Friday 2 July 2010

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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7 comments :

  1. Hello! I was gently nudged towards this blog yesterday via an Empire tweet, and I have to say it makes highly enjoyable reading. I chuckled at least 4 times while reading a random selection of past entries and looked through the entire 30-Minute Freeze Frame Feature, which was I think is a really interesting way of looking a films (after all, what is film but a series of carefully composed still images played one after the other very quickly?)

    Anyway, my point is: You have a new regular reader in me, and while I am bored at work I shall continue to peruse past postings.

    Keep up the good work!

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  2. P.S. Regarding Lymelife - there must be something wrong with the film when two drastically different posters are deemed suitable enough to reflect the themes of the film. The above poster has a menacing 'autumnal sexual assault' vibe, while the other poster paints the film as a gentle 'Home-Improvement' style comedy.

    Still, the Media Studies student in me finds it fascinating how one film can be marketed in such opposite ways...

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  3. To go off on a slight tangent... what's all the fuss about Sleuth? It's pretty shit. It's a got a ridiculous twist ruined by Michael Caine's inability to do any other accents except his own, and doesn't deserve its place in the top 250. I'd rather see Weekend at Bernies in there.

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  4. Mr Fisto, glad to have you on board. Four chuckles must be a record, I shall get on the phone to Norris McWhirter immediately.

    Colin, Sleuth is abominable. I can only imagine Caine has registered with the IMDb under a thousand different names (all with the same accent) and voted for his own film over and over again. When I interview him I'll ask him.

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  5. I like Sleuth.

    This was insanely formulaic, the Ice Storm brand of scandalous-suburbia-pre-90s drama I'd beat up if they were people.

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  6. I try to refer to 'acting dynasties' as frequently as is humanly possible, and yet I have never referred to the Culkins as one. Why?

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  7. Because life's too short to refer to the Culkins.

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