cunningham), is platitudinous drivel that takes you nowhere and there’s almost no narrative flow as scenes just appear to be strung together in haphazard fashion that eventually take you someplace that you couldn’t care less to be. There’s instances of sex thrown in, one which involves a romp for Lisa with Paul that lets you know she’s so crushingly bored and desperate for something interesting that she’ll sleep with the least attractive guy she knows. There’s one interesting scene where, having just made a bomb for shits and giggles, Lisa gets accosted by two punks on the subway. They pull a knife, she pulls out the bomb. Other than that, this is a snoozefest.
It was no surprise that after States of Control was released, Van Dyck was in every video store she could find trying to burn every copy …
The Package
Made in 1997, the film doesn’t look all that great. It’s an indie and looks it, and the audio is passable. There’s some weak special features, the most notable of which is a short by the director called On Some Consequences of a Passage by Guy Debord. There’s also some production notes in the way of cast bios and photo gallery, and an interview with the director that appeared in Arts Today, an Australian publication. There’s also a trailer. So even though it seemed impossible, the special features are just as boring as the film.