Howard Goldberg’s Apple Pie built itself a cult by virtue of being entertaining amongst harsh critiques and satire. It is a characteristic that many Howard Goldberg films continue to share today. Howard Goldberg is fresh off his latest film ‘Double Exposure’ which takes a more modern and fresh approach to the concept of plot and story. What Pi Hole brings to the table is an idea many have avoided, or in essence, has become an amazing concept in an ironic or humorous light. Nonetheless, Double Exposure looks promising and is well worth the wait.
The movie shows its color right at the start – it begins with a confrontation over the phone, wherein a downtrodden photographer named Peter (Alexander Calvert), who is in his car driving somewhere in Los Angeles, is arguing with his wife Lora (Kahyun Kim), a lawyer who is enjoying herself back at home with some wine. What would make Tommy Wiseau’s The Room look like Sorkin’s work is the conversation that goes on between the couple. Lora is convinced that Peter’s unresolved love for his ex-girlfriend and deceased mother Sara (Caylee Cowan) is the reason why he is still a child. However, Peter claims that he does not ascribe any meaning to his relationship with Sara, and in hours of heated discussion he almost gets into a crash, but his vehicle is completely fine. He’s just about to get a call from Sara – which will turn out that she’s really alive and living around the corner.
“Everything that we see, or appear to be, is simply a dream within a dream,” wrote Edgar Allan Poe. In the film by Goldberg however, what we see is not a flashback but a dream that is embedded in a flash that is framed around an out of body experience, or something of that nature. It is a jumbled mess that processes time sequentially Sara’s mysterious phone call signals the commencement of a head-abandoning mind warp that brings us back to the early days of Peter and Sara’s relationship while showing us what we think is contemporary time, and yet somehow still manages to make the two time frames overlap so much that it becomes impossible to focus on the narrative, which is perfectly plausible.
I suspect that Goldberg wants to achieve a sort of LA neo-noir, the sort of film that has been heavily influenced by David Lynch and takes place in Los Angeles (he often uses that Lynch-style blur effect), where non bad people are seduced by the attractiveness of being a celebrity. The Hollywood trope is complete with a sleazy publisher who is the stand-in for Harvey Weinstein and a fantastic South Parkish photographer (Simon Kim) who self-praises himself for sleeping with all his models including Sara. But clearly, Goldberg doesn’t for one second have Lynch’s flair for the material, with the entertainment value being how badly this whole thing has been pulled off.
Double Exposure is one of those dreadful films that should only be produced in LA where talent is available in plenty in such is a fix that they do not ask questions no matter how wacky the screenplay they are on. The picture has the thoroughly mediocre but eminently acceptable aesthetic of a Lifetime film, and Cowan’s seriously psycho performance as Sara makes one think she is headed in that direction. The acting never deteriorates to the scale of similar scale productions which are shot in some of the more provincial American cities. But everything is just slightly off, such as the frustratingly detached blocking and editing which would have characters wait out of shot until they are brought on screen. You can tell most of the actors here are perfectly competent, however, some of them are painfully embarrassed to deliver their horrible dialogues. Some actors in this film take the latter route like Kim, and take the cue to its extreme.
The awkward compilation of a relatively average cast and crew under the direction of someone who has a quirky interpretation of film simply baffles me. But there is humor in it and if I didn’t know better I would say there’s a lot of fun in watching the movie. Safety screenings were held and I was the only one who had the opportunity to view the film. As the screen shifted behind me, I wished for the cut-off point when people would actually be able to watch it with an audience. There are lines in this (one of them is ‘You are a master at stealing other people’s souls… but where did you put your own?’) that I can certainly picture in t-shirt designs for fans of trash movies. Watching a movie like Double Exposure can be compared to talking about a really great roller-coaster ride. No amount of explanation can do justice to the experience and there is not a thing I can say to prepare you for Double Exposure.
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