Replica [2005]

Gosh darn it, James Nguyen has done it again. This is his second film, shot in between Julie & Jack and Birdemic, and it's somehow so much more poorly made than either of them. Unfortunately, we'll never get anything this pure again since the only films he made after 2010 were sequels full of self-referential humor in the way of Sharknado. The undiluted bad movie beauty is gone. Cherish it.

The film is only an hour long but like his other two movies the first act is way longer than the rest of the film so you don't even hit the second act until more than halfway through the film. It follows a generic everyman who just got a heart transplant made from stem cell cloning; the opening plot description tells us regular cloning is illegal. He's a salesman and, because every one of these movies needs a romance with a blonde girl, he creeps on his doctor until she relents. Creeps on is the accurate expression here; he has even less game than the everymen in the other two films and she absolutely would have blocked him. After some bland dates and a Chinese expression that was utterly baffling and that online research could not verify the existence of, the doctor woman dies in a car crash. Not long after, he sees a brunette girl who looks just like her except she has a tramp stamp with her name, Claudia, and is always wearing low rise bottoms with her bellybutton piercing out (oh, 2005). At least now her intense vocal fry doesn't feel so incongruous. He creeps on this girl too and she dates him instead of macing him and then has the absolute six-feet-under level of self esteem to change her hair and clothes to look like his dead girlfriend, all while being offended that he can't seem to love her for her. Girl, this is what you signed up for when you decided to date this lunatic. In the last fifteen minutes we find out she actually is a clone of the doctor and she was made by the doctor's evil coworker for . . . reasons. Adam had theorized that she would be cloned to finish some project or something, but we literally get no explanation. Everyman and Clone go to destroy the cloning machine and tell the evil doctor beforehand what they're going to do so he pulls a gun on them. A cop shoots down the evil doctor, but the clone gets killed in the process. 

This film has everything: audio feedback, sub-Neil-Breen level green screen, skim milk level acting, Tippi Hedren footage on the television all the time, non-sex scenes, A BIRD. It's so worth a watch, and with the short run time you can even pair it with some wack commercials like we did including the TiddyBear and UroClub. Look them up.

Spoon Rating: 8

Julie And Jack [2003]

When the movie for tonight was announced we didn't think much of it until we saw "directed by James Nguyen" and we knew we were in for a treat. While mostly known for Birdemic, he actually made two films before that, and this romance was his first film.

With all the signature quality of a film you made for a high school foreign language class, we get the story of Jack, poor tech salesman. His sex-obsessed friend tells him to get on a dating website because all your issues can be improved with a relationship and there he meets Lady Renegade. Her actual name is Julie Romanov and she's a computer programmer. She likes to wax poetic about the ephemeral nature of things and Ada Lovelace and does not like to talk about her past. For the first half hour, nothing much happens aside from them getting closer as they go on dates. 

Then suddenly when they are dressed for a Gatsby party and walking through the Fines Arts Palace in San Fran, Jack starts saying things about how he wishes they could meet in real life and not a simulation. We all immediately started placing bets and correctly realized that they have been dating through VR. The next thing we started guessing was, "What's the actual deal with Julie?" None of us believed she was real at that point but was she just AI like in Her or was it more of a "she's dead but programmed herself before she died" deal. Jack spends the next half hour learning about her from a former professor, business partner, an old friend of hers, and an ex before finding her parents. Her mom, played by Tippi Hedrun, reveals that she died two years ago.

Jack breaks up with her because of the sex (no, really, he says that) then goes on a brief soul searching journey to a church that talks about "spiritual love." He decides that he can just date her as the AI reconstruction of a dead girl, and they reunite in virtual reality. Happy ending? I genuinely don't know.

While lacking the glorious CGI of Birdemic, this film has so much to love in its poor acting, silly script, shoddy camera and sound work, and a lot of locations and motifs that are clearly staples of the Nguyen canon. It wasn't really a laugh a minute, but the whole thing was captivating. Maybe Nguyen missed his calling writing for Black Mirror.

Spoon Rating: 7