Earlier today I started watching a movie on Hulu. It was there because I was adding movies to my watchlist last night – without a great deal of consideration except “that seems like it might be interesting”. The movie stars Cristina Ricci, which I thought would be a huge plus (and should have been), because aside from being cute as a button she also plays some pretty quirky characters and generally seems to add to a film. Well. An army of Cristina Riccis could not have saved this turkey. I don’t think I got more than about 20 minutes into it before I turned it off in disgust and decided to abandon it for good. To start with, the premise of the movie is asinine: A man released from prison kidnaps a young woman within an hour or so of his release – so that he can take her home to meet his parents (to whom he has lied about the reasons for not visiting for the past few years) and have her pretend to be his wife. Is that not silly? Not only that, but when he kidnaps her he has her drive her car to the destination – because he has nothing, and because he can’t drive a stick. She goes along with him even though she has numerous chances to simply drive away and leave him. Then they meet his parents at their home (I’m embarrassed to admit that I watched this far!) where the four of them sit around a table, and the camera angle changes from place to place on the table… and the actors’ relative positions to each other changes, as well – during the course of a single conversation. In addition, while the conversation is going on and the actors’ positions change (like expensive musical chairs) they tend to disappear from the conversation. They probably even come back to the table – later in the same conversation – wearing different clothes. (This is a failure of “continuity”, where obvious errors in the filmmaking and editing process throw the viewer out of the story to concentrate more on the errors and stupidity of the story than the story itself.) If you want to see a bad, bad movie, I highly recommend “Buffalo ‘66”. What a stinker. ETA: And yeah, the dialog was stupid, too.