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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.

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