This movie attempts the amazing feat of making a very political movie with absolutely no stance, climax, or resolution all within the framing of the story being a love triangle between a guy, his professor/landlord who he's sleeping with, and a girl at his college who he is ideologically opposed to. What is this movie trying to say? As far as we can tell the thesis is: people disagree on stuff at colleges. Wow. Nailed it.
The movie starts with a few different plots. We have a guy just arriving at the airport and looking for a place to stay near the college who then ends up getting a spare room in his professor's house (and yes, ending up sleeping with her; messy). We see a blonde woman go to a doctor who waxes poetic about Marie Curie and women in STEM. We see another girl talk to a conservative guy at a bus stop, and then leave, apparently not needing the bus. Then we get a man who has apparently never seen snow and who no one can understand even though his English is not hard to understand even with his accent. We wondered if this guy was meant to be an alien for a good long time and we were just being told he was unintelligible even though he's not. Turns out no. This man is the director, and this is maybe meant to be a commentary on immigrants. Also, he's very old and in college, which is totally fine, but the movie is framed like we are supposed to believe he is the same age as his 19-year-old classmates. Conservative guy has conservative meetings with the other guys, and starts dating bus stop girl who's a centrist but kind of annoyed that he won't have premarital sex. Eventually the professor-screwer starts dating the blonde woman who went to the doctor and we have a love triangle with no real resolution. Also, he gets really conservative from hanging out with conservative guy and she gets more liberal by talking to a liberal girl. This could be a conflict, but mostly it's about the love triangle. A lot of political talking points of 2007/2008 are brought up signifying nothing.
This film is quite funny but a bit too long. The sets are all hotel rooms or the children's section of the library, you can see the shadow of the cameraman a bunch, the audio is horrendous, the acting is flat, and the story doesn't arc at all. The problem is, it's two hours long. It's definitely fun for the first hour and 15 minutes but then it starts to really drag. Definitely good for one watch, but maybe not a repeat.
Spoon Rating: 6
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