This overlooked Indie features razor-sharp performances in a really brilliant script. It's a shame that it didn't get a distribution deal.
One reviewer on Amazon hated the main character, but that does not make me dislike the movie. After all, at the outset of the film he was about to commit suicide anyway, so you can't really expect his subsequent actions to be very clearly motivated by any specific identifiable goals of his with which the viewer may sympathize -- except perhaps to strike back at the small cast of other more successful and more clearly motivated Hollywood types who are successively dragged into orbit around him through the accident of his finding the producer's cell-phone. But the unfolding and increasingly complicated details of this process for me made a highly entertaining story.
And from a technical viewpoint I greatly admired the way the filmmakers were able to tell this story so vividly and engagingly, within the evident constraints of a low budget production: no special effects, no crane or tracking shots, no expensive locations. Once the situation is established, all of the action happens in and around a small apartment and the adjoining balcony and long stairway (which provides a nice running joke). This forces the use of narrative devices more familiar from theater than film, moving a small cast of characters around this fixed interior set, with cinematic techniques limited to the blocking of shots and cutting between close-ups and two-shots. This puts all the weight on the script and the performances, and I thought these were both brilliant. I kept being reminded of Mike Nichols' film version of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?', or of the garage scenes in 'Reservoir Dogs', but with Coen Brothers' sardonic humor replacing overt violence.
