Let Me Not Make Porn-quality movies without porn
January 16th 2007 17:14
Category: No Category
I know that this is a current affairs blog, but a) when I have ever really stuck to THAT rule? and b) I watched a movie on Friday night. It was called Let Me Not. And I desperately need to tell you all about it.
This is a real movie. Honest. Look:
http://www.letmenot.com/
And it's bad. I don't mean Independence Day-Anaconda bad. I mean Manos: the Hands of Fate bad, or the video of your kid's kindergarten class re-enacting the First Fleet bad.
It's about a schoolgirl-by-day-stripper-by-night who flaunts her body in the fleshpots of Melbourne in order to gain independence from her strikingly hideous lizard-faced father (no, I don't mean literally lizard-faced. It's a bad movie, but not that kind). The canny viewer might observe that her chances of obtaining said independence may be considerably enhanced if she:
a) did not throw a tantrum and storm off stage when men in the audience try to give her money
b) could dance around a pole with any more erotic intensity than a washing machine
c) actually removed her clothes whilst dancing. Her strip act apparently consists of taking off her shirt, prancing about in a bra and long, billowy skirt, and then stopping. Sometimes you see her underpants, which fair near sets my heart a-leaping out of my chest.
Anyway, she does this stripping and early on, Alex the Architect (that is not my wry nickname for him, that is how he is listed in the credits: Rodger Corser as Alex the Architect) sits in the strip club with his boorish mate, The Comedy Channel's Cameron Knight. This is the first instance of "What the hell is he doing there?" that arises in this "film". Cam Knight is a very low-level celebrity, and mainly makes his living hanging around more successful comedians, but a) his star power is still way beyond this movie, and b) it's not a comedy and his role is not comedic. It's barely even a role.
Anyway, they see Nina, the SBDSBN referenced above, and wow, isn't she transfixingly beautiful, then they wander off into the night, into Melbourne, city of sordid secrets and wobbly camera operators. Cam Knight talks about a girl's arse to demonstrate how boorish he is. I don't know why, he's barely in this.
So then we're at school, and Nina is apparently a dancer, but she quit ballet to go become a non-nude stripper, and there's a big talent show fundraiser coming up, and Alex is at school too. Because he is an Architect and has been hired to design the school's theatre extensions. So he spends a large part of the movie sitting around at school. He doesn't seem to ever draw plans, or supervise building work, or do a single architectural thing for the duration. He sits around looking creepily at schoolgirls.
Like Nina, with whom he strikes up a conversation. In their first encounter we get our first impression of Miss Charlotte Rees's haunting acting style, as Nina. This is basically to deliver her lines as she is sleepwalking with an arrow through her head. Her screen presence...well, here is how you can imagine how little charisma this freakishly untalented little minx has:
First, think of the least charismatic or interesting person you have ever met.
Then, kill them.
You have now approximated Charlotte Rees's acting.
They talk, they bond, there are several thousand scenes in a school storage cupboard, leading me to believe that for about a week of the shoot, director (and producer and editor) Ron Brown got his camera stuck in a crack in the cupboard's wall and so every scene they shot that week had to be done in the cupboard.
Anyway, Alex and Nina's extremely creepy relationship begins. Nina is sixteen. Actually, she is seventeen early on, later she becomes sixteen. Later on there is talk that she has been engaging in "illegal sex". At that stage of the movie, she hasn't had sex. The characters (and Ruth Brown, screenwriter extraordinaire, and Ron Brown, her husband, director ordinaire, and Bec Brown, some relation of theirs who did additional dialogue) seem completely unaware of the fact that since Australia's age of consent is 16, it is not only untrue that Nina has had "illegal sex", it is literally impossible for her to do so. But she had to be sixteen, because Charlotte Rees's range only extends to playing sixteen-seventeen year old dancers and unconscious girls trapped in fridges.
Around this time (what time? I don't know. When you're watching Let Me Not, time ceases to mean much), we discover that Alex the Architect's boss is played by BUD TINGWELL!!!!
Bud Tingwell is an Australian television and film legend. He is very old, has been in a million things, and is very good normally. He also did the voiceover for The World's Oldest Safety Law, an instructional video I wrote. So we are brothers in spirit.
How Bud Tingwell ended up in this is a mystery dwarfing the Cam Knight conundrum by far. Gambling debts? Compromising photographs? Ron Brown held a gun on him while Ruth held the script up? I don't know, but it's baffling.
At one point I swear Bud actually makes an attempt to escape the movie. He gets up from his desk and begins to walk away, only to abruptly and for no apparent reason go into reverse and sit down again. I assume he was making a break for it while the cameraman was asleep, but then Ruth came back in with her machete, and Bud had to hurriedly change course and keep acting.
Of course, the scenes where the cameraman is sleeping are the best ones in Let Me Not, because they're the only ones where the camera isn't constantly bobbing around like Katharine Hepburn.
So where were we? In Hell? Oh yes, Let Me Not is on, so we must be.
OK, so on we go. Nina and Alex keep meeting at school, and keep having the most boring conversations in movie history. And I am including the ones in Benji: The Hunted.
Seriously, virtually nothing happens in this movie. I think we're supposed to be gripped by theb irresistible attraction developing between these star-crossed free spirits, whom society will not allow to be together. But actually we just feel a little bit sick. Because it's creepy. A thirty-year-old man forming a relationship with a sixteen-year-old girl isn't all that creepy: just these two are.
Somewhere in this we get to see what Alex is working on. No, it's not architectural plans, duh! It's a nude picture of Nina, with boobs and everything. He would have had to imagine the boobs, because he hasn't seen them. In fact, nobody's seen them, not even the people who pay to watch her strip. I have doubts that Nina herself has seen them. This movie offers no evidence that Nina possesses boobs at all.
Of course, sometimes things do happen, and they are horrific and traumatising for everyone. These mainly take the form of dance. A couple of nasty girls hang around at school. They are clearly sluts, because they talk about how "hot" Alex is. This shows us how much more immoral and skanky they are than the sixteen-year-old stripper who ends up in Alex's bed.
Which is not to defend these two girls: they ARE immoral and skanky, not to mention actresses of such cosmic lack of talent that they almost make Charlotte Rees look merely very very bad.
Alex has a girlfriend, by the way, whom he lives with in a luxurious studio apartment and who is, as far as I can make out, sick of him. As are we all. Very rapidly I get sick of the girlfriend too, because she seems to be one of those strange professional TV women who are always laying about looking bitchy and wearing black leggings.
Anyway, to the dancing. In preparation for "MAD Night", the nasty skanky girls rehearse a dance routine, overseen by the school's lovable dance/drama/whatever teacher, Mr Paedophile. It is worthwhile noting that the Let Me Not website says that the film's soundtrack consists of " original pop, r&b, rock and dance tracks by Australian artists". This is a filthy stinking lie. There is nothing original in this movie except for the inventively unstable cameraman. The song that the skanks dance to in this quite nightmarish scene is, for all intents and purposes, "Independent Woman" by Destiny's Child, only subtly altered to make it unlistenable.
The dance scene itself is so horrible watching it could potentially give you eczema. Then later there's another one with three unspeakably cool young men doing an unspeakably cool exhibition of breakdancing. It's all just so hip you could almost pull your own eyeballs out.
Oh, God, so can get to the point? No, we cannot. At some point, Alex's girlfriend dumps him because he is moody and distant and will not pleasure her the way a woman needs. She discussed her problem with her red-headed friend, in a scene which, like all others, goes nowhere.
I think Nina's dad pops up now and then to be pointless. He is married to a 22-year-old. This is very important. No idea why. He is creepy, I think I mentioned that. He is more creepy than Alex, less creepy than Mr Paedophile. Here's a chart to demonstrate:
CREEPY LEVEL
***** Mr Paedophile
**** Nina's dad
*** Alex the Architect
** The Cameraman
Um, so...yeah. Nina and Alex go to dinner. Their pizza arrives at the table and they instantly leave the restaurant without eating a single thing. They then sit on a couch in a nightclub while a band bangs away annoyingly, and get jiggy with it. Alex says he can't, because she is so young and it would be wrong. He does not, note well, say that he can't ebcause they are in the middle of a crowded bar and everyone would see them in their penetrative fun.
So Nina runs away. Alex catches her. I think all is well. Generally any conflict or problems thrown up in this movie are resolved inside thirty seconds.
The movie has a montage of course, to get full value out of its shitty Australian indie-rock. The montage consists of Alex repeatedly picking up Nina at the bottom of a ramp, Nina repeatedly getting changed in the car, and then the two of them going off to an observation tower or something. We see a lot of authentic Melbourne locations. Apparently Melbourne's kind of crap.
So...the big night approaches. MAD NIGHT! I do not know why it's called MAD Night. Maybe they explained it, I don't care much. I could have missed it. Maybe it stands for Make A Difference. If it does, it's stupid. Well, it's stupid anyway, but...
Maybe it stands for Methadone Arse Dimples. That makes more sense.
Um...God, I'm losing the will to live here. So anyway Alex and Nina are spending a lot of time together. You think they're doing it, but they're not, because Nina needs to wait for her mail-order breasts to arrive. But she's over at his apartment, not girlfriendless, and the doorbell rings and Alex tells her to stay and at the door is Cam Knight being boorish and leering unconvincingly and Alex tells him to go away and Nina appears and Alex says "I thought I told you to stay around the corner" and you might sympathise with her resentment at being treated like a dog were it not for the fact that really she should count herself lucky to be esteemed that highly and then Cam says he liked her dancing and oh the CAT IS OUT OF THE BAG!
So Cam goes, and Nina and Alex fight but I'm not sure why. So he knows she's a stripper. But he clearly doesn't mind, does he? But she's all, "Look, it's not as if I like it". Well, what difference does it make since he doesn't care anyway? But they have a big non-specific argument and she storms off and thirty seconds later everything's all right again. Because it always is.
But then trouble looms. Bud Tingwell calls Alex into his office and looks vague. The headmistress calls Nina into her office, which looks suspiciously like a floral-wallpapered elderly woman's drawing room, and they are grilled about the appropriateness of their relationship. Fortunately for those viewers about to suffer strokes from the tension of it all, nothing comes of this plot strand and everything's all right again. Then Nina's friend asks her to choreograph her ballet piece for MAD Night. She appears to be running a bit late. Mr Paedophile will not be well pleased.
Then Alex's ex-girlfriend snoops around his house and finds the boob drawing and Nina's number. So they meet, and go for a ride, and we cut away to avoid the Browns having to write anything interesting in their script, and then Nina's on a bridge with Alex and she's crying and we never find out exactly why, but I think Alex's girlfriend told her that Alex is a fuckstick, and I can get on board with that. Alex consoles her, they walk, the camera wobbles...and then it's all right again. Phew.
And then, at some point, Alex and Nina have sex. And it is utterly marvellous, probably. The mechanics of Nina's inability to get undressed overcome, the couple bask in the glow of their love, and then Nina leaves to choreograph things.
Actually, maybe Bud Tingwell fired Alex. I'm not sure, laughing too hard.
MAD Night comes. The ballet is done, everyone applauds, Mr Paedophile opens his mouth really wide, Nina takes a bow. It is a bizarre scene, because it's played like this is the big climax to something, like Nina's been working so hard to prove herself as a choreographer all this time and finally she's made those naysayers eat their words. When actually, the entire "choreography" plot point only appeared five minutes ago and serves no useful purpose whatsoever. Why not just have her DANCE in the show? Oh, that's right, she quit dancing to strip. But while the rehearsals are going on, she just sits there watching, and she seems to have hours every day, at school and outside, to faff about with Alex performing their mechanical sexless flirtations. Stripping only seems to take up three minutes of her week.
Then her dad bumps into Alex and they discuss Nina's skill. Dad says how proud he is of her and then mentions how she's going out with some sick thirty-year-old, making it clear he knows it's Alex. Alex then cleverly sinks in the knife by saying that Nina's dad "would know all about it", a cutting implication re: 22-year-old trophy wives, which makes it perfectly acceptable for Alex to be banging his schoolgirl daughter.
Oh I almost forgot! Also at the show is Nina's MOTHER, who works as one of those people whoe get paid to fly constantly around the world with mobile phones, talking to their daughters in English accents and being a free spirit. Most of the film she is "overseas", popping up briefly in front of some black people in a field simulating Ghana, with authenticity added by a map on the wall of the bus station, a map labelled "Ghana". She also pops up in an airport in China, simulated by Asian people riding an escalator.
I'm sure the mother plays some part in the deciphering of Nina's complex character, but fucked if I know what it is.
So MAD Night is a triumph. Nina is ever so happy. Then, for no reason that the Browns have made the slightest attempt to make apparent, Alex tells her he's leaving her. Something about their ages...something about him needing to find work elsewhere....good God, I don't know, it'd be a more natural plot development if he quoted the giant brain from Futurama: "Now I am leaving, for no raisin!"
And we're all sad.
And then three years later Nina discovers that Alex's picture of her boobs has won a major art prize (and forgive me for saying this as a non-art expert, but it must have been a really shitty art prize with incredibly low standards) while surfing the net in a laundromat (her career's going swimmingly then) and she drives off to visit him in a lavish country hillside house which we are not allowed to film the inside of.
Here we discover that Alex is...still a dick, but apparently he's an artist now, and Nina is a professional dancer, and they still love each other and they kiss and credits roll and Alex and Nina will be back in Let Me Not 2: Let Me Not With A Vengeance.
At least Skyscraper had explosions and graphic sex.
This is a real movie. Honest. Look:
http://www.letmenot.com/
And it's bad. I don't mean Independence Day-Anaconda bad. I mean Manos: the Hands of Fate bad, or the video of your kid's kindergarten class re-enacting the First Fleet bad.
It's about a schoolgirl-by-day-stripper-by-night who flaunts her body in the fleshpots of Melbourne in order to gain independence from her strikingly hideous lizard-faced father (no, I don't mean literally lizard-faced. It's a bad movie, but not that kind). The canny viewer might observe that her chances of obtaining said independence may be considerably enhanced if she:
a) did not throw a tantrum and storm off stage when men in the audience try to give her money
b) could dance around a pole with any more erotic intensity than a washing machine
c) actually removed her clothes whilst dancing. Her strip act apparently consists of taking off her shirt, prancing about in a bra and long, billowy skirt, and then stopping. Sometimes you see her underpants, which fair near sets my heart a-leaping out of my chest.
Anyway, she does this stripping and early on, Alex the Architect (that is not my wry nickname for him, that is how he is listed in the credits: Rodger Corser as Alex the Architect) sits in the strip club with his boorish mate, The Comedy Channel's Cameron Knight. This is the first instance of "What the hell is he doing there?" that arises in this "film". Cam Knight is a very low-level celebrity, and mainly makes his living hanging around more successful comedians, but a) his star power is still way beyond this movie, and b) it's not a comedy and his role is not comedic. It's barely even a role.
Anyway, they see Nina, the SBDSBN referenced above, and wow, isn't she transfixingly beautiful, then they wander off into the night, into Melbourne, city of sordid secrets and wobbly camera operators. Cam Knight talks about a girl's arse to demonstrate how boorish he is. I don't know why, he's barely in this.
So then we're at school, and Nina is apparently a dancer, but she quit ballet to go become a non-nude stripper, and there's a big talent show fundraiser coming up, and Alex is at school too. Because he is an Architect and has been hired to design the school's theatre extensions. So he spends a large part of the movie sitting around at school. He doesn't seem to ever draw plans, or supervise building work, or do a single architectural thing for the duration. He sits around looking creepily at schoolgirls.
Like Nina, with whom he strikes up a conversation. In their first encounter we get our first impression of Miss Charlotte Rees's haunting acting style, as Nina. This is basically to deliver her lines as she is sleepwalking with an arrow through her head. Her screen presence...well, here is how you can imagine how little charisma this freakishly untalented little minx has:
First, think of the least charismatic or interesting person you have ever met.
Then, kill them.
You have now approximated Charlotte Rees's acting.
They talk, they bond, there are several thousand scenes in a school storage cupboard, leading me to believe that for about a week of the shoot, director (and producer and editor) Ron Brown got his camera stuck in a crack in the cupboard's wall and so every scene they shot that week had to be done in the cupboard.
Anyway, Alex and Nina's extremely creepy relationship begins. Nina is sixteen. Actually, she is seventeen early on, later she becomes sixteen. Later on there is talk that she has been engaging in "illegal sex". At that stage of the movie, she hasn't had sex. The characters (and Ruth Brown, screenwriter extraordinaire, and Ron Brown, her husband, director ordinaire, and Bec Brown, some relation of theirs who did additional dialogue) seem completely unaware of the fact that since Australia's age of consent is 16, it is not only untrue that Nina has had "illegal sex", it is literally impossible for her to do so. But she had to be sixteen, because Charlotte Rees's range only extends to playing sixteen-seventeen year old dancers and unconscious girls trapped in fridges.
Around this time (what time? I don't know. When you're watching Let Me Not, time ceases to mean much), we discover that Alex the Architect's boss is played by BUD TINGWELL!!!!
Bud Tingwell is an Australian television and film legend. He is very old, has been in a million things, and is very good normally. He also did the voiceover for The World's Oldest Safety Law, an instructional video I wrote. So we are brothers in spirit.
How Bud Tingwell ended up in this is a mystery dwarfing the Cam Knight conundrum by far. Gambling debts? Compromising photographs? Ron Brown held a gun on him while Ruth held the script up? I don't know, but it's baffling.
At one point I swear Bud actually makes an attempt to escape the movie. He gets up from his desk and begins to walk away, only to abruptly and for no apparent reason go into reverse and sit down again. I assume he was making a break for it while the cameraman was asleep, but then Ruth came back in with her machete, and Bud had to hurriedly change course and keep acting.
Of course, the scenes where the cameraman is sleeping are the best ones in Let Me Not, because they're the only ones where the camera isn't constantly bobbing around like Katharine Hepburn.
So where were we? In Hell? Oh yes, Let Me Not is on, so we must be.
OK, so on we go. Nina and Alex keep meeting at school, and keep having the most boring conversations in movie history. And I am including the ones in Benji: The Hunted.
Seriously, virtually nothing happens in this movie. I think we're supposed to be gripped by theb irresistible attraction developing between these star-crossed free spirits, whom society will not allow to be together. But actually we just feel a little bit sick. Because it's creepy. A thirty-year-old man forming a relationship with a sixteen-year-old girl isn't all that creepy: just these two are.
Somewhere in this we get to see what Alex is working on. No, it's not architectural plans, duh! It's a nude picture of Nina, with boobs and everything. He would have had to imagine the boobs, because he hasn't seen them. In fact, nobody's seen them, not even the people who pay to watch her strip. I have doubts that Nina herself has seen them. This movie offers no evidence that Nina possesses boobs at all.
Of course, sometimes things do happen, and they are horrific and traumatising for everyone. These mainly take the form of dance. A couple of nasty girls hang around at school. They are clearly sluts, because they talk about how "hot" Alex is. This shows us how much more immoral and skanky they are than the sixteen-year-old stripper who ends up in Alex's bed.
Which is not to defend these two girls: they ARE immoral and skanky, not to mention actresses of such cosmic lack of talent that they almost make Charlotte Rees look merely very very bad.
Alex has a girlfriend, by the way, whom he lives with in a luxurious studio apartment and who is, as far as I can make out, sick of him. As are we all. Very rapidly I get sick of the girlfriend too, because she seems to be one of those strange professional TV women who are always laying about looking bitchy and wearing black leggings.
Anyway, to the dancing. In preparation for "MAD Night", the nasty skanky girls rehearse a dance routine, overseen by the school's lovable dance/drama/whatever teacher, Mr Paedophile. It is worthwhile noting that the Let Me Not website says that the film's soundtrack consists of " original pop, r&b, rock and dance tracks by Australian artists". This is a filthy stinking lie. There is nothing original in this movie except for the inventively unstable cameraman. The song that the skanks dance to in this quite nightmarish scene is, for all intents and purposes, "Independent Woman" by Destiny's Child, only subtly altered to make it unlistenable.
The dance scene itself is so horrible watching it could potentially give you eczema. Then later there's another one with three unspeakably cool young men doing an unspeakably cool exhibition of breakdancing. It's all just so hip you could almost pull your own eyeballs out.
Oh, God, so can get to the point? No, we cannot. At some point, Alex's girlfriend dumps him because he is moody and distant and will not pleasure her the way a woman needs. She discussed her problem with her red-headed friend, in a scene which, like all others, goes nowhere.
I think Nina's dad pops up now and then to be pointless. He is married to a 22-year-old. This is very important. No idea why. He is creepy, I think I mentioned that. He is more creepy than Alex, less creepy than Mr Paedophile. Here's a chart to demonstrate:
CREEPY LEVEL
***** Mr Paedophile
**** Nina's dad
*** Alex the Architect
** The Cameraman
Um, so...yeah. Nina and Alex go to dinner. Their pizza arrives at the table and they instantly leave the restaurant without eating a single thing. They then sit on a couch in a nightclub while a band bangs away annoyingly, and get jiggy with it. Alex says he can't, because she is so young and it would be wrong. He does not, note well, say that he can't ebcause they are in the middle of a crowded bar and everyone would see them in their penetrative fun.
So Nina runs away. Alex catches her. I think all is well. Generally any conflict or problems thrown up in this movie are resolved inside thirty seconds.
The movie has a montage of course, to get full value out of its shitty Australian indie-rock. The montage consists of Alex repeatedly picking up Nina at the bottom of a ramp, Nina repeatedly getting changed in the car, and then the two of them going off to an observation tower or something. We see a lot of authentic Melbourne locations. Apparently Melbourne's kind of crap.
So...the big night approaches. MAD NIGHT! I do not know why it's called MAD Night. Maybe they explained it, I don't care much. I could have missed it. Maybe it stands for Make A Difference. If it does, it's stupid. Well, it's stupid anyway, but...
Maybe it stands for Methadone Arse Dimples. That makes more sense.
Um...God, I'm losing the will to live here. So anyway Alex and Nina are spending a lot of time together. You think they're doing it, but they're not, because Nina needs to wait for her mail-order breasts to arrive. But she's over at his apartment, not girlfriendless, and the doorbell rings and Alex tells her to stay and at the door is Cam Knight being boorish and leering unconvincingly and Alex tells him to go away and Nina appears and Alex says "I thought I told you to stay around the corner" and you might sympathise with her resentment at being treated like a dog were it not for the fact that really she should count herself lucky to be esteemed that highly and then Cam says he liked her dancing and oh the CAT IS OUT OF THE BAG!
So Cam goes, and Nina and Alex fight but I'm not sure why. So he knows she's a stripper. But he clearly doesn't mind, does he? But she's all, "Look, it's not as if I like it". Well, what difference does it make since he doesn't care anyway? But they have a big non-specific argument and she storms off and thirty seconds later everything's all right again. Because it always is.
But then trouble looms. Bud Tingwell calls Alex into his office and looks vague. The headmistress calls Nina into her office, which looks suspiciously like a floral-wallpapered elderly woman's drawing room, and they are grilled about the appropriateness of their relationship. Fortunately for those viewers about to suffer strokes from the tension of it all, nothing comes of this plot strand and everything's all right again. Then Nina's friend asks her to choreograph her ballet piece for MAD Night. She appears to be running a bit late. Mr Paedophile will not be well pleased.
Then Alex's ex-girlfriend snoops around his house and finds the boob drawing and Nina's number. So they meet, and go for a ride, and we cut away to avoid the Browns having to write anything interesting in their script, and then Nina's on a bridge with Alex and she's crying and we never find out exactly why, but I think Alex's girlfriend told her that Alex is a fuckstick, and I can get on board with that. Alex consoles her, they walk, the camera wobbles...and then it's all right again. Phew.
And then, at some point, Alex and Nina have sex. And it is utterly marvellous, probably. The mechanics of Nina's inability to get undressed overcome, the couple bask in the glow of their love, and then Nina leaves to choreograph things.
Actually, maybe Bud Tingwell fired Alex. I'm not sure, laughing too hard.
MAD Night comes. The ballet is done, everyone applauds, Mr Paedophile opens his mouth really wide, Nina takes a bow. It is a bizarre scene, because it's played like this is the big climax to something, like Nina's been working so hard to prove herself as a choreographer all this time and finally she's made those naysayers eat their words. When actually, the entire "choreography" plot point only appeared five minutes ago and serves no useful purpose whatsoever. Why not just have her DANCE in the show? Oh, that's right, she quit dancing to strip. But while the rehearsals are going on, she just sits there watching, and she seems to have hours every day, at school and outside, to faff about with Alex performing their mechanical sexless flirtations. Stripping only seems to take up three minutes of her week.
Then her dad bumps into Alex and they discuss Nina's skill. Dad says how proud he is of her and then mentions how she's going out with some sick thirty-year-old, making it clear he knows it's Alex. Alex then cleverly sinks in the knife by saying that Nina's dad "would know all about it", a cutting implication re: 22-year-old trophy wives, which makes it perfectly acceptable for Alex to be banging his schoolgirl daughter.
Oh I almost forgot! Also at the show is Nina's MOTHER, who works as one of those people whoe get paid to fly constantly around the world with mobile phones, talking to their daughters in English accents and being a free spirit. Most of the film she is "overseas", popping up briefly in front of some black people in a field simulating Ghana, with authenticity added by a map on the wall of the bus station, a map labelled "Ghana". She also pops up in an airport in China, simulated by Asian people riding an escalator.
I'm sure the mother plays some part in the deciphering of Nina's complex character, but fucked if I know what it is.
So MAD Night is a triumph. Nina is ever so happy. Then, for no reason that the Browns have made the slightest attempt to make apparent, Alex tells her he's leaving her. Something about their ages...something about him needing to find work elsewhere....good God, I don't know, it'd be a more natural plot development if he quoted the giant brain from Futurama: "Now I am leaving, for no raisin!"
And we're all sad.
And then three years later Nina discovers that Alex's picture of her boobs has won a major art prize (and forgive me for saying this as a non-art expert, but it must have been a really shitty art prize with incredibly low standards) while surfing the net in a laundromat (her career's going swimmingly then) and she drives off to visit him in a lavish country hillside house which we are not allowed to film the inside of.
Here we discover that Alex is...still a dick, but apparently he's an artist now, and Nina is a professional dancer, and they still love each other and they kiss and credits roll and Alex and Nina will be back in Let Me Not 2: Let Me Not With A Vengeance.
At least Skyscraper had explosions and graphic sex.
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Comment by Cibbuano
20/20 Filmsight
Science News
Hunt Famous
Orble Post of the Day
Fat Cult
Techbreak
Comment by Anonymous
Comment by AllieWonder
Comment by Anonymous
I loved this on LJ, I love reading it again. Good work, Benj!
Le Gateau
Comment by BenP
I don't really have a thing for wacky gadgets.
Comment by KC
Makes you want that 2 hours of your life back, doesn't it?
Comment by Melb Anonymous
The one positive from this - it employed some Australians at least for a while. But we need quality on our screens. It's this time of year we see so many Australian films made - so we know they're being produced - but the quality is so poor. Australia is fully capable of delivering some wonderful pieces. For some unknown reason, we throw out this rubbish.
Then again, in quality productions like Black Jack with Colin Friels, we have to see the stereotypical moronic Australian cop who swears and belittles all those around him... Why ruin an otherwise great telemovie?
Well, Let Me Not filled a rainy Saturday afternoon for me.
Comment by freeksngeeks
You have so ruined the movie for me.
On the other hand, you really brought the picture to life!
Comment by BenP
Comment by Anonymous
Liked a lot of the settings, too !
Comment by Anonymous