It's all about timing, for a great movie to be great. This film has some fantastic components in it. Every scene is fantastically crisp, with nice depth of field images with beautifully blurry backgrounds, vibrantly coloured, quirkily framed, too much so to the point of that looks nice but what's the point in relation to the story you're telling, immaculately lit, ...... willful editing quirks too, jumping through timelines it seems to just be clever, too clever for it's own good. The script, witty banter, back and forward trying hard to keep us guessing where it's going to go, to be off the wall, quirky, again, trying too hard to be clever, to the point of the script drawing attention to itself, making it obvious that these are written characters and not natural on the screen. They're kind of unlikable in their clearly contrived nature of cynical guy and quirky girl, acted well, Justin Long gives good character, he captures what was obviously on the page, but what was on the page isn't necessarily believable, engaging or appealing. Justin is good but still this fails, it just fails because it seems so text book indie cinema, written and made by a student of great cinema, looking to the great innovators of great cinema, but a well studied facsimile, a well executed pastiche, but not taking that cinema anywhere naturally new, and showing up the lack of real depth in the material and execution. Cos anyone who wants to make a text book film can hire a RED camera, and colourgrade the sh!t out of their edit in Premiere these days, and really the execution of this movie does have craft, it looks good, it really does, but when access to making movies is so accessible now the real quality in cinema is revealed, having something worthwhile to say, and that something can't just be that you love cinema and want to play, it has to be that you have something to contribute to our understanding of the human condition. I see so many movies out there failing at that simple plain objective, and they fail to connect because of that. That said there were patches of good here. The Where's my money bit worked, Dell's love soliloquy was nice enough, and it was almost going somewhere on the re writing of moments mash up dream thing, but it got confused and ended up not making it. This movie had a lot on a few levels, but it doesn't have enough.
