Review of Personal Velocity (2002) by Kevin G — 09 Mar 2011

This is a mediocre feminist drama at best. The best thing it has going for it is the fact that it has all these terrific actors in it like Parker Posey and Lou Taylor Pucci. Otherwise, it's really just another lame affliction story about how women are constantly mistreated and abused by crazy and ruthless men.

To tell you the truth the three characters this centers around are very well drawn out and are interesting to observe, but the antagonists, or should I say the males, are flat-out typical stereotypes of abusive, perverted, and/or vaguely bland men.

I see the realism that it's trying to attain in how it's shot in this documentary style and completely through the use of DV cam, but it ends up just looking really kind of amateur to me. I understand that the film was on a very low budget, but that doesn't change the fact that the film itself looks like a sort of low grade docudrama.

I think my main beef with this really is the fact that it's another entry in this sort of heavy-handed, male guilt series of films that blame everything on arrogant, egotistical men. It just gets really tiresome and in the case of this film, it doesn't even attempt to examine the perspective of these one-noted male characters, rather it jumps right to indicting them as horrible people from the get-go.

I honestly do like some of the writing here and a lot of the acting is really terrific, but it just doesn't have enough depth to be what it really thinks it is, a serious examination of real life relationships.