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| Images courtesy of MVD Visual |
Film worker and Kevin Smith documentarian Josh Roush along
with his wife, coproducer and actress Liv Roush who recently served as a
production manager on Andrew Dominik’s Blonde and the upcoming Maestro,
have put their heads together to make ostensibly Josh Roush’s first feature as
a writer-director: the Black Snake Moan inspired satirical darkly comic
thriller Wrong Reasons. Billed as
‘a punk rock movie’ with lots of needle drops including Tim Armstrong, L7,
Black Flag and many more, its another movie about a mysterious man who kidnaps
and chains a troubled girl to the bed in an effort to help her go clean. The results don’t always land with some
sequences touching on the awful depths scoured by the also-Kevin Smith produced
Vulgar, and yet the end result is more or less well meaning.
Heroin addicted punk rock singer Kat Oden (Liv Roush) wallows
on her apartment couch strung out next to her rapey boyfriend Nick Boon (John
Enick) when a masked man who later reveals himself to be James Winandi (James
Parks from The Hateful Eight) kidnaps and imprisons her in his shabby
home, chaining her ankle to the bed. Stirring
a media frenzy including lascivious news reporters played by Caitlin Reilly and
Kevin Smith, drawing out the kidnapper’s estranged brother Marshall (David
Koechner) while a beleaguered detective Charles Dobson (Ralph Garman) tries to
track down the kidnapper’s home. All the
while, the initially angry and frightened Kat Oden starts growing fond of her
captor and after escaping she even comes back under his wing, further
complicating the already bizarre situation.
Shot by Roush himself with Matthew Rowbottom on digital in
2.35:1 panoramic widescreen, Wrong Reasons looks rather amateurish and
at times the lighting and color grading changes mid-shot, perhaps unintentionally
with the focus drifting in and out. As
with most digital productions, there’s the question of the film’s frame rate
and one wonders whether or not, like with other Kevin Smith films before it,
the filmmakers knew what they were doing.
Still, the cameos including but not limited to Vernon Wells, Keith
Coogan and Daniel Roebuck keep us distracted long enough that we don’t mind the
amateurish shortcomings so much. Liv
Roush is mostly fine in the lead role though James Parks upstages her as the
mysterious kidnapper whose strange intentions might actually be doing the drug
addicted singer some measure of good.
Still, despite Kevin Smith’s impassioned introduction before
the movie and the homegrown do-it-yourself nature of the piece, Wrong Reasons
is something we’ve seen many times before in other stronger minded
movies. While there’s room for Josh
Roush’s filmmaking career to grow, Liv Roush despite her punkish appearance and
comfortability with frolicking about half naked in fishnet stockings really out
to return to production management.
Kevin Smith is a well meaning nice guy whose money sometimes goes into
projects that would otherwise get no outside attention were his name not
attached. There were aspects of this
very overtly small kidnapping dark comedy that went over well while other
moments landed with a thud, but overall my friendly recommendation is to skip
this one. Godspeed to Josh and Liv Roush
for branching out into other arenas of the filmmaking world but as a viewer I
wasn’t a fan.
--Andrew Kotwicki
