Friday

Since no one thought it would be fun to humiliate me by sending me to Wedding Daze or Becoming Jane, yesterday I chose to see The Pacific and Eddy, part of the Declaration of Independence Film Festival. As the name suggests, this was an independent film from the USA. I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. It looked and sounded great, but the acting was poor, the script bad, its dialogue stilted, and the overall meaning muddled. The main actor, playing Eddy, somehow reminded me of Keanu Reeves: photographs well, but is terrible at acting. Eddy drifts back into his hometown after a year away to find his friends moving on. He intrudes in their lives, causing old tensions to resurface, and eventually resettle. He's introduced to us as an unpleasant person, but I feel at the end we are supposed to feel sympathy for him because of an event in the past (the death of a friend) that has disjointed his life. That whole concept of something terrible having happened in the past is terribly overused in cinema (and literature in general). I thought they could've been more original here. They don't need to add anything like that. Instead, like the great Funny Ha Ha, it could've just been a film about Eddy drifting around. The character's interesting, the direction easy and fluid, and as I said the music and photography is good. As it was, the film became muddled. I think it tries at times to be more illusive than it needs to be. So, I'm not sure whether to say if it's a good movie or not. I enjoyed it, and it interested me, perhaps that's enough.