Mind Poison

If you know anything about this movie, it's probably that "it has a good soundtrack." I can't really disagree, since I already had 8 of the 13 songs on the soundtrack (well, one of them was a remix of a song I already have). Still, as brilliant a soundtrack as it is, it does have a movie to go along with it, and surprisingly enough, it's not bad either.

I wouldn't quite call it a grand slam, it had a few missteps. There's a scene in the beginning where the movie is trying to establish how lame and miserable his life in LA is, as he's a waiter at a Vietnamese restaurant, and a particular table is giving him trouble. The scene is just really dumb and poorly written, and squanders an opportunity for some real laughs. Another thing is that the visuals you might have seen in the trailer are in the movie, but some of them are dead-ends that seem to be in the movie just because they look cool. I liked them, but can't help but feel that a couple extra lines of dialog, or maybe just some slicker editing might have made them fit into the flow better. Lastly, the ending has a scene that might have been played as comedy, but I suspect it was actually an attempt to put some last-second romantic suspense into the movie. It ends up with the right conclusion, but again, I think this could have been tweaked.

This is all very minor, Seinfeld-ish whining, obviously. This is easily the best writer/director newcomer movie I've seen since Good Will Hunting.