User Reviews

I also saw this film at Sundance 2003 and liked it a lot. It follows the life of a technical writer who has given up on people and would be happy to live his life in his basement apartment except for the crazy people who keep forcing him to respond to their own neurotic desires. Michael Harris (who co-wrote with director Scott Saunders) is pulled out of his world into sex, death and The Scary Outside through a series of crazy demands from the various women in the building. Slim (O'Neal) plays a conflicted and bored housewife who thinks she can have some fun at Jessup's expense only to discover there's a real man there waiting to show up and that comes back to haunt her. I found the "sex scenes" amusing and touching, good hooks to pull the guy out of his little world. What the protagonist eventually learns is how to feel good about himself despite the pain and suffering that surrounds him. In the screening I was in everyone stayed to listen to the director and cast after giving a loud round of applause (in fact, I've never ever been at a Sundance screening where "just a few people" remained to hear the director speak, that's just ridiculous). Overall I think this was a good character-driven piece with some really outstanding performances.

I just saw this movie at Sundance, and afterwards I wanted to brush my teeth, take a shower, and get a lobotomy. The movie starts with two characters. One is the main character, a chain smoking agorophobe who lives in abject squallor in a basement room of a Manhattan tenement. The other is a woman upstairs dying of something, we are never told what, but she is bed ridden and morphine addicted. She calls him and announces "I'm sh***ing blood". Thats the opening scene. It only gets worse from there. It suggests a once medicated agorophobe with terrible personal hygeine could be the object of fascination of all of the women in the film. As though his offensive behavior was irrelevent and women will do anything to fix him because he really is all that and more. The film is little more than the sex fantasy of an adult who never made it past the 13 years old pimply geek stage where he sits there and cannot understand why women dont love him and if they just saw the beautiful guy within then they would see how great he is...and then have sex with him. Whatever. Its ridiculously demeaning to women to have such an offensive character be the object of all the female character's desire. Very little is explained in the movie, and the few attempts to explain things just don't ring true. The idea that agorophobia can be cured by forcing the person outside and screwing them is just ridiculous. The sex scenes were poorly done and some were pretty gross, one scene made me gag. After the screening was over the applause was tepid and few if any people stuck around to talk to the Director, who was present for the screening.