STAR MAPS (Fox Searchlight) Starring: Douglas Spain, Efrain Figueroa, Kandeyce Jorden, Martha Velez, Lysa Flores, Annette Murphy, Vincent Chandler, Al Vicente. Screenplay: Miguel Arteta. Producer: Matthew Greenfield. Director: Miguel Arteta. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, nudity, adult themes, sexual situations, violence) Running Time: 85 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Good intentions can make up for a lot, but they can't make up for STAR MAPS. Writer/director Miguel Arteta's debut feature concerns a Los Angeles family as thoroughly dysfunctional as you'll find anywhere, which is saying a lot for L.A. Patriarch Pepe (Efrain Figueroa) pimps for young boys whose street-corner sales of maps to the stars' homes is a front for selling themselves to kinky Hollywood hot shots; Pepe's 18-year-old son Carlos, recently returned from two years in Mexico with dreams of becoming an actor, offers to work for his father as a chance to meet some well-connected people. Meanwhile, Carlos' mother Teresa (Martha Velez) is recovering from a breakdown while seeing visions of the late Mexican comedian Cantinflas, sister Maria (Lysa Flores) puts her own life on hold to care for Mama, and brother Juancito (Vincent Chandler) sits mutely watching television when he's not dressed up like a professional wrestler.
The fact that this family is Mexican-American should be incidental, but it's likely that the ethnic angle (along with the "controversial" material) is all that snared STAR MAPS a distribution deal. It's clear that Arteta wanted to say something about the dark side of Hollywood, about self-delusion for one's dreams, about the ways people use each other, and about the struggle to find some normalcy in the middle of a chaotic life. He simply says them all at the same time, creating a cacophany of heavy issues colliding with one another. Every once in a while, moments of humanity creep unexpectedly into Arteta's story. Too often, the impact of those moments is blunted by lack of direction.
And "lack of direction" applies in both senses of the term. Even more than by its rambling script, STAR MAPS is thwarted by Arteta's inability to put together a remotely professional production. His performers, it can be said charitably, read their lines in comprehensible English sentences; his copious use of slow-motion, flashbacks and low-tech visual tricks can't camouflage a basic technical clumsiness. Somewhere in STAR MAPS are a few interesting ideas, but Arteta forces viewers to wade through a swamp of muddled exposition and amateurish film-making, then doesn't offer them a map to get out again.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 starstrikes: 4.
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