Change Your Image
newfangled2
Reviews
Festival (2005)
Amateurish mess.
Like the amateur productions this film often lampoons, this is an unappealing mess of story and tone which works too hard to both shock and please. Seemingly modelled on 'Love Actually', we're presented with a bunch of uncomfortably performed clichéd characters who we might sympathise with and enjoy were they not pawns in a project which seems more about showing off the writer/director's spectrum of talents than about entertaining the audience. The tone is horribly uneven - including scenes of a paedophile killing himself and a post-natally depressed mother abandoning her baby (the film's romantic climax!) in the context of light romantic comedy. I'm no prude either, but the high level of desperate-to-shock nudity is the only obvious reason this film is rated 18 rather than 12, again, it ruins the tone. It doesn't feel any edgier or more adult for it, you're just left wondering why someone thought a non-sex based comedy needs graphic shots of masturbation, oral sex and, um, fisting. The person above found the film's lack of resolution as somehow charming or clever. I found it amateurish and misguided.