Getting your first feature film finished and released is a cause for celebration. It’s a Herculean task involving training or on-the-set-experience, finance, casting, locations and hiring a crew.
Most first-time feature filmmakers don’t get this far. And many of those who do can’t find distribution for their newborn feature.
If you wonder why no distributor nibbled at “The Wedding Party,” director and co-writer Kyle Larsen, it might be due to you filming, editing and releasing a walk-through hehearsal. Your “finished” film needed a few more staged readings in a workshop setting, a fresh set of eyes and ears to tell you “Not one joke works” and that entire production is 113 minutes of Arizon to Montana road trip tedium.
The “editing” should have started with the script and left out a third of the incidents — again, no laughs — that were sleepily acted-out and filmed. Another vigorous cut in the final edit — providing you cooked up or bought a few gags that play — would have shaved endless unfunny reaction shots and further trimmed this wallowing hog of a movie down.
The cast has little to work with and can’t make that “little” even a little bit funnier.
You’ve made a road to nowhere road trip comedy that staggers toward a conclusion, not a climax. So I hope nobody blew too much money on champagne to celebrate the wrap.
Two sets of adult siblings are wrangled into making a 1400 mile trek together in a former rock band’s van by their aged about-to-marry parents (Shalee Mortensen Schmidt and Bill Gillane). They make videos, leave QR coded quests for them to accomplish on the way.
And short-tempered job-quitting Sean (Ische Bee) and her put-upon, just-dumped born victim sister Maggie (Amelia Joan Bowles) aren’t equally enthusiastic about “crazy” Dad’s latest scheme.
“The road to Thompson Falls (Montana) is full of surprises,” they’re promised. Not really.
Onetime TV star Theo (Erik Kl Larsen), reduced to teaching acting at summer camps and his writer-brother Olan (James Rudd) aren’t all that thrilled, even after the van Mom they toured the country with accompanying her and her band Neon Valkyrie decades ago.
“Shield Maiden” the van had good memories. Some of them were good, anyway.
They head out on an odyssey that includes meeting old hippy acquaintances of their parents and the like, finding items in a scavenger hunt and playing confessional road-trip games to tell each other all about themselves.
Nobody’s “story” is fascinating, although a couple have promise. Characters with edge have that edge rubbed off by the funereal pacing and general mamby-pamby nature of the story.
Simple slam-dunk “incidents” are so mishandled as to play as lifeless.
Road comedies are one of the cinema’s most reliable genres, but this movie doesn’t try hard enough when hunting for interesting interludes, detours and moments of truth or “personal growth.”
The players don’t have a lot of pop to their performances, and Larsen the director smothers potential in the slack way they’re filmed, pointless edits filled with dead space before and after a line or “gag.” It’s “student film” sloppy.
Comedy is fast and this picture stalls out at the first intersection it teeters into and never gets going afterwards.
Yes, all involved got your first feature finished. But don’t ever roll camera again without having more on the page and more sense about what to cut and what to leave out of each and every finished “take.”
Rating: TV-14, a hint of violence, some nudity, profanity
Cast: Ischa Bee, Amelia Joan Bowles, Erik K. Larsen, James Rudd, Bill Gillane and Shalee Mortensen Schmidt
Credits: Directed by Kyle Larsen, scripted by Kyle Larsen and Tyler Harrah. A District 22 release on Amazon Prime.
Running time: 1:53
