Lymelife

Lymelife is an indie drama comedy (would I get away with 'indramedy'?) (No.) about some people who do some stuff and say some things in America some time around 1980. I'm not about to go into any more detail because a) it's not very interesting and b) that's what the IMDb is for. Use it or lose it.

It was made about two years ago and, like The Brothers Bloom, it's been hanging around since then like a group of kids outside Spar, waiting for someone to come along and release it into the wild.

Lymelife is notable for starring two sixths of the Culkin acting dynasty, one of whom looks like Tobey Maguire, the other of whom doesn't. I can only assume Macaulay is still nursing his bee stings from My Girl, otherwise they would have found a pointless role in this film for him too like they did for Tobey Maguire Culkin.

It's not an appalling film by any standards but if you can't predict what's going to happen several scenes in advance then you need to lock yourself in a room with the entire IMDb Top 250 movies of all time and don't come out until you've watched them all. Even Sleuth.

Lymelife offers nothing new or surprising to make it stand out from the morass of identidramas about dysfunctional families and, with the exception of Timothy Hutton, it wastes a good cast who look like it's too much effort to do any hard acting. In fact to waste Alec Baldwin like this should be punishable by being made to watch a rest-of-the-Baldwins marathon.

It also suffers from a truly awful title, which refers to the tick-borne Lyme disease suffered by one of the characters, and which I assume is some kind of clever metaphor for things that get under your skin and eat away at you from the inside, but in fact just makes you think of disease-ridden ticks.

Watchable, then, but ultimately forgettable. That's even if you get chance to watch it: Lymelife opens in about nine cinemas around the country this weekend then disappears from the face of the Earth, never to be heard of again.

Oh and one more thing: Don't try to sell me your movie by sticking this on one of the posters:

Because a) there's nothing remotely Scorsesish about Lymelife, 2) at least make the effort to spell his name right, and iv) the whole world knows that 'Executive Producer' is a pointless title used when someone agrees to stick their name on the poster in the hope of suckering in a few idiots. Shame on you Marty. I may have to rethink my offer of an interview.

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