I'm officially dropping Friday entries for the foreseeable future. It's always been a possibility, and now that sundown is getting really early again (especially with the jump back to Eastern Standard Time tonight), it seems like the best option.

However, I found myself wanting to see this film for a great many reasons, not least of which that I had been led to believe that it might have some bearing on my upcoming term paper on masculine roles for my Theories of Feminism class, about which you'll be hearing more later, I'm sure. And the local dive had two very strong advantages going for it:

1. It's a few blocks from my apartment.
   
2. It's cheap: $4.50 for a student ticket.

(As it happens, I myself have deliberately not yet read what Columbine and Jette had to say about this film. I expect to do so immediately after I finish this entry, though...)

Partway through the film, there is a simply wonderful video clip of a plastic shopping bag "dancing" with a swirling bunch of leaves in the autumn wind. This called back the memory of one fall afternoon when I was in... oh, it must have been first or second grade, and a friend and I danced with the leaves in a similar setting.

That plastic bag gets my nomination for Best Supporting Actor in the film.

No, I'm serious. After all, it brought charm and life to its admittedly short role, and the bag had just as much personality and character depth as any of the human players. Perhaps more.

Let's start with what I assume is supposed to be the most important pair of characters in the film: the narrator and his wife. (I have forgotten the name of every character in the film. This is probably simply because I'm horrible with names, although it's tempting to read more into that.) The wife is an utterly unsympathetic character, with no redeeming value. Not to mention no personality.

Now, we are told (by the narrator, who conveniently tries to remind his wife of The Way Things Used To Be) that she used to be different. That she used to be fun, and enjoyed life, and didn't care so much about material gain or controlling everything in her life. We don't actually get to see any of that, though. Nor are we granted any indication of how and why she changed over the years.

The male lead, for his part, is in a dehumanizing job. We know this, once again, because he tells us so. How he got there, and why he decides he's had enough (and it's pretty clear that decision was in the making before his object of desire came along, although she might have served as a catalyst) is, again, a mystery. Nor do we know much else about him, except that he has Had Enough and now wants to Live Life to the Fullest.

The other major characters are no better developed. You've got the two buff gay guys on the block, the real estate mogul who's a perfect match for the narrator's wife in every two-dimensional particular, and the model who cares only about having her beauty appreciated by others.

The kid next door comes closest to having an actual personality, but even he's pretty bland. He sells drugs to buy video equipment so he can record everything in sight, while being abused by his one-dimensional right-wing military gun-nut gay-bashing father. Oh, and he's a bit mental in a slightly necrophiliac way, but that shtick was done better by Terry Brooks in his book, The Druid of Shannara. Anyway, none of this is developed quite well enough to matter. Ultimately, the one bit of beauty we get to see through his eyes is not a dead bag lady, but that plastic bag. And perhaps his girlfriend, the narrator's daughter.

Speaking of whom, all we really know about her is that she doesn't like her parents, and she's in love with the boy next door. That's about it, really. Which doesn't give us any compelling reason to get into or care about their relationship, now does it?

Now, this is where I have to admit to being a bit biased, in that I like closed endings. I prefer to have everything wrapped up at the end of a story, or novel, or film, or whatever, or at least to end on some sort of note of resolution.

On the other hand, a whole lot of literary fiction prefers to show a slice of life, with some sort of change taking place along the way, and with everything left wide open at the end. And I have the impression that the filmmakers here were striving for a similar effect, which is why I wasn't quite ready to rush to a judgment of it right off the bat.

But, on reflection, I think it's fair for me to say that in order for such an approach to work, we have to at least know where the protagonist starts out, in order to see how he changes. And I don't think we get that here. And I think it's fair for me to say that we really need either interesting characters, or an interesting plot, or at least interesting visuals. And I don't think we get any of that here.

(As for the last of those, a few shots are visually interesting: particularly the shot with the family photo next to the vase of roses; the plastic bag dance; and the scene where the daughter and the psycho-next-door are talking in his room, and seen on his TV screen at the same time. But most of the film... well, let's just say that it won't lose a thing in being panned-and-scanned for video.)

This doesn't change that fact that they did manage to ratchet up some tension towards the end, even while I was rolling my eyes at the way the wife was acting in the final few minutes (I mean, please). But creating tension is comparatively easy. Creating a good film is tougher.

Final rating: Two stars, out of a possible four.

But then, I never claimed to be much of a film critic.