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By EdwardHavens
July 28th, 2009
After making appearance at several film festivals in 2006 and 2007, tyro filmmaker Chris Fuller's "Loren Cass" made a quiet theatrical debut in New York City this past weekend, which is probably just as well, as this mess of a film would be of little interest to anyone except those looking for an "extreme" indie movie.
Mr. Fuller grew up in the Florida town of St. Petersberg, and set his film in the aftermath of the city's 1996 racial tensions after white police officers shot a young black man, as Fuller follows three disaffected youths as they float through their lazy, hazy lives. We have our typical modern suburban archetypical characters: Cale (Mr. Fuller himself, using the pseudonym Lewis Brogan for inexplicable reasons), a sensitive bad boy mechanic, Nicole (Kayla Tabish), a blonde sexpot waitress, and Jason (Travis Maynard), a rebel without a clue with many tattoos and body piercing. We follow these three, sometimes alone and sometimes together, as they eat and and fight and fuck and party and sleep through their miserable lives with no good reason for going on and no explanation as to why they keep doing what they do.
Like too many first-time filmmakers, Mr. Fuller makes many questionable choices without bothering to explain why he's doing what he's doing or how it relates to anything going on in his story. There's never any mention of who or what Loren Cass is. There's no explanation as to why this story needed to be set when it is set. There's footage of the infamous Budd Dywer on-camera suicide from 1987, which seems to only have been included to pad the running time (an anemic 83 minutes).
We're presented a small slice of life with a group of wasted teens, expected to consider this to be somehow artistic and asked to be sympathetic for their malaise. But like the films of Larry Clark, Harmony Korine and several titles from Gus Van Sant's mid-decade experimnetal phase, whom it appears Mr. Fuller desperately wants to emulate, the time spent with these people is ultimately wasted because we are never really given any reason to give a damn about any of them. Empathy doesn't come just because a filmmaker asks of it. It doesn't come from a work that tries to be edgy and provocative, especially when it really comes off as shallow and superficial. And it doesn't come when the storyteller defiantly tells us "Take my vision or leave it."
Judging from the one week and out playdate for "Loren Cass," the few who might have been interested in it left it.
My rating: F