This movie is an instructive demonstration of the difference between skill and talent. Writer/director/editor Miles Matthew Montalbano clearly has some skill as a filmmaker. He knows which end of a camera is up and how to utilize various storytelling techniques. Talent, however, is not something Montalbano shows much of in this Revolution Summer. He's strung together a bunch of concepts instead of writing something with a real plot and a consistent theme. He doesn't understand which of his characters are worth focusing on or why. His dialog is so unnatural that even George Lucas would say "You can write this stuff, but you sure can't say it". And at the end of his production the only emotion he's stirred is relief that it's finally over.
Revolution Summer focuses on 4 aimless 20somethings. Hope (Mackenzie Firgens) is looking for meaning in life and arbitrarily narrates the movie. Frankie and Charlie (Samuel Child and Zak Kilberg) are dilholes who wear brown corduroy pants and are in some new millennium mashup of the Baader/Meinhof Gang and the Symbionese Liberation Army. Francine (Lauren Fox) is a cynical party girl who thinks she wants nothing more out of life than getting wasted, getting screwed and getting it all over with. Hope and Frankie fall into one of those undefined relationships young people curl up in nowadays, Francine mostly sits around listening to other people BS about life and Charlie goes through cinematic devolution. He starts out with all the trappings of a real character with a part to play in the story, then gradually regresses into little more than a stick figure the film can't wait to get rid of. Oh, Francine and Charlie also get naked (but not together), Hope remains fully clothed and Frankie appears to have a prostate problem because he's constantly getting up in the middle of the night to take a whiz.
This is the sort of movie that has title cards throughout it with phrases on them like "and so" or "real freedom" to signify what the following scenes are all about. It's the sort of movie that spends 37 seconds watching a girl lie motionless on a bed while she listens to a expositionary news report on the unseen television offscreen. It's the sort of movie where there's a scene of a guy peeing that lasts almost as long as the one with the motionless girl on the bed. It's the sort of movie that wins awards at film festivals and no one but amateur movie reviewers ever pays to see it except by accident.
Revolution Summer's anti-capitalist musings and dorm room-level bull sessions on existence are all crap. The one interesting and vaguely appealing aspect of this thing is the contrast between cynical party girl Francine and Hope's yearning for meaning or at least something more than getting drunk and/or laid every night. So of course, that particular piece of the story is dropped before it really gets anywhere when Hope and Francine have an abortive lesbian make-out session.
Outside of one scene where the camera movement gets frustratingly excessive, writer/director/editor Montalbano effectively executes most of what he tries to do in this movie. Unfortunately, what he's doing is almost always obvious and most of it isn't at all well thought out.
Skip this thing.
Revolution Summer focuses on 4 aimless 20somethings. Hope (Mackenzie Firgens) is looking for meaning in life and arbitrarily narrates the movie. Frankie and Charlie (Samuel Child and Zak Kilberg) are dilholes who wear brown corduroy pants and are in some new millennium mashup of the Baader/Meinhof Gang and the Symbionese Liberation Army. Francine (Lauren Fox) is a cynical party girl who thinks she wants nothing more out of life than getting wasted, getting screwed and getting it all over with. Hope and Frankie fall into one of those undefined relationships young people curl up in nowadays, Francine mostly sits around listening to other people BS about life and Charlie goes through cinematic devolution. He starts out with all the trappings of a real character with a part to play in the story, then gradually regresses into little more than a stick figure the film can't wait to get rid of. Oh, Francine and Charlie also get naked (but not together), Hope remains fully clothed and Frankie appears to have a prostate problem because he's constantly getting up in the middle of the night to take a whiz.
This is the sort of movie that has title cards throughout it with phrases on them like "and so" or "real freedom" to signify what the following scenes are all about. It's the sort of movie that spends 37 seconds watching a girl lie motionless on a bed while she listens to a expositionary news report on the unseen television offscreen. It's the sort of movie where there's a scene of a guy peeing that lasts almost as long as the one with the motionless girl on the bed. It's the sort of movie that wins awards at film festivals and no one but amateur movie reviewers ever pays to see it except by accident.
Revolution Summer's anti-capitalist musings and dorm room-level bull sessions on existence are all crap. The one interesting and vaguely appealing aspect of this thing is the contrast between cynical party girl Francine and Hope's yearning for meaning or at least something more than getting drunk and/or laid every night. So of course, that particular piece of the story is dropped before it really gets anywhere when Hope and Francine have an abortive lesbian make-out session.
Outside of one scene where the camera movement gets frustratingly excessive, writer/director/editor Montalbano effectively executes most of what he tries to do in this movie. Unfortunately, what he's doing is almost always obvious and most of it isn't at all well thought out.
Skip this thing.
