Brent Marchant

I’ll come right to the point about this mess – it’s a prime example of unmitigated cinematic nonsense. This preposterous exercise in stream of consciousness filmmaking is not only utterly ridiculous, but positively annoying to sit through. I lost interest very quickly and could not wait for it to end. Writer-directors Ivan Leung, Harrison Xu and Katherine Dudas have come up with one of the most unfocused, amateurish, totally stupid movies I have ever seen, one that plays like a bad, pretentious student film project on steroids. It’s almost as if the filmmakers went out and shot a lot of footage at random and then tried to piece it all together into some kind of allegedly coherent finished product, hoping that it would somehow all make sense (and apparently not really caring if it didn’t). Much of the “story” (if it can even be called that) consists of two longtime stoner buddies (Leung, Xu) engaged in a series of shallow, incomprehensible, disjointed conversations while making a movie about two fictional friends making a movie whose subject is making a movie (and unrealistically attempting to do so all in one weekend). In the process, they spout an endless barrage of completely unrelated ideas on how to proceed, many of which amount to little more than hollow, pseudointellectual observations about a wide range of subjects, filmmaking techniques and narrative elements. What’s more, the film’s attempt at trying to redeem itself by incorporating some “serious” material late in the film absolutely fall flat, given that any credibility that the directors were trying to engender at this point is totally undermined by the unending, senseless twaddle that preceded it. The picture also unsuccessfully tries to incorporate an LGBTQ+ story thread that gets decidedly shortchanged and feels more like an afterthought than a genuine attempt at making some kind of meaningfully relevant social statement. The picture’s only redeeming attribute, in my opinion, is its mercifully short 1:13:00 runtime, which actually often feels much longer than that. It’s truly sad that many well-made movies struggle mightily to find distributors while cinematic hokum like this inexplicably gets the green light. Sadly, the principals involved in this project seem to have deceived themselves into thinking they’ve created an edgy, rip-roaring contemporary comedy in this offering. But what they don’t realize is what they’ve created is a joke.