Archie's Final Project
(2009)
|
|
| Watch Trailer 0Share... |
Archie's Final Project
(2009)
|
|
| Watch Trailer 0Share... |
| Cast overview, first billed only: | |||
| David Carradine | ... | ||
| Mariel Hemingway | ... | ||
| Brooke Nevin | ... | ||
| Nora Dunn | ... | ||
| Michael Welch | ... | ||
| Zachary Ray Sherman | ... | ||
| Vanessa Lengies | ... |
Mallory
|
|
| Gabriel Sunday | ... | ||
| Tony Hale | ... | ||
| Joe Mantegna | ... | ||
| Sandy Martin | ... | ||
| Tim Halligan | ... | ||
| Steven Anthony Lawrence | ... | ||
| Stephen Sowan | ... |
Stoner
|
|
|
|
Robert Kurcz | ... | |
Archie Williams is a 17-year old media geek who has suddenly found himself the most talked-about kid in school. He has announced that he's going to kill himself- on camera- for a class project. His classmates, parents, Sierra- the most beautiful girl in school, and a "Shady Bunch" of shrinks, doctors, pill-pushers, and counselors descend on Archie. Some are hoping to save him, some want to imitate him, others try to push him over the brink. Archie films every moment of his high school experience, hiding nothing from his audience: realities of life, death, violence, sex, drugs, and the intense media overload and hypocrisy that bombard all teenagers. Written by Steven Jay Rubin, Executive Producer
This film is about a boy who suffers from the fantasy unique to our age: the belief that one's entire life is a movie. The Truman Show is a good example of this: the notion that one's entire life is so perfect, so banal, repetitious and ordinary, that it must be scripted-- it cannot possibly be real. So this boy, Archie, records as much of his life as he possibly can on video, and edits it together in his room.
The problem is, no matter how much of his life he makes into a movie, it still feels meaningless. So he announces in his high school film class that he will make a movie in which he kills himself. That will be the plot and the grand finale.
His entire neighborhood starts gossiping about him, and his life changes enormously. This is when his real movie-making starts. Suicide is always lurking near him, and the entire movie is a play on various questions of suicide: when we kill ourselves, what are we doing? Is every death a 'suicide' because of the necessarily unsafe ways we live our lives? Is suicide an act of freedom and defiance, or of conformity and weakness-- or neither?
Some great cameos from unexpected actors add to the film a lot.
This is one of those rare films that covers the entire emotional spectrum, and does so effortlessly. It is as hilarious as it is tragic, as fragmented as it is thorough. If it receives the distribution it deserves, it will be a hit.