Mike reviews the indie drama, Wishing For A Dream.
Los Angeles is full of young writers and filmmakers trying
to "make it". There's no
bigger dream, and no greater reward, than to become wildly successful based on
your creative efforts. Behind all of the
great Hollywood success stories are plenty of tales of bad auditions, failed
callbacks, and would-be producers who leave their talent hanging. Interesting movies with fascinating,
sympathetic characters have been made about this process, and the life of a
struggling actor. Wishing For A Dream
is the latest attempt to do just that.
Writer-director Jared Cohn, typically known for films such
as Bikini Spring Break, the horror film 12/12/12 and
"mockbusters" like Atlantic Rim, tries his hand at serious
drama with Waiting For A Dream. WFAD is
the likely semi-autobiographical tale of a young couple of would-be artists
struggling to "make it" in Hollywood.
Mika (Sara Malakul Lane) scrambles to auditions just trying to get a
callback while her boyfriend Louis (Cohn himself) is trying to get his latest
low budget masterpiece made. These could
be tense, emotional moments in their young lives, and in a better movie they
would be. Instead, WFAD can't
even be bothered to make you care about them.
 |
| Someone tell me what I'm doing here. I'm way too pretty for this kind of treatment. |
The film falls apart when it tries to do absolutely anything
at all. Lane is pretty enough and a
decent enough actress but still isn't quite skilled enough to take what she's
given and turn it into a character worth caring about. She whines and mopes her way through the
formless mess of the movie, complaining about a lack of sleep or failed
auditions while doing copious amounts of drugs (a problem hinted at but never
really dealt with.) Cohn writes,
directs, and co-stars, despite not being very good at any of them. He mumbles his way through his own dull,
lifeless dialogue with an equally lifeless performance that plays like he'd
been woken up five minutes before his scene and handed a joint along with his
copy of the script. The result is a boring,
predictable film that runs less than an hour and a half but feels much longer,
only to come to a dead stop.
Wishing For A Dream is badly directed, badly written,
badly edited, and mostly badly acted. It
takes what could have been an interesting story about struggling actors and
makes it tedious and unwatchable. The
film was an absolute chore to watch, culminating in a complete waste of
the viewer's time. Wishing For A
Dream leaves its viewers wishing they had spent the last hour and a half
doing literally anything else.
Score
-Mike Stec