Skip to main content

Breaking Even: Adam Sigal's When the Starlight Ends

 Sam Heughan, Arabella Oz, David Arquette. Dir. Adam Sigal, Cinedigm, 2016


Along with The Beast, When the Starlight Ends was my great-unknown buy on my last trip. Found for $2 in the Dollar General clearance bin, it looked like some micro-indie romantic drama, maybe an ensemble piece, that somehow got enough distribution to turn up in an Oxford DG. Might be a cool discovery. Might stink. $2 made it worth the gamble. Watching it, not as much.

First off, When the Starlight Ends is exactly what it appears, a microindie rom-dram, starring a star of Starz's Outlander series and his two famous friends, Sean Patrick Flanery and David Arquette, in cameos lending what looks like a student film with a good grant some dubious accociation with celebrity. Its best moments all owe to cool cinematography moreso than performance or story. A driving scene either resurrects real rear projection or some digital version thereof, but looks really cool either way.

The story - I mean, it's more a standard set of situations, like a writing-class exercise on film, where the idea is to ring the kind of stylistic/cinematographic changes on the form likely to get some Hollywood or big producer's eye. For Mr. Sigal's sake, I hope he succeeded. For future audiences' sake, I hope that studio or producer acquaints him with interesting characters and stories that are about something. Anything.

Could be a real discovery. Could be crap. The Beast was a discovery. When the Starlight Ends goes to the other place. A 50-50 split on the gamble. For $3, I found one movie not yet on bluray worthy of agitating for, a truly striking and obscure film and a no-budget bore. A satisfactory return on the investment.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friday Flop: Adrian Lyne's 9&1/2 WEEKS

 Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke. Dir. Adrian Lyne, MGM, 1986 Style over sex, minus substance. That's a glib summation/dismissal of Adrian Lyne's 1986 blockbuster erotic drama, but it's not unfair or inaccurate. I took copious notes on this movie, most relating to some way Lyne and screenwriter Zalman King failed to make the film daring, dark, perverse, bold, or even a little erotic.  I noted, many times, that as an artifact of Hollywood's attempt to make sex-movies for an adult audience after home video made hardcore porn available to everyone, 9&1/2 WEEKS fascinates and depresses in equal measure. It's aesthetically fascinating, sociologically depressing. Lyne delivers a hyperstylized, superficial imagining of the US audience's "freaky" side and it's all pretty standard, you're-not-kinky-if-you-use-the-word-kinky kind of stuff.  Allegedly dom/sub-themed, both the film and the fantasies it trades in define predictable. A little gaslighting...
Post a Comment
Read more

Grasshoppers & Nazis: Bob Fosse's Cabaret

 Liza Minelli, Michael York, Joel Grey, Fritz Weppert. Dir. Bob Fosse, Warner Bros., 1972 Once upon a time in the '80s, I wrote a paper for a college English class deconstructing the fable of the ant and the grasshopper, coming down on the side of the grasshopper with both feet. The grasshopper, I argued, is humankind's wanderlust, its irrepressible need to go new places and meet people and have adventures with them (or at least drinks), to be in and of moments, to laugh and feel good and not worry, and that, I argued, is the best of us. We need the grasshoppers to remind us life is beautiful when it is lived.  Back then, I hung around with grasshoppers, though I'm not sure I was one. The real grasshoppers I knew took to the air and seldom, if ever, returned. Their adventures took them everywhere but back to Short Vine Street, Cincinnati, anytime between 1987 & 1993. I loved to hear their wild tales when they did alight there again for a few days, but I had to make su...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fill in the '80s: Peter Bogdonovich's Mask

 Cher, Eric Stoltz, Sam Elliott, Laura Dern. Dir. Peter Bogdonovich, Universal, 1985 As I've noted, my movie addiction starts with my parents taking me to see Disney's Bedknobs&Broomsticks when I was four years old. I spent the '70s seeing any movie I could, mostly Disney and other kid-friendly fare, peppered by notable exceptions like The Sting, Jaws, and The Outlaw Josey Wales. In the '80s, my teenage and young adult years, I began to see more adult-themed movies and started watching with a somewhat more critical eye. I have since compiled a list of every '80s movie I've seen.  It's a long list. All the usual suspects are on it. The classic '80s fare, the Purple Rains and Red Dawns and Top Guns and so forth predominate. Whenever I go out scavenging, I always keep an eye out for '80s titles I have not seen or have but do not own. I regard the unseen ones as pieces of a picture puzzle I've been filling in for 40 years. Last night, I fitted ...
Post a Comment
Read more