I do not own the above picture. Copyright Brandi Brothers Productions. All Rights Reserved.
The worst thing
a movie can do is not try. Not try to be
anything other than a 100 minute piece of fleeting entertainment that you may
laugh at once or twice and tell your friends about just how “good” it is. Then said friend sees the movie & screams
at their friend “IDENTITY THIEF is awful!”
But I digress. What is a movie tries and fails
miserably? And by miserably, I mean
there is nothing positive to say about the movie that would be visible to the
average moviegoer. A movie where the
only element worth writing home about may be non-existent to any human besides
yours truly.
LIE WITH ME is a small movie from
the twin brother team of Jamison & Jason Brandi. The film, their second full-length feature,
follows Carla (Younger), a prostitute whose specialty in the world’s oldest
profession is with gentlemen in wheelchairs, as she returns home with her
significant other Ian (McEvoy). Back
home, there’s crippled father Stan (Gordon), jealous younger sister Susan &
terminally ill mother Deanna (Strassman).
But it’s the fifth family member who has run of the house: revulsion.
LIE WITH ME starts interesting
enough but quickly, very quickly, the film falls apart at the seams. First, I can’t help but feel the screenplay
is only 60% finished. There are scenes
where we are just dropped in the middle of conversations and are given no opportunity
to catch up. Or, if we do, the scenes abruptly
end. Plus, some of the dialogue in the
serious scenes is cringe-worthy. A fight
between two people where one person says the same thing three or four times in
a non-comedy is the definition of cringe-worthy.
In addition, the boyfriend/fiancé character
is, I guess, supposed to be us. At
least, I think he represents us when he’s holding his tiny digital camera for
some documentary he never gets into detail about. He just doesn’t really need to be there the
whole time. The family itself is
interesting but the mother is wasted.
The movie starts (I assume, since it’s never really mentioned in the
movie that’s why Carla goes home) because Deanna is dying. What she’s dying of isn’t important, or so
say the filmmakers. But we also don’t get
a scene between the three women. Even if
they had no relationship, you’d think there would be something that gets either
daughter in her bedroom before the rising action scene. But we get nothing and the mother just feels
useless too. The sisters' hate/love relationship is fairly effective and their relationship to their father is the driving force of the movie.
While the Brothers Brandi did put maximum
effort into the making of the film, on a technical level, the movie is a mess
sometimes. You can have the most
professional, affordable cameras; but if you can’t place them at logical or
interesting angles, they’re worthless.
Most shots come from low angles with the camera tilted up. They could be showing us what the
wheelchair-bound father sees but the camera is usually too low to be that way
and why in the world would we want to see the world from the perspective of
that despicable human being. Plus,
serious emotional moments are amplified by jump cuts. Very distracting. But worse of all is the sound. You can hear the points where the dialogue
was cut during the editing process.
Unbelievably distracting.
I get the sense that I know where
the Brandi twins wanted to go with this: a serious dysfunctional family
drama. But at 84-ish minutes, there isn’t
enough time to tell that story. There is
something there, begging to get out. But
with a half-finished screenplay, a broken tripod and high school film class
quality sound, it appears trapped. Just
like Carla.
*1/2
