A movie about fictions, mostly personal ones, and how we represent them to the people around us. Two of the main characters present the fictions, and the other two tend to read them quizzically, not quite understanding what they're trying to say. Not surprisingly, the two writing the fictions rarely actually listen to themselves, so it seems that nobody is really hearing what they have to say.
It's a nicely made movie--shot effectively on video. Good characters that border on cartoon without actually crossing the border into cartoon.
It's another in a line of modern films (Me and You and Everyone We Know being another) that deal with actual children instead of idealized children. That means they're messy, confused, sexually curious but misguided, and caught up in their own world of strange associations. I'm personally tired of the prescient little boy/girl who surprises everybody with their mature outlook on adult situations. Why not let kids be kids, and let childhood be represented for the minefield it really is?
Daniels is very nice as the currently failing writer who once had great praise heaped on him. Like people you see from your high-school who 20 years later still dress the same, his character seems to have a self-image forged from his moment in the limelight and unchanging afterwards. His disregard for other writers, people and events is so complete that he lives inside his prism of absolute opinion, rather than a world of sensory events.
The film is more clever than deep, with two strong metaphors--the title metaphor, about fear, and the Pink Floyd metaphor, which is a little more obvious. But a whole auditorium of high school kids in the 80s who don't know The Wall inside and out? To paraphrase Wayne, that album was standard issue in America from it's debut in the 70s up through the late 80s. I would have believed it more if he had played "Answering Machine" off of the Replacement's Let It Be.
Where we saw it: Movie Theater | We deign to rate it: 81 outta 100