Julie and Jack

2003 romantic drama

Rating: 3/20

Plot: Jack, struggling in love and microchip sales, meets Julie online and falls madly in love with her. Julie seems to love him as well, but she will only meet him in some virtual reality world and refuses to tell him anything about her past. He decides to investigate.

As you can tell from the professionally-made poster up there, this is from James Nguyen, the director of the Birdemic movies. This had been on my radar for a while, but I was waiting around for the Bad Movie Club members to watch it with me. I've given up on a lot of things lately, and my Bad Movie Club friends are just one of those things.

This starts as poorly as any movie I can remember with a shot of clouds and a pan flute. There's a promise of a special appearance by Tippi Hedren, and knowing that this is what Tippi Hedren's career has become is enough to make anybody miserable.

This doesn't have the abysmal special effects or environment propaganda to make this is special as Birdemic, but I think anybody who's seen that would know this was a Nguyen production without being told that. Characters say lines that seem to have been written by somebody who learned English from watching soap operas. Scenes are strangely paced. Long chunks of movie pass by without anything happening at all. There are three or four sales meetings, some containing applause.

If Tarantino has a thing for feet, Nguyen obviously has a thing for sales. The repeated motif making a connection between capitalism and sex is almost alarming. Of course, the character who brings that up, Jack's friend Mark, is a total dick, a wannabe Casanova who has two of the most awkward examples of coitus interruptus you're likely to see in a movie. He's played by Will Springhorn with what might be the worst performance in this although the guy who plays Bill (Lee Boren) gives him a run for his money. Bill, also a dick, is Mark's rival at work, and he steals every single scene that he's in. Well, he steals it and sets it on fire and pees on it. That feels more accurate. Most of the performances aren't actually that bad. The guy who plays Jack--Justin Kunkle--is trying very very hard. His career, by the way, went nowhere. He was in a couple of shorts and no other feature-length film.

This movie might break the record for having the most scenes that don't actually need to be in the movie. Of this movie's 90 minutes, I'd say about 80 of them aren't really necessary. It takes about 35 minutes for the movie to even find a real plot. About 25 minutes is taken up by a dating montage that shows off the sights of San Francisco. If Birdemic was Nguyen's clumsy homage to Hitchcock's Birds, this is quite obviously his Vertigo. Most of the movie has Jack running around like either a detective or a stalker, depending on your perspective.

My favorite moments:

--a really awkward church service
--anything with Bill
--a print-out at a college party that says Alpha Pi but has the word Alpha and the symbol for Pi

If you laugh at how this movie ends, you should feel very bad about yourself as a human being.