(spoiler alert) Though the actors are fine, this is one of those movies where you keep waiting to find out why we should be interested in these characters, then the end arrives and we realize the filmmakers apparently never understood that was even a problem.
Basically, we get an adult Manhattan manboy who seems to have no interests beyond internet gambling (and who, improbably, does nothing else for work/funds), yet is attractive enough that he should have no trouble with women. Instead, he obsesses exclusively over a "cam-girl" dominatrix. They become "friends," sort of, in that she allows their exchanges to be a little less controlled than those with other clients. But it still seems she's probably only stringing him along for the money, a suspicion not really allayed once she acknowledges that she actually does live nearby. (She'd claimed to be in San Francisco, even for a while after he accidentally spotted here in town.)
These characters are semi-blank slates, and the few people we glimpse who are also in their lives are so dumb and/or crass it makes no sense the protagonists wouldn't be able to do better in terms of friends or lovers. Still, it makes even less sense when the two leads get a "happy ending" that leaves them together--when they've already proven neither of them can be trusted, particularly by each other. So the fadeout makes his stalking OK? Makes her deliberately ripping him off OK? Are we supposed to think "Well,, they deserve each other"?
I honestly could not for the life of me figure out what the makers were thinking. Not that the film needed to be moralizing, but there needed to be SOME acknowledgement that these characters are kind of awful, shallow and aimless with a gloss of hipsterdom. The trouble is, I don't think anyone affiliated with the movie realized that. This is ultimately a movie about people who might have worked as supporting figures in a different central narrative. But they, and their story, ultimately seem trivially wrong-headed floating an entire movie. It's never a good thing when you finish a movie having less notion why it was made than you did 90 minutes earlier, beyond the fact that obviously it put actors and crew to work. But that work needs to add up to something substantial enough to justify feature length, and here it just doesn't--not even close.
Basically, we get an adult Manhattan manboy who seems to have no interests beyond internet gambling (and who, improbably, does nothing else for work/funds), yet is attractive enough that he should have no trouble with women. Instead, he obsesses exclusively over a "cam-girl" dominatrix. They become "friends," sort of, in that she allows their exchanges to be a little less controlled than those with other clients. But it still seems she's probably only stringing him along for the money, a suspicion not really allayed once she acknowledges that she actually does live nearby. (She'd claimed to be in San Francisco, even for a while after he accidentally spotted here in town.)
These characters are semi-blank slates, and the few people we glimpse who are also in their lives are so dumb and/or crass it makes no sense the protagonists wouldn't be able to do better in terms of friends or lovers. Still, it makes even less sense when the two leads get a "happy ending" that leaves them together--when they've already proven neither of them can be trusted, particularly by each other. So the fadeout makes his stalking OK? Makes her deliberately ripping him off OK? Are we supposed to think "Well,, they deserve each other"?
I honestly could not for the life of me figure out what the makers were thinking. Not that the film needed to be moralizing, but there needed to be SOME acknowledgement that these characters are kind of awful, shallow and aimless with a gloss of hipsterdom. The trouble is, I don't think anyone affiliated with the movie realized that. This is ultimately a movie about people who might have worked as supporting figures in a different central narrative. But they, and their story, ultimately seem trivially wrong-headed floating an entire movie. It's never a good thing when you finish a movie having less notion why it was made than you did 90 minutes earlier, beyond the fact that obviously it put actors and crew to work. But that work needs to add up to something substantial enough to justify feature length, and here it just doesn't--not even close.