"TRANS" Film Criticism By Zachary McGhee
Not Rated (strong language, mild violence, mature themes), 90 minutes, 1998. Released commercially in 2000. Justin Lakes, Ryan Daugherty, Jon Daugherty. Directed by Julian Goldberg.
Movies like Trans get on my nerves. They’re the type of rubbish that makes up roughly one-half of the independent film world, and give it a bad name. The other half are grand motion pictures carried out in the traditions of cinema: Bright, original, cutting edge. We, as critics, may urge Hollywood studios to take a look at this emerging art form known as independent film, but imagine a film like this slips through the cracks and they get a good look at it?
Even Supernova, a recent film which looks pretty much like a disaster area with its background (that film’s director walked out in an editing dispute with the studio and replaced his name with pseudonym Thomas Lee) and pathetic screenplay, is preferable to this mediocre, muddled garbage. Few directors can achieve the feat which Julian Goldberg has. This movie is boring, long, drawn out and unnecessary. If you don’t have a story to tell, don’t tell it.
Truth be told, the most horrible and condemning fact about Trans is this: I walked out of this movie.
The plot (which I had to look up on the Internet, as it can’t be found in the film itself) seems to go something like this: A young delinquent of some sort manages to escape the juvenile facility he’s been placed in and goes running all around talking and meeting with different people who manage to assist in concealing him from authorities out to catch him, along the way somehow managing to be called by some a "coming-of-age" tale.
Sundance officials, who selected the film to run at the 1999 festival, say that they were "so excited" when they saw Trans. No doubt because, if there were any insomniacs among them, they were instantly cured. I was constantly checking my watch during the movie, and when it felt as if the film ought to be reaching some sort of merciful conclusion, I realized that only one-third of it had passed, leaving another sixty minutes to be endured. And so I up and left.
I give Trans one star, rather than none, because perhaps I did not give it enough of a chance, and maybe if I had seen the rest of it there might have been some redeeming qualities about it. Of course, a film with a prologue as tedious, incoherent and confused as this one hardly deserves such a presumptuous credit.
Sundance officials also noted that the visual integrity of Trans appealed to them, and the fact that Goldberg didn’t really know "where he wanted to go" when he started shooting somehow makes the film more true to life in its art. Ha. I say, you don’t know where you’re going when you start shooting? You’re wasting film.
But then, that can be forgiven. If you know where you want to go when you start editing. Chop out the tedium. That is, of course, unless there’s nothing but that.
E-Mail ZCMCGHEE@aol.com if you'd like to receive free film reviews via e-mail.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews