BEFORE: Riffing off of last night's film, this one also features someone with the ability to freeze time. Based on a short film of the same name, so it's a little confusing - but I'm interested in seeing what happens to a short film when a feature gets built around it.
Linking from last night, Jesse Bradford from "Clockstoppers" was also in "Romeo & Juliet" with Pete Postlethwaite, who was in "Last of the Mohicans" with Jared Harris, who appears here (in an uncredited role, but that counts).
THE PLOT: After a painful breakup, Ben develops insomnia. To kill time, he starts working the late night shift at the local supermarket, where his artistic imagination runs wild.
AFTER: The original short film (18 minutes) got a lot of attention a few years back, because it features an art student/supermarket clerk with the ability to freeze time (or he imagines he does), and he uses this ability to undress women in the supermarket (or perhaps he imagines he does). And when he's got a store full of naked women, he pulls out his art pad, and he sketches them, as one does in life-drawing class. Any other activity would be equivalent to rape, and would produce an unsympathetic central character.
For the feature film, I presume the original short was kept intact, and more scenes were added before and after, to umm...flesh out the story. Showing a character recovering from a failed relationship does make him more sympathetic, but I'm not sure that the other additions to the story enhance it. There's a supermarket clerk that he develops feelings for, a best friend and an odd group of horndogs who also work at the market.
There's sort of an attempt to develop quirky characters, sort of akin to "Napoleon Dynamite", but also a look at Ben's sexual history - first kiss, first time seeing a naked woman, first time finding a stash of porno mags, that sort of thing. I wish that all of this added up to something greater than the sum of its parts, but it doesn't seem to.
Later in the film, Ben does use his ability for something other than seeing girls naked, but mostly it's for his quiet moments of introspection amidst the chaos of a party or a soccer game. I do think that the undressing part seems more in line with what the average male would do with such an ability.
But I wish the film would have gotten around to making some kind of point - Ben replaces his ex-girlfriend with his new girlfriend, without developing as an individual, a mistake that a lot of people seem to make. True happiness comes from being comfortable with yourself, not just chasing after the next person. Plus at one point there seems to be another person with the ability to live in the frozen world, but the movie just drops this plotline cold, with absolutely no follow-up. That's an odd choice.
I've found several films in the last month that I thought would have worked better as short films - here's one that started as a short film, and should have quit while it was ahead.
Starring Sean Biggerstaff, Michelle Ryan, Emilia Fox, Stuart Goodwin.
RATING: 3 out of 10 nude models
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