Spin the Bottle

Rating:
Summary: Sympathy lost
Review: Ultimately a disappointing film, though the plot is more feasible than the better written and acted RITES OF PASSAGE. The plot allows five childhood friends now in their late twenties to revisit the past. The two lone male characters have a PAST that causes one of the men to nurture a grudge and the other to suffer pangs of guilt that the female friends have only a cursory knowledge of. This serves as one of those tension points in the film, finally explosive as the characters - and the plot - turn on a game of "spin the bottle." Besides guilt, the same newly engaged man also is forced to realize he's gone through life as a leaf in the breeze, never setting a deliberate course for himself, but instead unpleasantly residing in a state of complacency. He doesn't seem to know how to get himself out of this malaise, and this is the root of all his - and the other man's - problems and why things went so horribly bad between them the issue must still be settled more than a decade later. Though I didn't find any of the characters likeable, seeming far too self-absorbed and infantile, the lot of them, what does work finally are the surprise elements: characters you disliked on sight turn out - by film's end - to be the characters whose view you can most endorse and vice versa. I've never found real-life relationships to work that way, but in a film setting it functions.

Rating:
Summary: Sympathy lost
Review: Ultimately a disappointing film, though the plot is more feasible than the better written and acted RITES OF PASSAGE. The plot allows five childhood friends now in their late twenties to revisit the past. The two lone male characters have a PAST that causes one of the men to nurture a grudge and the other to suffer pangs of guilt that the female friends have only a cursory knowledge of. This serves as one of those tension points in the film, finally explosive as the characters - and the plot - turn on a game of "spin the bottle." Besides guilt, the same newly engaged man also is forced to realize he's gone through life as a leaf in the breeze, never setting a deliberate course for himself, but instead unpleasantly residing in a state of complacency. He doesn't seem to know how to get himself out of this malaise, and this is the root of all his - and the other man's - problems and why things went so horribly bad between them the issue must still be settled more than a decade later. Though I didn't find any of the characters likeable, seeming far too self-absorbed and infantile, the lot of them, what does work finally are the surprise elements: characters you disliked on sight turn out - by film's end - to be the characters whose view you can most endorse and vice versa. I've never found real-life relationships to work that way, but in a film setting it functions.