Personal Velocity

Director: Rebecca Miller
Year Released: 2002
Rating: 2.0

Goody Miller adapts her novel into a movie, and in the process forgets that cinema is the illusion of motion, not a series of brightly-lit photographic snippets to gaze at in-between endless voice-over (slightly off-topic, but I think of the last twenty or so films I've seen - ranging from 1950 to now - about five or six have really overdone the VO as well). There is an overwhelming sense of humanity in this film - you can tell she really empathizes with her characters and respects them - and that adds a good degree of likeability, but the clips don't mean too much individually (fathers are the real problem) and the attempt to link them together (with an accidental death reported on the radio or TV) isn't particularly impressive.