Customer Reviews

Little Athens

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This excellently-crafted film follows the lives of a group of post-high school graduates (or dropouts), late teens and early twenty-somethings for whom college is not an option. There are 4 stories which proceed independently of each other, occasionally passing off the baton from one to the next, but eventually all coming together.

Little Athens is a slice of life in a relatively lifeless environment -- a small town called Athens, but it could be any small town just about anywhere. Certainly, anyone who grew up in such a place knows it well. There isn't a whole lot to do. So you do what you can to get by. These characters' lives are about who you're dating, used to date, or would like to date, who you're cheating on and who's cheating on you, who's doing drugs and who's selling them, getting jobs and getting fired, getting into trouble and staying out of trouble, and trying to figure out who you are in a town where nobody amounts to much unless you leave. Stay and you're stuck, so you may as well make the best of it. In a town with no rock concerts, no sports arena, no dance clubs, no mall, and no multiplex, there's no drama. And when the drama doesn't exist without, you create it from within. Nature abhors a vacuum, so these young people fill the void by creating their own conflicts, because it's so much easier to be discontent than not.

If it sounds sad, well, where there's pity there's sympathy. And where there's sympathy there's comfort. We know these people. And that cuts to the heart of what makes this film what it is -- this brilliant young cast does what good actors are supposed to do -- they make these characters real. You never get the feeling that this is scripted, or has been rehearsed -- and the camera similarly stays out of the way.

Most of the film is shot in widescreen 35MM, as if to emphasize how small these characters are set against the bleak landscape of this town. We are watching them from a distance, just observers, taking it all in and allowing us to slowly invest ourselves in these people. The last portion of the film uses hand-held 16MM, as the four separate story lines come together towards the climax of the film. Now we are there, with them, because now that we know them we are allowed into their world.

The aspects of the film which stand out the most in my mind are the performances and the music. The acting is just spot on. It's always hard to single anyone out in an ensemble cast, but John Patrick Amedori's Jimmy is arguably the most sympathetic character in a film where you tend to feel sorry for everyone. He's perfectly cast -- the story had to have one sometimes sad but hopeful puppy-dog, and he's it.

The other highlight for me was the music, but that's always my weakness. After the acting and the soundtrack comes Tom Zuber's intricate story, told with the luxury of one able to write it, produce it, direct it, and edit it. He should be extremely proud of this work.

Tom Zuber has great credentials in Law but seems to prefer to dabble in the territory of cinema. Having not seen his debut film LANSDOWN (2001) it is difficult to judge from LITTLE ATHENS (2005) if he is improving with age, but looking at LITTLE ATHENS on its own merits it seems a bit sparse in idea and in production.

Athens, Arizona is the bleak setting of this day in the lives of some fairly bored (and boring) youngsters, ne're-do-wells attempting to infuse sparkle into an otherwise glitterless place. Zuber creates four story lines, spottily interweaves them, and finally connects the dots in the last reel. The main problem is that comedy is funny because we care about the facilitators and here there really aren't any folks in which to invest. The cast tries hard and succeeds in giving us a taste of life in the flatlands of nothingville. D.J. Qualls (a character type who is very good, as in 'Hustle and Flow'), Michael Pena, John Patrick Amedori, Shawn Hatosi, Tory Kittles, Eric Szmanda, Jorge Garcia, Erica Leerhsen, and Michelle Horn are particularly fine and do their best with the material they are given.

Tom Zuber has a style, a sense of non-scripted spontaneity incorporating the gross with the sadsack, and given time he may make a fine little film. This one just misses. Grady Harp, January 07

This film starts with a blurb about how this story might take place in the titled town but that it could just as well have been anywhere. We have watched this movie before about a group of young kids struggling to find their place in life but this movie managed to keep my attention glued to the screen.

The plot might have been tired but the great acting and soundtrack makes this little film stand out from the rest. We meet one young man who is being given a second chance by serving community service instead of time after being convicted of robbery. But when we discover that he got caught because his car ran out of gas in front of the victim's house and he attempted to return the stolen property, we know things are not going to go well. The film makes a point with music and by stretching out the scene to highlight morally defining moments.

We all know what is going to happen in this movie but the paths taken were interesting to watch. I would highly recommend this film over others in the same genre. The great soundtrack helped too.

"Little Athens" is a terrific slice-of-life film; beautifully rendered and acted. Life can be unforgiving and desperate, and this movie offers a portrait of several people in the throes of hopelessness, and how their actions and misdeeds color their future. Subtle, but affecting, "Little Athens" is lovely, and its cast is outstanding.

I won't reiterate the other reviews, they are pretty much on target. We have seen a lot of the style of this film, which take several seemingly at first disparate storylines and manage to tie them together as the story continues to its conclusion. Most effectively done in Quentin Tarantino's films as well as Greg Marcks' "11:14". As far as teen/young adult boredom and angst comes into play the film "Over The Edge" also comes to mind. While many of the characters are unsympathetic and make bad choices, I still find the overall trials and tribulations of the characters somewhat compelling. A good film, not great, but worth viewing.

Little Athens is a circuitous look at post-high school life in the small town of Athens, Arizona (although, as the opening scene states: "it could have taken place anywhere"), using a series of loosely interwoven characters to develop more of an apathetic tone rather than a typical plotline. It succeeds in communicating this sense of boredom with its audience, although it does so at the risk of actually being a bit boring at times. But, the characters and their stories are very believable and realistically portrayed, even if they go over the top a few times.

The entire film eventually centers around a party that all the characters happen to attend, in which we see how their various lives are intertwined, and ultimately see how the lifestyles of the bored and lost can result in irreversible damage to multiple lives.

The cinematography is often stunning, although occasionally the low budget filmmaking stands out when the digital camera can't keep up with the action, and this does detract from the film, but only enough to remind you that this movie was made on an extremely low budget, which is more reason to be impressed by the rich colors and scene arrangements.

There is a behind the scens featurette on the DVD, but it's only about five minutes long and doesn't offer much insight you can't gather from watching the film itself.

Featuring a smart young cast of rising stars, Tom Zuber's second feature is a caustic and consuming look at disaffected small-town American youth. Little Athens is as ironic as its title suggests. If Athens is the birthplace of Western civilization and democracy, representing a legacy of supreme achievements, how then does Little Athens, a small, sleepy town in Arizona, represent the state of the world two thousand years later?

The picture painted is grim, even if its canvas is filled with sunny vistas, manicured lawns and crystalline pools. Caught in a dead-end, post-high-school void, the youth of Little Athens are a strange assortment of ragtag characters, constantly at each other's throats. As in a Robert Altman movie, a series of stories overlaps over a twenty-four-hour period, each one finely conceived and convincingly performed. Heather (Erica Leerhsen) is a neurotic EMS worker convinced that her boyfriend, a handsome young cop, is cheating on her. Jimmy ( John Patrick Amedori), wide-eyed and tousle-haired, delivers pizza, works in a gym and deals drugs to get out from under a sizeable debt. Two slacker roommates, Corey (DJ Qualls) and Pedro (Jorge Garcia) clean pools, but their meagre earnings are not enough to pay the rent. And then there is Jessica ( Jill Ritchie), living on her mother's couch, who learns that her boyfriend is out to get her for giving him an STD.

The film evokes so many other films about troubled teens - Rebel Without a Cause, Splendor in the Grass, American Graffiti, Kids - but it is very much its own entity, a distinctive and arresting accomplishment. Each encounter in the film is a confrontation, oppositional and antagonistic. Close friends do little to comfort one another; they are too busy protecting their own selfish interests, clawing to get ahead or simply to maintain their position. Surviving in this Darwinian world requires a special skill set that Zuber and his co-screenwriter and brother, Jeff Zuber, capture with unerring precision. Quite a portrait of the new millennium!

- Review by Piers Handling,
- Director, Toronto International Film Festival

This movie was not to bad , but lacked a meaningful plot .was ok for a rental.

if so and so, do you still want to hear me out about my pathetic boredom of my life? if the town in this movie like the small town in santa barbara county where i've lived before is so boring, you still want to hear something about this town and how the young people deal with their suffocating boredom?
what the screenwriter, the director and the production team wanted to deliver here was a dead-beat story with dead-beat people with 4 dead-beat storylines and tried to link them together in vain, and ended up a dead-beat finale. if you think it's worth seeing, then your life might be even more bored than what i've seen in this movie. do you want me to tell you how i became homeless? how i ended up divorcing my wife? how my children hated me to the guts? you really don't want to know, do you? why? because it's so common, so ordinary and it happened everywhere and all over the world. just like what the movie said in the very beginning, it happens everywhere, like: brushing your teeth, dude this, dude that, cursing...whatever. LOSERS' PARADISE

I ask if anyone knows what music is playing at the house of the asian guy when jimmy finds him dead siting in the sofa??
Thanks
The movie is ok.