Dare Review

Truth or dare? How about neither?

Dare, a new film by first time director Adam Salky which premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, investigates the lives of three intertwined high school students. The problem is, this freshman effort isn’t truthful enough to resonate nor daring enough to provoke and therefore it falls flat.

Broken into a tryptique of narratives, Dare follows three high school seniors who share a drama class and a whole lot of drama. First up is Alexa (Emmy Rossum of Phantom of the Opera and The Day After Tomorrow former fame), a girl who’s so stressed out about her need for scholastic perfection that she has to go on the pill to regulate her period. Sound ludicrous? Just go with it, because that birth control is going to come in handy real soon. Alexa dreams of becoming an actress but when her class is visited by a special guest (Alan Cumming, tossing out a cameo as a high school alumnus and local actor made good), his harsh critique of her performance in A Streetcar Named Desire sends her into a trampy tailspin. She puts a few blonde streaks in her hair, ditches her oversized, boxy sweater, and pretty soon she’s in a pleather skirt seducing the high school’s resident bad boy, Johnny Drake (Friday Night Lights star Zach Gilford).

Their tryst sets off a domino of events leading viewers to the film’s next segment focusing on Ben (Ashley Springer), a tech geek who’s been Alexa’s best friend since childhood but who failed to mention all that time that, oh yeah, he’s gay and in love with Johnny Drake also. His infatuation leads to a champagne fueled, Cruel Intentions-esque game of poolside blowjob chicken and an intro into the life of Johnny, the man, the myth, the mystery.

Stepping into Johnny’s life is sort of like an extended version of the monologues in The Breakfast Club. You realize that even though his life seems perfect, after all, he’s rich, popular and handsome, there are much darker forces at work and he’s really just a lost little boy desperate for love and connection. Poor little rich boy.

Written by David Brind, Dare evolved from Salky and Brind’s student thesis film during the graduate film program at Columbia, the problem is, it never truly evolved beyond the shell of an idea. Thanks to uneven pacing, performances, visual structure and writing, Dare screams sophomoric.

Alexis Bledel and Zach Gilford on Post Grad

Picture this: a college graduate with big dreams of making it out on her own is hit with a cold, hard dose of reality when she finds, despite a good education, willingness to start at the bottom, and just the slightest whiff of desperation, she can’t find a job anywhere and is forced to move home with her crazy family.

Sound familiar? Sure, the majority of college graduates are entering the worst job market in recent American history, but this isn’t the tale of some girl who lived down the hall from you freshman year; it’s the setup for Post Grad, a new comedy starring Alexis Bledel and Zach Gilford, backed by a comedic goldmine including Michael Keaton, Jane Lynch, J.K. Simmons and Carol Burnett.

The script was written by first time scribe Kelly Fremon who admits the film is largely autobiographical, if you eliminate the romance and the diabolically hot neighbor played by Rodrigo Santoro. “I started writing this script when I was at home on my parent’s couch after I’d graduated” Fremon begins. “I just felt like the biggest and the only loser on the planet.” But over the course of creating a theatrical version of her loser-dom, she discovered she was surrounded by friends who were dealing with similar issues and post-collegiate angst. “That’s part of the reason I was really compelled to write it, because I started to find that everyone I knew was going through the same thing. Everybody was coming up against so much friction in the real world.”

“When we started on the movie, we knew it was universal” director Vicky Jensen adds. “[In your twenties] you have these wonderful expectations where you just think you know everything.” Before anyone knew how topical the film would be, the director says she just wanted to make a movie about the potentially unwanted lessons learned “when you have to start making your own decisions and reality hits you in the face. It’s about growing up, graduating to the next chapter in your life.”

For Jensen, Post Grad is also a sort of graduation. After decades in animation, this is her first foray into working with people in front of her lens.

“You could tell she’s an animator because, at one point, she was telling me to move as if she were animating me,” Bledel recalls with a chuckle. “My idea was to just do everything exactly the way she said. I didn’t want to stray from it if she had a vision.”

“The upside to that,” Gilford is quick to point out, “is that she knew what she wanted. She never seemed like she wasn’t sure. She had it all in her mind.”

One of the things Jensen and the rest of the production had in mind was great chemistry between their two leads. Bledel was attached to the project for some time before, serendipitously, her male counterpart was cast. One actor dropped out just as the writer’s strike halted production on Friday Night Lights allowing Gilford to fly to LA to audition for the role.

“We were asked to do these acting exercises together…” Bledel begins, before bursting out laughing as Gilford turns fuchsia.

“It’s awkward. It’s really awkward,” Gilford interjects. “They shove you in a room and they’re like ‘You need to charm this person and have great chemistry with them in order to get the job.’ And you’re like ‘Okay.’”

“It’s a bit forced” Bledel agrees, collecting herself. “And you can’t force chemistry; you just have to read the scenes.”

When asked if either has ever known the post-graduate deluge of failure the film mines for laughs, both shake their heads.

“I haven’t personally,” Bledel admits. “But I’ve experienced setbacks where I had to regroup and start from scratch.”

“I was fortunate enough not to have to go home,” Gilford says, good-naturedly. “But it’s still early, I could move home next week.”

Post Grad open August 21st.