Bellflower – 1 1/2 Buckets

With Bellflower, first-time filmmaker Evan Glodell undoubtedly made his $17,000 micro-budget go a long way, technically speaking. With a distinctive look characterized by dirty, wide lenses and a badass focal prop–‘Medusa,’ the muscle-car equipped with functional flamethrowers–there is no doubt that a lot of dedicated, talented people worked on the project. Unfortunately, Glodell and company didn’t spend any of their time working on story, characters, or thematic schema — all of which are, you know, kind of essential to a good movie.

Bellflower essentially adheres to the same ‘ol Sundance ‘breakthrough’ mold, dressing it up as a macho mind-fuck at the end. The characters are the typical twenty-somethings who, rather than spend most of their time looking for jobs in a down economy, instead partake in eccentric endeavors intended to amuse the audience. In an early scene, the two daredevil male leads–Woodrow (Glodell) and Aiden (Tyler Dawson)–shoot a propane tank with a sawed-off shotgun, apparently as part of their ongoing preparation for the apocalypse. It goes boom. Shortly thereafter, Woodrow meets the indie-but-pretty Milly (Jessie Wiseman) in a cricket eating competition, after which they decide to go on a date. He wants to take her someplace nice, but she insists he take her to the seediest restaurant he knows of. That happens to be in Texas, so they drive to the Lone Star State from California on a whim. Woodrow’s car may be a beater, but it boasts a pressurized whiskey dispenser, so everything’s cool. I assume that having Woodrow drink and drive was Glodell’s concept of introducing character flaws.

Had enough yet? I thought so. Bellflower is the latest entry into an Amerindie genre that has devolved — once an honest attempt to dramatize the human condition through hyperbole, the formula has become a way for amateur writers to throw every character-quirk they can think of into one movie. Here, the result is a work of complete artifice, a masturbation session for a young filmmaker who has not yet earned the right to an audience. Speaking of masturbation: Glodell cast himself in the lead role, only to deliver the kind of apathetic, distinctly non-humanlike performance you generally only find in mumblecore films.

It’s almost as if Glodell realized that he had written a conventional quirk-fest when he finished typing the second act, because the third descends into complete chaos, the lazy filmmaker’s solution to a script headed nowhere. Medusa, the focus of the final passages, is one darn cool automobile (custom made for the film), but she isn’t worth sitting through Woodrow and Aiden’s antics (and, in one case, the former’s apocalyptic hallucinations) to experience. Undoubtedly, fans of Bellflower will argue that its finale is some kind of profound statement about desperation and rebirth (or something like that), but they are the same ex-frat-boys who defended The Boondock Saints ten years ago.

The movie looks great (keep an eye out for cinematographer Joel Hodge’s name in the future) and female lead Jessie Wiseman is charming enough that a Hollywood crossover is inevitable, but beyond that, there is nothing to see in Bellflower. If the movie were even half as original as Glodell thought it was, then perhaps it would have been watchable.

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Originally posted on September 1, 2011 for the film’s theatrical release.

Bellflower (2011, USA). Produced by Paul Edwardson, Brian Thomas Evans, Luis Flores Jr., Evan Glodell, Vincent Grashaw, Joel Hodge, Jet Kauffman, Jonathan Keevil, Josh Kelling, Lenny Powell, Ari Presler, Chelsea St. John, Efraim Wyeth, and Byron Yee. Directed and written for the screen by Evan Glodell. Starring Evan Glodell, Jessie Wiseman, Tyler Dawson, Rebekah Brandes, Vincent Grashaw, Zack Kraus, Keghan Hurst, and Alexandra Boylan. Distributed by Oscilloscope Pictures. Rated R, with a running time of 106 minutes.