Genres

Visitors Review

2012-05-19 10:04:43

Finely conceived and convincingly performed...

Featuring a smart young cast of rising stars, Tom Zuber's second feature is a caustic and consuming look at disaffected small-town American youth. Little Athens is as ironic as its title suggests. If Athens is the birthplace of Western civilization and democracy, representing a legacy of supreme achievements, how then does Little Athens, a small, sleepy town in Arizona, represent the state of the world two thousand years later?The picture painted is grim, even if its canvas is filled with sunny vistas, manicured lawns and crystalline pools. Caught in a dead-end, post-high-school void, the youth of Little Athens are a strange assortment of ragtag characters, constantly at each other's throats. As in a Robert Altman movie, a series of stories overlaps over a twenty-four-hour period, each one finely conceived and convincingly performed. Heather (Erica Leerhsen) is a neurotic EMS worker convinced that her boyfriend, a handsome young cop, is cheating on her. Jimmy ( John Patrick Amedori), wide-eyed and tousle-haired, delivers pizza, works in a gym and deals drugs to get out from under a sizeable debt. Two slacker roommates, Corey (DJ Qualls) and Pedro (Jorge Garcia) clean pools, but their meagre earnings are not enough to pay the rent. And then there is Jessica ( Jill Ritchie), living on her mother's couch, who learns that her boyfriend is out to get her for giving him an STD.The film evokes so many other films about troubled teens - Rebel Without a Cause, Splendor in the Grass, American Graffiti, Kids - but it is very much its own entity, a distinctive and arresting accomplishment. Each encounter in the film is a confrontation, oppositional and antagonistic. Close friends do little to comfort one another; they are too busy protecting their own selfish interests, clawing to get ahead or simply to maintain their position. Surviving in this Darwinian world requires a special skill set that Zuber and his co-screenwriter and brother, Jeff Zuber, capture with unerring precision. Quite a portrait of the new millennium!- Review by Piers Handling,- Director, Toronto International Film Festival

badgrrlkane 2012-05-19 05:05:29

Not a bad indie but could've been better

Not the worst indie film I've ever seen.And it does have it's momentsof being funny.Rachel Miner was DECENT as the best friend of Erikaleerhsen's character where she's cheating with her cop boyfriend causeshe's willing to give him anal sex that he so craves. Then you've gotJorge Garcia who is awesome on Lost but in this film just seem wastedas a character.It was stupid the way he'd speak Spanish words mixed inwith mostly English.It's like he's trying to say "I'm Mexican though ilook like a fat white dude."And, once again DJ Qualls gives a decentquirky character performance & once again shows why he's one of thetruly ugliest actors I've ever seen. Is reminiscent of the party scenein Dazed & Confused but that film is wayyy better. Too dark in parts tosee much of what's going on, i feel this film would've been better hadthey had less characters. ** out of *****

Michael Burns 2012-05-17 17:14:16

Lawyers with extra cash make crappy movie

This just sucked. The "day in the life" approach only works when thereis something to care about. At no point are we interested in thecharacters, the location, or the void where a plot or storyline wouldbe. I would just leave this here if there wasn't a 10 line requirementfor comments. It doesn't deserve any more discussion. Do somethingbetter with your time than watch this movie. Read a book. Learn a newlanguage. Build a bird feeder. Take a nap. Clean your fridge.Masturbate. Go for a walk. Browse Wikipedia. Cook a new meal. Cook anold meal. See how many Crayola colors you can name. Balance yourcheckbook. Mow the lawn. Floss. Pretend you're Batman. Clean out yourcloset. Go to bed early.

gradyharp 2012-05-17 06:30:57

The Dynamics of Small Town Boredom: A Metaphor?

Tom Zuber has great credentials in Law but seems to prefer to dabble inthe territory of cinema. Having not seen his debut film LANSDOWN (2001)it is difficult to judge from LITTLE ATHENS (2005) if he is improvingwith age, but looking at LITTLE ATHENS on its own merits it seems a bitsparse in idea and in production.Athens, Arizona is the bleak setting of this day in the lives of somefairly bored (and boring) youngsters, ne're-do-wells attempting toinfuse sparkle into an otherwise glitterless place. Zuber creates fourstory lines, spottily interweaves them, and finally connects the dotsin the last reel. The main problem is that comedy is funny because wecare about the facilitators and here there really aren't any folks inwhich to invest. The cast tries hard and succeeds in giving us a tasteof life in the flatlands of nothingville. D.J. Qualls (a character typewho is very good, as in 'Hustle and Flow'), Michael Pena, John PatrickAmedori, Shawn Hatosi, Tory Kittles, Eric Szmanda, Jorge Garcia, EricaLeerhsen, and Michelle Horn are particularly fine and do their bestwith the material they are given.Tom Zuber has a style, a sense of non-scripted spontaneityincorporating the gross with the sadsack, and given time he may make afine little film. This one just misses. Grady Harp

2012-05-08 06:55:01

so i'm bored to death, and this town is also bored me to death

if so and so, do you still want to hear me out about my pathetic boredom of my life? if the town in this movie like the small town in santa barbara county where i've lived before is so boring, you still want to hear something about this town and how the young people deal with their suffocating boredom? what the screenwriter, the director and the production team wanted to deliver here was a dead-beat story with dead-beat people with 4 dead-beat storylines and tried to link them together in vain, and ended up a dead-beat finale. if you think it's worth seeing, then your life might be even more bored than what i've seen in this movie. do you want me to tell you how i became homeless? how i ended up divorcing my wife? how my children hated me to the guts? you really don't want to know, do you? why? because it's so common, so ordinary and it happened everywhere and all over the world. just like what the movie said in the very beginning, it happens everywhere, like: brushing your teeth, dude this, dude that, cursing...whatever. LOSERS' PARADISE

2012-05-07 21:15:46

Seen it before, yet still find it compelling

I won't reiterate the other reviews, they are pretty much on target. We have seen a lot of the style of this film, which take several seemingly at first disparate storylines and manage to tie them together as the story continues to its conclusion. Most effectively done in Quentin Tarantino's films as well as Greg Marcks' "11:14". As far as teen/young adult boredom and angst comes into play the film "Over The Edge" also comes to mind. While many of the characters are unsympathetic and make bad choices, I still find the overall trials and tribulations of the characters somewhat compelling. A good film, not great, but worth viewing.

jennic82 2012-05-01 18:51:18

I went home thinking about it

I have to start by saying it took me a solid hour to figure out thatAthens is the town the movie takes place in. That being said, thismovie's got big intentions and they are realized. I saw it with a greatcrowd, so the mood was cool. I won't ruin it, but the scene where theJimmy character steals drugs from his dealer is classic. Really reallygood, and the female characters are super real which is something Idon't think most movies have. My friends and I talked about the moviefor an hour afterward. The guys are great, especially Michale Pena andJohn Patrick Amedori. Eric Szmanda has some very funny scenes as wellwhich is great after seeing him in the same role every week on CSI. Iloved the way the movie looks.

JonBowerbank 2012-05-01 06:53:34

Great performances, lacked structure or professionalism...

The only thing that saves it are the performances by the many familiarfaces that star in it, which were mediocre at best. Would have beennice if there was more of an actual story or point to the thing. Every10 minutes or so I was saying to myself "Is this going anywhere?"I liked the songs they used (respectively), but I felt most of them tobe very intrusive and distracting from the story. Especially that riffwith the strings that would play at the beginning or end of almostevery scene. And there were some scenes where complete silence wouldhave served so much more to what's going on, for instance when thatpizza delivery kid was stealing the rest of those drugs while wewatched the dead guy. The music killed that scene.Also, I think the writers/directors have some kind of hostility towardswomen which is displayed time and time again in this film. The way thewomen are portrayed is as if they're stupid and clueless as to what'sgoing on. The anal sex scene, the brother pushing his sister to thefloor and the girl getting punched towards the end just seemed like away for these guys to express their own short comings with women, and Iviewed it as borderline degrading.And that one actor Jorge Garcia, his random Spanish words mixed withhis English dialogue didn't seem to make sense, and I speak Spanishfluently. No one throws in fully conjugated and otherwise unknownSpanish verbs while talking to monolingual white guys.I thought the look was alright. The lighting of the party at nightkinda made it hard to look at, but it emulated the real life lightingof a party like that I suppose.So yeah, 5 out of 10 for me. It probably could have been better ifthey'd gone through a couple more drafts of the script.

2012-04-26 15:58:30

star review

This movie was not to bad , but lacked a meaningful plot .was ok for a rental.

Splattii 2012-04-25 23:48:48

Average film with an ending that tries to hard and fails

I'll start with the things that didn't work; Jorge Garcia – I am a fan of his character in "Lost", and I haverespect for the job he does for that series. In Little Athens he playsa person of Spanish decent (I believe Mexican), thus he has to use a"Mexican" accent for the duration of the film. To say his accent is badwould be a complete understatement. His accent was so bad, I couldn'tbelieve his character at all. It honestly resulted in the worst actingperformance I saw during the entire Toronto Film Festival. At first Ithought he was trying to mock Mexicans, until his character stated thathe was in fact a Mexican. What makes it worse is that his charactersethnicity HAS NO BEARING ON THE FILM AT ALL! The Ending – Sometimes when people try too hard, it results insomething that no longer feels natural, but forced. That's what I felthappened here. When watching a film like Amorres Perros or Magnolia,separate stories found in the film intersect for a brief moment. Whendoing so, they do so well. I believe this is the type of ending LittleAthens tried to come up with, but it fell short. The move is actually afew separate stories/segments running in parallel that in turn meet inthe end. For one, I'm surprised they tried to take the character thathad the least amount of emotional draw and place the most unfortunateevent on them. What makes for a good dramatic scene is the fact thatthe viewer becomes attached to a specific character, thus in a sense"pulling" for that character or hoping for that characters well being.The one question I wanted to ask the director but couldn't (I had toleave) was why he chose a character with such little dialog and impacton the film to have this fate? But wait, I'm not done with that "surprise" just yet...This "surprise" is apparently a "surprise" because the character isaffected at that moment by an incident from one of the other stories inthe film. This is where the director tried to "bring it all together".The problem is it was forced, and would have been better if commonsense was used. To make it worse, the scene prior to this actually hadit set up so that characters fate could have been tied back to familyissues, and something that occurred earlier on in the film! It wouldactually have been a stronger message! Not only that, but ALL THECHARACTERS could have had the EXACT SAME END RESULT if gone the otherdirection. The fact that the "simple" end would have made more senseand actually had a stronger overall message is why I call the endforced. I don't think the director wanted me to laugh at the moment,but I had to.This feeling of being forced doesn't only stop here, and that is partof the problem. They always had to go that one extra step to the pointwhere it becomes laughable. They just had to make situations "that muchworse" The reason for why the police came to the party at the end forexample. They could have come just because of the fact there was aparty, or from the loud music. It would have worked just fine. Insteadthey had to find something from one of the segments to make it work,and again "bring it all together".At a high level, I'd probably suggest DJ Qualls did the best overalljob. They decided to be very typical and pair the skinny guy with thebig guy (they paired him with Jorge Garcia), but I could still believein his character, even when Jorge Garcia was on the screen.It seemed to me that the film stock changed at some point in the movie.I don't know how to confirm this, but I'd swear they went down to alower stock at the end. The granular look was amazing, and for parts ofthe ending that did work, it was a nice touch. It was probably thehighlight of the film for me. The fact the stock changed.At a high level it would be easy to make a statement that with the castit had, it underachieved. There were moments when the acting wasn'tconvincing even outside of Jorge Garcia, but I'm not so sure that wasthe problem. The real problem was the end. It may be a result of thefact people are marketing this film through it's end, I'm not sure.Even the program director at the TIFF suggested "Wait until you see theend!!", leaving the audience in anticipation. Maybe the end didn't liveup to its hype, but I can't believe I'd respect this end even withoutexpectations or anticipation. It was just that forced. Sadly, thismovie could have been such a better overall result with two changes,one of them being very minor; #1 Remove the fake accent from Jorge Garcia #2 Use the more obvious events for some of the characters, especiallythe "surprise" at the end You could have had the exact same fate for every character. You couldhave had practically the same movie outside of 3 minutes worth ofdialog to be honest. You could have re-shot a 10 second scene in whichthe camera pans a character, and it would have made for a much strongermessage...Unfortunately for me it doesn't work, and the people I attended thiswith felt the same. An average film with an ending that was forced.The movie opens with "The following events happened in Ahtens but couldhappen anywhere"I don't think so, unless you try really hard ;)