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Fan Forum Legend
Joined: Oct 2002
Posts: 334,892
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here's a rather negative Standing Still review:
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STANDING STILL (NR) (2 stars)
Jon Abrahams, Aaron Stanford, Mena Suvari, Melissa Sagemiller
Directed by Matthew Cole Weiss
It'd be nice to say that Standing Still, the first film from the Vegas-based production company Insomnia Entertainment, is a great piece of filmmaking that heralds the arrival of major talent from Sin City. It'd be nice, even, to say that Standing Still is a formulaic but entertaining mainstream film that will find success with middle-of-the-road moviegoers. Unfortunately, I can't say either of those things about Standing Still which, given its lack of distribution even a year after its completion, is likely to go down as neither an artistically nor commercially successful first venture.
Trying hard to be The Big Chill for a new generation, Standing Still follows several friends reuniting for the wedding of two of their group. Although it boasts a number of telegenic young stars, some of whom (James Van Der Beek and Mena Suvari in particular) turn in strong performances, the film remains an ill-defined mishmash of clichés, with poorly sketched characters and leaden dialogue.
Like American Wedding with fewer poop jokes and more self-serious speeches about where people are headed in life, Standing Still doesn't even manage enough cheap laughs to qualify for anything other than quick straight-to-video oblivion.
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here's one from "Las Vegas Mercury":
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Cine City: Sleepless in Sin City
Local boy makes good as Insomnia Entertainment's first production wraps in Vegas
By Anthony Allison
It's two days before Thanksgiving and George W. Bush is making a lightning Las Vegas visit to milk megabucks from local cash cows and crow about the Medicare bill the Republicans have rammed through Congress. At McCarran International Airport, the arrival of Air Force One has caused minor excitement--and provided welcome distraction from the activities of another group of famous visitors.
In a sleek executive jet discreetly tucked away in a distant hangar, a bunch of young Hollywood types have begun their Vegas visit with some "in-flight entertainment" involving two leggy escorts in little black dresses. Among the familiar faces is the son of an Oscar-winning superstar, the star of a popular WB series and Quentin Tarantino's ex-video store co-worker. Colin Hanks, James Van Der Beek and Roger Avary don't want to be distracted. Tom Hanks' son, the "Dawson's Creek" star and Tarantino's sometime collaborator are busy filming a scene from Standing Still, under the deceptively insouciant gaze of director Matthew Cole Weiss and the proud, proprietorial eye of producer Trent Othick. On this last day of a hectic, four-week shoot, everyone seems eager to finish up in time for tonight's wrap party, before heading home for the holiday.
The atmosphere inside the impromptu sound stage is calm, quiet and unremarkable. Yet another Hollywood production shooting on location, eager to capture a few "money shots" against the billion-dollar backdrop of the Las Vegas Strip.
But Standing Still isn't a Hollywood movie, it's a Vegas one. This "Big Chill for the Gen Y set" is the first film from Insomnia Entertainment, a Southern Nevada company headed by Othick and financed largely by local luminaries, including Station Casinos President Lorenzo Fertitta and Tim Poster and Tom Breitling, founders of Travelscape.com and soon-to-be owners of the Golden Nugget casinos in Vegas and Laughlin, whose real-life dotcom success story is set to form the basis of Fox's upcoming reality show "The Casino."
When Othick and his well-heeled backers announced their new venture in October, naysayers familiar with Sin City's moviemaking scene tried not to sneer. Locals who recall how Doris Keating's plan to build a major movie studio in suburban Henderson degenerated, in effect, into a massive real estate boondoggle when residents raised "not in my back yard" objections, have good cause for cynicism. And "Sahara and Decatur" doesn't exactly have the resonant ring of "Hollywood and Vine."
Yet Insomnia's publicity blurb heralding this "Las Vegas-based independent development, production and financing shingle for feature film and television projects" detailed an impressive list of (mainly Vegas-related) projects, including Yonkers Joe, about an aging card shark plotting a casino scam; Doyle, a biopic of poker legend Doyle "Texas Dolly" Brunson; and The UFC, an action flick based on the extreme sports fight league co-owned by Fertitta.
First up, though, is Standing Still, written by Matt Perniciaro and Timm Sharp, which stars Van Der Beek as a hard-drinking actor reuniting with a bunch of old college friends. "It's a lot like The Big Chill, Anniversary Party and St. Elmo's Fire," says Weiss. "We shot a lot in Los Angeles, but part of it is set in Vegas. The Big Chill revolves around a funeral, our film revolves around a wedding. So the the guys come to Vegas for the bachelor party."
In short, it's pretty clear from Insomnia's ambitious slate that Othick means business. Like his partners Poster and Fertitta (who was Breitling's roommate at UC San Diego), Othick is an alumnus of Bishop Gorman High. While Breitling and Poster launched Las Vegas Reservation Systems--which they renamed Travelscape and sold in 2000 to Microsoft for $90 million--Othick headed to law school in L.A. only to realize "that wasn't the kind of creativity I was interested in." Instead, he worked his way up in a TV production company, from gofer to "dallying around in production," before returning to Vegas. "I was from here, I always wanted to come back here, I love this town. And to be frank, I was kind of sick of Hollywood bull****."
The 31-year-old was ready to reinvent himself as Sin City's answer to David O. Selznick and knew exactly who to approach for support. "A light went on in my head and I said, `Who are some really great people that can get things done, and that aren't bull****ters?' There's so many talkers in this business that try to spin things together and it just doesn't work. But I went to the guys that are completely the opposite of that. Every time they say they're going to do something, they do it. And fortunately they wanted to do this."
With help from casting director Karen Meisels, Othick and Weiss assembled a remarkable cast (which also includes Mena Suvari and Estella Warren) and a top-notch team behind the camera, including cinematographer Robert Brinkmann (The Rules of Attraction) and production designer Daniel Bradford (The Good Girl). By low-budget indie flick standards, it's a class act.
Weiss, a 24-year-old NYU film school grad who generated much buzz with his short film "Mean People Suck," was happy to have so many seasoned pros around for his first feature. "In my real life I'm kind of anxious and a little neurotic. But being on set actually calms me. It's kind of a reversal, a Zen-like situation that sets in. I don't need to get extra anxious and freak people out. It's easier for me to just sit back and say, `We're gonna get the shot.' I trust my crew, I trust my cast."
Avary, who recently directed Van Der Beek in The Rules of Attraction and here makes his acting debut, returns the compliment: "He's a wonderful, amazing and giving filmmaker." Back on set, Roger hams it up, amusing everyone by adopting the Method Acting approach to a boys-on-Vegas-bachelor-party binge: As the bodacious babes enter the jet's cabin, he lowers his pants.
Whether that take will make the final cut will remain under wraps for quite a while. Though Weiss says the film should be finished next month, Othick explains that the obvious marketing strategy is to launch Standing Still at the Sundance film festival in January 2005.
Meanwhile, Insomnia Entertainment won't be standing still, because Othick is convinced the time is right to bring some real filmmaking glamour back to town. "You go out with us, all we do all night is tell old stories about old Vegas. We talk about Sinatra and the Rat Pack and how great those days were and [wonder] could it happen again? We're hoping we can maybe bring back some of that."
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Trude  P.P.S.A. Avi by ms_lesly
Violence is a choice a man makes and he alone is responsible for it. ~ Patrick Stewart
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the title! 
