Like Crazy: Review By kiion

Throughout cinema history, independent film making has become more and more common. With some of these movies becoming both interesting and genre defining productions. With tighter budgets and less guidelines to what can be produced and shown on screen, independent film can allow the filmmaker the independence to present their vision in all its entirety.

These looser controls on what can be shown allows for many bolder subject matters to be presented, allow more realism to shine through and in general allow bigger risks to be taken. However, with all the praise that can be given to this style of filmmaking, the revolutions that can be found when looking back, and the ease of gaining the funding that is needed to produce what is sought after, means that sometimes, films that are not needed to be produced are green lit and distributed to people, 'Like Crazy' is one such film.

Like Crazy is a romantic drama that revolves around the lives of two young people. The complication to the seemingly perfect lifestyle of said characters is that one lives in America the other in the United Kingdom. The narrative outlines these lives as they move apart from each other but remain committed to one another. Throughout its duration the two principal cast split up on numerous occasions, get married, skip the Visa period on the passports, get banned from certain countries, find new love and settle down. A lot seems to happen but one would never know as the plot is handled in a ludicrous manner, which only serves at confusing to the audience in many different ways.

With badly edited cuts found throughout, the location and time line of the scenes are extremely hard to follow. Having a narrative that spans many different years, but not outlining to the audience what amount of time has passed for these characters just means that this movie is virtually impossible to follow. Intercut into the poor plot line are characters that not only seem pointless in moving the story forward, but also seem only to be there to fill out space. Viewers are never given a second to understand the meaning of said characters being present and as such the film just becomes cluttered. On the whole the acting found within this movie is adequate, but on more than one occasion scenes appear cringe-worthy and laughable (why is it never that the two people seem happy if they're in love?). All these issues bring about the fact that this film never seems realistic, so why should audiences care.

The filmmaking that is found within this movie is also of a poor standard. What is the need of showing a scene to the viewer, if it is done on a rocky handy-cam and as such is impossible to view clearly? With the wooden script not helping with any characters development, the writers have only allowed enough content to fill possibly 30 minutes of tape, but decide for some reason to stretch it to three times that amount, the stretch being present throughout.

This movie is a real shame to watch as, after the film has run its course, audience members will only wonder what has gone on and what the actual reason of being put through it is. In short there is no real meaning to this film, and only the minority of people will find it worthwhile. Generic in every sense but bad in showcasing it.