19th April 06 - Junebug

I actually woke up this morning and forgot I had been to the cinema last night. Oh dear.

Junebug is one of those rare films where I went in knowing absolutely nothing about it. It makes a nice change to watch a film with no expectations. This was a conscious choice, by the way. I’m not one of those idiots who don’t know anything and blindly stumble into the cinema (who fall on two levels – the general dimwit: ‘I didn’t know the Producers would be a musical!’ And the dangerously dense: at the end of Fellowship of the Ring ‘is that it? Where’s the end?’)

Anyway, it took me a while to figure out what I thought of this film. On the one hand it has moments of, well, not brilliance, but ‘fairly good-ness’. Gentle humour, kooky characters, a lolling plot that softly lifts up ideas about relationships and family. It’s inoffensive, amusing, and offers enough tid-bits to ponder (compare the three relationships and see how those that at first appear strongest may well be the least likely to succeed.)

On the other hand, this is one of those films that feels twice as long as it is and makes you feel very tired at the end. There’s endless shots of nothing, with no sound (not an easy film to eat Skittles to) and very little point. If you scrape the bottom of the arsey analyst’s barrel, you could maybe come up with ‘oh, they’ve shown that car reversing up that long drive to show the backwards nature of the area’, but really that’s pushing it. You get the backwards nature of the area with all the scrotum paintings, anyway. There’s no need for anything else.

So, if you took a pair of scissors to this film and cut out all the shots of empty rooms and forests, then you’d get a sort of interesting film with sort of interesting characters and a sort of interesting plot. As it is, you get a sort of interesting film with huge chunks of boring fluff. At every piece of fluff I decided the film was slow and pointless, but there were just enough sparks of fairly good-ness to stop me from disliking it. So what score do I give it? If I was the editor, then it would have reached 7. As it is, it makes 6.5.