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Reviews
Anywhere, USA (2008)
Yat Another Bad Sundance Movie
It's movies like Anywhere USA that lost Sundance's luster.
Anywhere USA is everything you've come to expect from those "indie" films that are plaguing festivals and local theatres.
First of all, it's not really a "film" per se. It's shot on video and looks like it. Maybe there are people out there who don't mind watching a home video for two hours, but I do.
Then, it's overlong but fraught with dialogue and situations stretching oh-so-hard to be edgy-cool. And yet all it really does is bore from the lack of reality of the situations and characters.
Studio films aren't very good these days, and there is no relief in sight from the smaller films (and this one was one of the very few movies at Sundance that wasn't a studio movie trying to pass itself off as an indie).
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997)
First in the Hyped style of shows that didn't have an audience
With apologies to its devoted fans, Buffy was completely over-hyped all through its run. More effort was apparently spent getting Buffy ridiculously positive articles in the press than in making the show good. Of course, most of that effort was wasted because of the casting of one Sarah Michelle Gellar.
Without Sarah Michelle Gellar, Buffy would have been a likable oddity, a campy, innocuous show that may even have attracted a very sizable audience.
But they cast Grimaces Gellar in lieu of a real actress.
More baffling was the physicality of Gellar, of which she has very little. Her fans will wax lyrical about her beauty, but she was supposed to be convincing fighting vampires. She couldn't throw a punch and her acting was so pathetic in those scenes (again she made grimaces implying some sort of digestive problem) that all the suspension of disbelief in the world could not convince me that she could slay a paper towel.
It's too bad, because as I said before, the show itself would have been likable if more care had been given to casting and a lot less to over-hyping.