Andrew reviews Windsor Drive, new to DVD today.
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| "Music too loud. Hurt ears bad!" |
Surrealism in film is a tricky
business. The pioneering masters of the
breakdown of logic and reason to reflect the state of mind of a character or to
satirize a particular event or situation comes as natural as breathing air to
the likes of Luis Bunuel, David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky and David
Cronenberg. These are textbook examples
of figures in film who understand the nature of surrealism and use it as a tool
to drive home their greater points about experience or sociopolitical
aims. And then there are those like
Crispin Glover or, God forbid, Tom Green who will try just about anything
whether it’s cohesive or not.
Enter
Natalie Bible’s directorial debut Windsor
Drive, an unabashed ripoff of Mulholland
Drive, Maps to the Stars and
inexplicably The Canyons. The story of River Miller (Tommy O’Reilly,
who looks like Billy Zane’s long lost brother), an unhinged actor on the verge
of a mental breakdown, is intended as a portrait of tinseltown as a nightmarish
Hell but comes across as an obnoxiously pretentious wannabe full of terrible
scene chewing and one endless montage after another.
As a seasoned fan of the bizarre and
otherworldly in film, I was taken aback by just how many times I threw my head
back in dismay and aggravation. Tommy
O’Reilly, bless his soul, is meant to be teetering on the edge of insanity and
goes for all the high notes penned by Jack Nicholson in The Shining. He is so
ridiculously over the top here that scenes intended to invoke fear instead come
across as unintentionally hilarious. The
poster itself of the tuxedo suited Tommy O’Reilly screaming at the camera is
just plain goofy looking and much like the overall film itself reeks to high
heaven of trying too hard. When the
supporting amateurish cast, which couldn’t help but remind me of the social
media casting direction behind Paul Schrader’s The Canyons, isn’t trying their best to look and sound convincing,
director Natalie Bible overcompensates with fancy editing trickery that
contains no artistic meaning whatsoever.
Needlessly reusing shots with vertical inversion, reverse shots,
superimpositions, slow motion and frame dropping, my thoughts drifted away to
John Moore’s war film Behind Enemy Lines
which also utilized every cinematic trick in the book for no apparent
reason.
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| "I suppose now is a bad time to ask her out on a date!" |
For as hard as Windsor Drive tries to sell itself as a nightmarish odyssey into
the underbelly of Hollywood, it’s a silly jumbled up mess that fails
miserably. Only 82 minutes in length, it
felt like a snail paced tedious bore made by an overzealous student eager to
show off her thesis during the first week of film school. As previously mentioned, we literally get bad
musical montage after bad musical montage with the same repeated bad piano cue
spliced in between those scenes over and over again. It’s kind of amazing how obnoxious every
technical facet of Windsor Drive really
is. Even without the nifty editing used
to cover up the paper thin story thread, the bad music and terrible acting, the
central protagonist as written provides little reason to care or invest in his
psychodrama.
Movies that attempt to
debunk the glorious image of tinseltown obviously won’t go away anytime soon,
particularly with Cronenberg’s sunlit funeral Maps to the Stars. But if
you are gonna take on the hand that feeds you, get a clue as to what you think
you want to say and how to say it. I’ve
nothing positive to speak to about Windsor
Drive, one of the most annoying and idiotic films of the year!
Score
-Andrew Kotwicki
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