Another good film ruined by a hurried-tidy ending.
Production value, as is usual with low-budget indies, is pretty low. The handheld camera is use to the optimal benefits, emphasizing the confines and the cheap squalor of April's apartment, and making her and her boyfriend's warmth more touching. Joy, th mother, played here by the ever-amazing Patricia Clarkson ("High Art", "Green Mile", "Dogville", delivers a joyless, wry sense of humor with a desperate conviction, which makes her characterization worth of our sympathy and even a little grudging admiration.
There is an abundance of low-key funny moments, and oddball characters.
- The sympathetic neighbor, moved by April's sad childhood horror story: "Mi casa, su casa", moving aside to reveal a messy apartment with dirty cats crawling over a dysfunctional oven.
- The demanding mother, picky even when handed with a reefer: "Tim, roll it tighter next time."
- Wayne with the oven. "Tick-tock" nerviness and fluffy effeteness of the character clearly points to Anthony Perkins in "Psycho".
- Eugene the black gourmet, with his sighing, eye-rolling food snobbery and fussy precision with its preparartion.
- The mother's digression on "Smack Daddy": so delicious that the abrupt hilarity seems to belong more to the stage than the screen.
But the quickie conflict resolution and hug-for-all laziness in the end fail to tie the fun cameos together to make it a good movie, overall. Besides, one can't help finding it all a bit implausible with the character of April: except for some occasional mild snaps, April seems quite a good girl, and we have difficulty seeing her as the problem child that her family made her out to be. As a result, our sympathy goes too much to the daughter, which simplifies and weakens the relationship drama, and makes the comedy a bit too convenient, as simply a "harsh--mother" joke.
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