DVD Son of Morning

It's about a troubled kid who bleeds from his eye in church one day and is immediately snatched up by the media and presented to the world as the Messiah.

The director seems to take his cues from Zach Braff (Garden State), with the Scrubs-like frame skips and indie-emo tracks; though he lacks the sense of artful timing to pull this off effectively as a tool to convey any sort of depth beyond merely getting characters from one scene to the next.

Son of Morning seems to be more of an experiment in the use of frenzied background music to convey the emotions normally exuded in film through writing and performances. It overshadows nearly every potentially-interesting scene with a hasty mix of tracks and sound effects layered on top of one another. It (probably) wants to convey the confusion and/or hysteria of an ordinary kid suddenly being catapulted on a wild ride through pain/tragedy/stardom, just in case the audience doesn't get the point via the pedestrian performances.

If indeed an experiment, it's a failed one, as the music is purely a distraction. A big distraction that is the final nail in a coffin already firmly glued shut.

More mess is amply provided by the parade of uninteresting performances (aside from Danny Glover, the only person worth watching in this cluster-bleep), missed opportunities, awkward pauses, and other missteps. It's a rambling collage with little idea of what it wants to be, and feels long despite being a relatively short film. It eventually attempts to spell out some message that doesn't seem terribly relevant to the brunt of what came before. Overall I found this to be a rather annoying movie.

Nobody sets out to make a bad movie. That said, somebody should have performed an intervention at some point to tell the director that nothing was working and he needed help. Early on I had the feeling that the film was being helmed by someone who really enjoyed saying, "I'm a director," but didn't consider directing as something that should take a lot of thought or work. And then there was the writing which also let me know pretty early that there probably wouldn't be much payoff for my time and attention. **SPOILER** The Sun is going out because it's running out of Hydrogen…because that's what it's made of and if it doesn't have that then it doesn't, like, work right anymore. And that's all you need to know about that. So, now you have a director who doesn't seem to be trying to communicate anything visually, a writer who thinks making sense isn't all that important and guess what, it's the same guy. Later I looked the guy up and discovered that it's his first feature. Which is fine, but why wasn't somebody checking up on him? They used expensive film, had multiple locations and a lot of big name cameos. Why would they sit back and let him pretend like he knew what he was doing? What's that you say? He's Heather Grahams long time, good looking boyfriend? Ohhhhh. Gotcha. I guess that's enough for automatic carte blanche, but they really didn't do the guy any favors. In fact they owe him an apology. A seasoned writer to bounces the script off, and a veteran cinematographer to marry the shot to the message and this film might have been salvaged. Not good, but marketable.

All of the performances are wasted due to lack of control and or vision, the soundtrack is so unimportant to the story or scene that it's actually an unwelcome distraction; "Why are we playing that music at this point in the scene?" "I don't know, cause it was too quiet?" "Hm, okey dokey" The whole exercise reminds me of some people I went to art school with. They know what they like, but they haven't the slightest clue how to get there. And will quickly tell you you're not smart enough to understand what they're saying (Quick tip: Only a stupid person or a con man would ever say something like that). Son of Morning wants to say something important, but important words don't come easy to privileged people. So basically it ends with a string of useless clichés as the protagonist's final speech before a great big giant flaming cliché as his last act.

And not one single second of any of it ever mattered.

2/10