Jason says: “I am
going to guess that the makers of STARRY EYES have not necessarily
always enjoyed their time trying to make it in L.A. Sure, just by
having made this movie, they have managed to get further than their
characters, but it’s not hard to see the inspiration for this movie:
Take everything people say in jest about what it takes to succeed in
Hollywood, and mean it.
“As things start, Sarah Walker (Alex Essoe) is saying those things.
She’s pretty, young, tight-bodied, not untalented, and willing to spend
almost every hour she’s not working at a dinner with a kind of pervy
dress code in acting class to improve her craft. But just when it
looks like she has failed another audition for another crappy horror
movie, a casting assistant makes note of the frustration and
desperation that has her pulling out her hair in the ladies’ room
afterward and tells her to make use of that – one way or the other.
“Sarah is not alone in this, of course – she’s got a roommate in
roughly the same situation and other friends with similar goals – but
she’s the one that’s going to be tested, and there’s dark territory to
get through before anyone comes out on the other side. How dark? Enough
that when things get really crazy toward the end, the audience
is ready to accept this as the logical extension of everything else
that has been going on, rather than the sudden and drastic shift in
genres as which it might otherwise register. It’s probably still going
to lose some viewers, but more for the explicit way it goes about
making this shift than the shift itself.
“With Sarah being at the center of all this, it’s important Alex Essoe
be up to the task, and she handles the part fairly well. Sarah has to
be vulnerable and sympathetic for how she’s exploited at the start, but
she can’t ever completely be the ingénue. For all that Essoe
shows her
character as being under stress and maybe heading for a breakdown, she
also has to make sure that the audience sees Sarah’s destructive
decisions as her own as opposed to something she was backed or forced
into. Essoe may, at times, seem a little unpolished, but she’s good
enough to get Sarah established as something in the audience’s mind and
then push and pull on whether or not that is the actual case.
“The rest of the cast is capable as well, especially considering that
the most recognizable is likely Pat Healy as Sarah’s boss (who seems
just as happy for the parade of would-be stars coming off the bus as
any studio executive). Few of Sarah’s friends get to particularly
stand out as characters, with Fabianne Therese being the most memorable
for how relatively clumsy she seems to be at cutting Sarah down while
supposedly trying to be nice. It’s perhaps appropriate, though, that
nothing about this movie feels particularly slick or practiced, from
the acting to the locations to some nasty violence toward the end;
there might be a disconnect should a story about the young people
Hollywood chews up and spits out be too far from its characters’
capabilities.
“Those capabilities aren’t meager; STARRY EYES is at the very least
memorable (even if now being able to mentally summon a sound effect for
someone treating our her hair is a rather mixed blessing), and does an
unusually good job of telling a story on this subject without wallowing
in self-pity. Even the most bitingly satiric artists can have trouble
with that, so it’s good to see that filmmakers Dennis Widmyer &
Kevin Kölsch are able to make their point and tell a good story at
the
same time. 3.8 cats
“Seen 29 March 2014 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 16, digital)” |
