Director: Azazel Jacobs
Year Released: 2008
Rating: 2.5
A businessman from California - with a wife and infant back home - visits his parents in Manhattan (Flo and Ken Jacobs, director Azazel's real-life parents) where he feels drawn in by his childhood world and can't bring himself to leave, eventually causing his parents to worry (and his wife to become understandably upset). Generally this kind of pity party would earn little more than disdain, but the semi-autobiographical aspect is worth paying attention to: it's about the reluctance to leave a liberal/arts-influenced childhood for one of familial responsibility, weeping babies and business world B.S. Mom draws, Dad makes his famous seizure-inducing visual experiments, no one raises their voices and the apartment itself is like a tree fort built from old-world trinkets found on eBay. The young Mr. Jacobs still has to room for improvement when it comes to pacing and character development - some of this is laborious and his (curiously vacant) lead is so self-involved it's tempting to turn on him and demand he snap out of 'it' at once (I have a suspicion female viewers will be even more repulsed - this is very much a Wounded Guy Movie) - but it looks like his youth spent studying film had a positive effect on him. Now he just needs to prove he knows more of the world than Chambers Street.
