Pearblossom Hwy
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Pearblossom Hwy

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In the follow-up to Littlerock, director Mike Ott shows the Spike Jonze road from music videos to indie films is fraught with self-indulgent danger. Reprising his role from Ott’s last feature, small town 20-something Cory stops huffing nitrous bulbs for long enough to begin the quest to find the man who may or may not be his father. Joining him are his overbearing brother Jeff, recently discharged from the military, and his best friend Atsuko, who occasionally prostitutes herself out in a squalid motel room to finance a visit to her dying grandmother. Nothing, utterly nothing, ensues. 

Every vaguely interesting trope in this film is abandoned to make room for Cory’s endless monologues – each of which would win third prize at a LiveJournal-themed open mic night, but only because the judging panel worried that there would be an “incident” if the contestant went home empty-handed. Presumably Ott wanted a means to demonstrate his subject’s insularity from Atsuko’s sufferings, which would be fine if her character development went beyond borrowing a few pedestrian stylistic quirks from Japanese cinema.

The entire emotional tenor of this film is incoherent from start to finish. Ott can’t seem to decide whether he wants his aesthetic to match the anaemic lives of his subjects or to play around with the aperture on his digicam. To call this film undergraduate would be an insult to preening, Nietzsche-quoting undergraduates everywhere. Student union election campaigns have more candour, campus environment collectives have more charisma, than this overwrought, exploitative cringefest masquerading as social commentary. How fitting that the third act is set in San Francisco: this could convincingly pass for Tommy Wiseau’s stab at mumblecore, only without a shred of potential for retrospective cult status.