NORTH BEACH A film review by James Brundage Copyright 2000 filmcritic.com filmcritic.com
As we've seen in several recent Clerks knock-offs, doing nothing isn't anywhere as entertaining as we've all thought. Starting out with damn near no plot, almost no point, and a collection of bizarre characters and ending up with a funny movie that keeps your attention for a good hour and a half just can't be done in Hollywood style. So when I find myself watching a film like North Beach, which proves its tagline of "Once in a while, a movie comes along that defines a generation. Let's hope to God this ain't it," quite effectively, I can't help but enjoy it.
North Beach centers (as much as a movie that wanders its way through its story can center) around Tyler (Casey Peterson), a denizen of North Beach, San Francisco who happens to have made the mistake of sleeping with a 19-year-old stripper from New Orleans. Slacker movie that North Beach is, no matter where Tyler goes, everyone knows about this before he tells them… including his girlfriend. The inevitable result is that Tyler spends all day in frantic attempts to win his girlfriend back and manage whatever else pops up in his slacker life.
As clichéd as the plot sounds (I mean, let's face it, this is the same deal as every slacker film), North Beach has the rare panache required to pull it off. Casey Peterson, who also wrote and produced the film, provides just the right combination of multidimensional characters, witty dialogue, and insanity to make North Beach work, and North Beach does work… in most ways.
Co-directors Jed Mortenson and Richard Speight Jr. are proficient in their craft despite this being their first time in the chair, and the cast works together like a well-oiled machine. At times North Beach pushes it a little too over-the-top. Just like the Redbank Trilogy or Dazed and Confused, North Beach finds itself more than once in a situation that's just a little too surreal for a slacker comedy, and for that moment it losses its charm.
But such moments are fleeting. For the most part, North Beach is simply a highly entertaining comedy with few flaws other than its level of realism. And hey, as everyone who flames me is so fond of saying, it is only a movie.
RATING: ****1/2
|----------------------------------|
\ ***** Perfection \
\ **** Good, memorable film \
\ *** Average, hits and misses \
\ ** Sub-par on many levels \
\ * Unquestionably awful \
|--------------------------------------|
MPAA Rating: NR
Director: Jed Mortenson, Richard Speight Jr. Producer: Jed Mortenson, Casey Peterson Writer: Casey Peterson Starring: Casey Peterson, Jjennifer Milmore, Gabrielle Anwar, Richard Speight Jr., Jim Hanna, Barrow Davis, Hopwood DePree
www.northbeachthemovie.com ---
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=filmcriticcom&path=subst/video/sellers/amazon-top-100-dvd.html Movie Fiends: Check out Amazon.com's Top 100 Hot DVDs!
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