LOVELESS - Now On DemandFebruary 08, 2012
FilmBuff
On Demand Weekly provides new movie reviews of hot movies on demand from the POV of watching from the comfort of your home. Today’s review: LOVELESS (FilmBuff).
LOVELESS
With this Peter Pan, it’s not his nose that grows when he is lying
By Adam Schartoff
Andrew (Andrew von Urtz) is a middle aged single New Yorker with a dead-end job. While never explained, the scenes at work could be out of the OFFICE SPACE handbook. Clearly this is an intelligent, reasonably good looking guy, who has never been especially ambitious about much in his life or, if so not for a long while. To take his mind off that, Andrew continues to try to bed a growing pool of age-inappropriate women while the perfect one, his on-again, off again girlfriend Joanna (Cindy Chastain) is right under his nose. Her only flaw seems to be that she adores Andrew.
While Andrew continuously tries to get his screenplay financed —a script that is never explored in this movie— the opportunity of a lifetime literally falls into his lap in the form of the gorgeous Ava (Genevieve Hudson-Price). They meet in a bar late one night after she gets into a brawl with another woman. Andrew pursues Ava for her obvious assets until finally he ends up in her bed. That bed, for better or worse, is in house that Ava shares with her endless supply of swarthy brothers and one painting of their Dad.
One of LOVELESS’s running gags is that all the siblings have an active relationship with the late beloved patriarch, constantly seeking his approval though he is long since deceased. Whether the late father approves or disapproves of Andrew is an ongoing issue which resolves itself with Ava commitment to being in Andrew’s movie and financing it with the family money. It turns out that dead Dad was a real estate mogul.
LOVELESS is the product of filmmaker Ramin Serry (2002’s MARYAM) who based his character, Andrew, on his real-life good friend, von Urtz. If there’s an essential problem with LOVELESS, a character study, it’s that its main character, while not holey unlikeable or unsympathetic, is hard to fathom.
While enjoying the performance, I was still left wondering why Andrew was as self-sabotaging as he is. It’s clear that he’s at odds with his own success, referring to both his romantic relationships and career, but we never get any real understanding of why. The other problem is that few of the secondary characters stand out in any memorable way, with the exception of Scott Cohen who plays Ava’s over-protective brother, Ricky, and Ms. Chastain, who is an obvious talent. Because they were not drawn with more dimension they come off as merely there to service Andrew’s plot line.
And, yet, LOVELESS does have its funny moments and cannot be accused of being predictable. Unlike many low budget indie films, LOVELESS looks great largely thanks to director Serry, and director of photography Doug Emmett. Mr. von Urtz holds his own, no small deed considering this is his first film and as he is in almost every scene, he is largely expected to carry the movie. Many more seasoned actors have done much worse.
Adam Schartoff, a long time resident of Brooklyn, is the founder and programmer of Filmwax, a film series based in Kings County. Adam is also a contributing writer to a number of film-related publications and websites including Tribeca Films, Filmmaker Magazine and On Demand Weekly.
LOVELESS (FilmBuff) is now On Demand.
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