Jimmy and Judy

There is a very brief period of many peoples' young lives, usually sometime in junior high school or high school, when it is cool to be a loser, an outcast. The girls like the guys that ditch school and get in trouble with the police and have disastrous relationships with their parents. That period of life does not, however, extend beyond high school, which might be why 21-year-old Jimmy (played by a plump, 30-year-old Eddie Furlong) manages to get a high school girl to fall in love with him.

I love the irony here, by the way. Judy is clearly a smart and successful student who one day is attacked by a group of girls, the bad kids (by the way, do high school girls really do this? Definitely not when I was in school…), which Jimmy catches on tape because he films everything. Later he exacts vicious revenge on two of the people involved in the attack and shows it to Judy, who is horrified but ultimately touched that he would look out for her in such a way. Soon afterwards she falls intensely in love with Jimmy, who is not a far cry removed from the same kinds of jerks that attacked her in the first place.

This is going to be a film that most people will either love or hate, although I happen to have strongly disliked it, but I didn't hate it. It's an extremely simply made film, shot almost entirely from the perspective of a home video camera and cut for the most part to run like an unedited MiniDV tape. There won't be any concern about motion sickness, but it's an intensely realistic portrayal of the lives of a couple of genuinely screwed up kids. In short, for a good majority of the movie it is genuinely unpleasant to watch, as it is meant to be.

Personally, I knew a lot of people like Jimmy (minus the killing) in high school because I hung out with the wrong people for a couple years. These are the guys that never go home because they hate their parents and are always drunk or on drugs. I don't know why people hang out with people like that, they are highly unpleasant to be around, particularly the nutty ones like the crackhead that Jimmy and Judy shack up with for a couple hours midway through the movie. I like movies that bring back fun memories from high school. Jimmy and Judy brings back memories, but all the wrong ones.

I bought the movie, by the way, because I was curious to see what Eddie Furlong was up to these days. He was phenomenal in Terminator 2 but his career never really seemed to go very far after that, except for his outstanding role in the spectacular American History X. I don't know much about his personal life, but he is a little TOO good at playing a dirtbag. It's also interesting that he looks so handsome on the cover box, because little Eddie has become quite the meatball.

Anyway, his Jimmy in this movie is an unhinged lunatic with absolutely no redeeming values whatsoever, while Judy is pretty and smart. Whether you like the movie or not, believing her interest in him is no small feat. They are polar opposites and it's nearly impossible to understand what she sees in him, but their chemistry works well enough so I guess it doesn't matter. We do, however, see in great detail why Jimmy is so twisted (we are, after all, products of our environment, and his parents' relationship is one of the sickest marriages I've ever seen, in a movie or otherwise), but we learn nothing about Judy's past, including why she was being bullied at school.

But the worst part of all, by far, is this ridiculous commune at the end of the film. It is a mixture of a twisted cult group and what I imagine Woodstock must have looked like. You see, there is some insane fanatic known as Uncle Rodney who has started this as a place for trashy people to go live. I think his exact words were "garbage people," meaning they are the garbage of society. Nice. I can see the appeal already.

This Rodney is played by William Sadler, who must never have had a more pointless role. The only purpose he serves here is to make this already trashy movie look like preachy crap. You can feel yourself being punched in the face with the transparent "social commentary" when he gives his goofy, fiery speech near the end of the movie. You see, apparently he believes that by providing this retreat for the trash of society, they'll become stronger with each new addition, while the "outside world" gets weaker with every one, until they become so strong that they can rain garbage on the world that threw them away and then "fornicate in their ashes." Are you hearing this? WOW.

I would hate to be the one to burst his balloon, but I have a feeling that the subtraction of a lot of criminals and junkies and drunks is not exactly going to make society weaker…

Ultimately, the movie starts off as a serious downer and goes downhill from there. I was thoroughly depressed by the time it was over and couldn't even take my afternoon nap. I hate that.

Note: Another IMDb user called this the best film at the San Fran Indie Fest. Boy am I glad I missed that one. And by the way, some lunatic from the San Francisco Chronicle has claimed that this is the movie that Natural Born Killers wanted to be, and at 1/20th of the cost.

Yeah, right. They spent $500,000 on this? Scary. I would say that not more than about $1,200 made it onto the screen….

Jimmy and Judy This clever, heartfelt piece of gonzo indie film-making is the movie Natural Born Killers should have been. It commences with a clever premise: everything we see is captured through the lens of Jimmy's videocamera. In the first reel, this conceit works a tad like Bogart's character just out of prison in Elmer Daves' Dark Passage, with the subjective camera point-of-view employed until after plastic surgery.

Jimmy (a great turn by former child star Edward Furlong, whose career seems to be headed in the right direction again) reveals himself only in the presence of Judy (Rachael Bella). Jimmy has poor impulse control. He woos Judy by exacting revenge on the kids who have bullied her at school, films his parents' gender-switching sex, and, in a very funny piece of Americana, freaks out in a fast-food car lane after pickles are improperly included with his double cheeseburger.

They hit the road for their obligatory crime spree. A bout of in-car flirting leads to a very twisted hit-and-run accident. J & J wind up in a rural commune where young folks of both genders become the playthings of a speed freak Hitler (prompting a scary monologue by William Sadler).

J & J would be truly sublime if the plot gave more attention to Bella's Judy. Furlong and Bella have that rare sexual/emotional chemistry that allows one to suspend judgment and enjoy the ride. Furlong is a smart, intuitive actor who seems willing to do almost anything to satisfy a role. The fast-food diet gives him a slightly bloated look, which is good for the character, bad for Eddie. Superbly helmed by writer/directors Jon Schroder and Randall K. Rubin, this one would make a deliciously twisted teen triple-feature with Larry Clark's Another Day in Paradise and Francois Ozon's Criminal Lovers. (Roxie, 2/4; Women's Bldg., 2/12)

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where I'd only first heard of it the very day I saw it. Seeing this dark, grungy low-budget independent movie late at night at a large-scale mainstream theater just seemed to drop in my lap. It was quite an experience. Only halfway through the film did I realize that this shot in my town. There's a scene where we see the profile of Rachael Bella in medium closeup as she drives. In the background, I saw what I had a strange feeling was familiar. Then, after she passes a few dead giveaways, I'm taken by surprise in finding that this film was shot in my city. Well, it was shot in the grimiest and seediest parts of my city, but it's my city. I then realized that that must be the reason why it's being shown at this mainstream theater rather than being confined to the Esquire or the Mariemont theaters.

Jimmy and Judy is one of those relentless gritty and voyeuristic couple-on-the-run movies. It's reminiscent of Francois Ozón's Criminal Lovers, and even Baise Moi, which was scuzzy to the point of being pornographic. Jimmy and Judy is one of those movies that, in the end, is almost completely desensitizing and fixates your mind on a disturbing and morbid atmosphere that you'd rather it not be fixated on, and you end up being under its spell for the next day or two.

That is not to say that Jimmy and Judy is not a well-made movie. It is. Otherwise, how could it put you under such a spell? Its effect is the surefire sign that it's done its job. It's about everything intriguing to that is to most people the underside of your mind. It's all about the effect of alienation, vindication most people only think of under the influence of serious bouts of anger, and other things that, in a movie, are not for everyone. Yes, there are many movies that tackle subject matter like this, but not to such a raw and overwhelming extent. William Sadler's character alone is one of the scariest and most realistic people I think I've ever seen in a movie.

Jimmy and Judy is not quite at the status where it can be called a great movie, but it has a very clear message and a very precise and innovative way of conveying it. It-does-not-pull- any-punches.

Jimmy and Judy is a shared journey exploring the love, idealism and romance of youth set against the forces of mental instability and aggression. The self-filming style added greatly to the drama and immediacy. I was constantly wondering if I would get to keep seeing what was coming next. Sometimes I could see where it was heading, other times I was surprised, even shocked by the turns of events.

Great dramatic tension, wonderful acting and complex, believable characters. The actors were well cast for their parts. I was totally immersed in their performances.

This film is superb. I highly recommend it.

Jimmy & Judy overcomes it's limitations to be a film I'd definitely recommend even if intriguingly it points to greater things that it never achieves.

It's the first time I've seen a film filmed entirely from a first person point of view and I found this very striking. In many ways approaching film narrative through this device is very fitting for our age. We are surrounded as never before by video cameras, on phones, on CCTV etc and we spend more and more of our time viewing the end products of all of this on the internet. It stuck me watching me Jimmy & Judy just how rich the possibilities are here, developed further it could become a new genre of film. These possibilities aren't deeply explored here, but none the less where they are, it's surprising who naturally they seem to fit into the narrative. We see this as a story told about Jimmy, yet he's it's creator. People are frequently aware that they are speaking to camera, yet somehow we feel they are being filmed speaking to camera, as if there was another camera there filming this. It's a tribute to the skill of the directors that all of this works as smoothly as it does.

As other reviewers have pointed out another arresting feature of this film is the chemistry between to the two characters, fortuitously helped by the fact there was real off screen chemistry there as they actually ended up getting married in real life. Although I'd no idea watching at the time, this helps to keep their journey intriguing and watchable. Edward Furlong in particular gives it all with this character and as OTT as it can be it's all very watchable. I'd have to point out some great dark humor at the beginning to where Furlong's character films some scenes between Mommy & Daddy that really should have stayed secret – very funny.

This is a great film and all the more impressive for being made on a budget of close to nothing in 15 days. However it's not without it's flaws. All things considered it would be nitpicking to go after anything small, but there are two things that stop it being in the ranks of real great film making for me.

The first is that cliché of clichés in American cinema, guns. I know Raymond Chandler said whenever he ran out of ideas when writing he always fell back on having a man walk into a room with a gun. Perhaps it takes a non-American from the outside looking in (I'm Irish) to see it but characters with guns has become utterly tedious in American cinema. It's been cinematic shorthand for drama and angst since the days of film noir and while it's been reinvented successfully over the decades, it's formulaic in the extreme. So hence Jimmy & Judy's Bonnie & Clyde style crime spree becomes a little, how can I say this, done so many times before. People using guns, dealing with guns, or having guns seem to be in about three quarters of American films. Boring, boring, boring – can't you find some other way to talk about the human condition.

The second problem is their characters motivation for this angst driven spree. The film has a brilliant monologue near the end from William Sadler, a sort of white trash Declaration of Rights that speaks rivetingly of alienation, anger and despair. It seems to form a sort of denouement, the trouble is it's nothing to do with Jimmy or Judy who seem to have grown up in nice, well off, middle class homes. It's a shame having established this brilliant level of passion in Sadler's character, something similar couldn't be found for the leads, but apart from their love for each other it never is. By way of explanation we're offered their characters social ostracism in school but given their reaction to it, it doesn't come across as convincing. So as watchable as their journey, given its level of alienation and anger, it's never truly credible or believable.

Still that's not to gripe too much, as a debut this is excellent and well worth watching.