Shotgun Stories 2007

Are you effing kidding me? This thing has high ratings across the board...but that only makes me wonder if I'm the only sane movie-watcher left on this planet. This movie is terrible. At no point did I care about any of the characters, and that's REALLY bad for a character-driven drama. The ending was only satisfying because it was a conclusion, not because it wrapped up some kind of plot. This movie had very little point to it. There's no "hero's journey." There's almost no growth as a person save for one single character that is otherwise completely uninteresting and doesn't really seem to care too much about anything. The only reason I didn't give it one star was because the technical side of things was well-done. It's amazing to me that you can assemble so many people who can clearly act skillfully and so much technical talent behind the lens, yet poop out a product that is so pointless and uninteresting. This film would have been better if it was just 90 minutes of nice shots of the countryside.

Anyone who enjoyed this movie to the point that they'd rate it beyond 5/10 is a garbage movie reviewer. No, this is not "powerful." It's boring as hell. It would have been a lot more powerful if it was a 15-minute short film. I find that this is one of the most common complaints I have about quite a few modern (2005-ish onward) movies: they should have been shorts, not features. In my head, I can re-cut this film to be somewhat interesting and well-paced, and 80% of it would be on the cutting room floor.