Sweet Thing (Joe Lia, 2008): USA

Reviewed by Chloe Seaman. Viewed at The Santa Barbara Film Festival.

The idea of Sweet Thing has great potential, but the film was definitely a let down. The characters weren’t believable and neither was the dialogue. The only redeeming quality was that it looked and sounded pretty good for an extremely low budget film.

This is the story of two teenagers that are dealing with some life issues and eventually cross paths. There is Liz , a girl who decided to run a coffee shop instead of going to school and who meets and starts dating a graffiti artist. Then there is Jody, a hippie drug addict that spends the summer at her parent’s house. At first she works for her dad at his office, but then decides to buy an ice cream truck and sell ice cream to all the little kids in town. Liz begins to question her relationship, or fling (you can’t even call it a relationship because it doesn’t seem like it) when he doesn’t call her when he goes out of town. Jody is having issues with drugs that her parents are not happy about. The girls meet one day when Jody gets a coffee at Liz’s coffee shop. The two begin a friendship and they deal with their issues together.

This film was so painful to watch because the story was so forced, the characters were irritating, and nothing made sense. I mean, in a way it made sense because you can understand what the story is about, but the motives of the characters were not justified. I never believed or liked the characters, partly because of the acting and partly because of the dialogue. The character of Liz seems so upfront and flirty with her new boyfriend as if all she wants to do is get him into bed, but when that happens and you think she is getting what she wants, her line is “I have to go.” It was so unexpected, and not in a good way. This is just an example as to how cheesy this film is, because there are a lot of cheesy scenes and moments like that. Also, the actors don’t even look or act like teenagers.

After hearing the Q & A with the director, I got to hear what he learned from making his first film. He said that he learned a lot about writing because in the editing process he realized how many writing mistakes he made, and actually rewrote the story in editing. His favorite part of the film was the filmmaking, which was very good considering it was very low budget. The sound is good but the mise-en-scene was just okay. It looked like there was some thought as to where the characters were and how they looked, but the director explained that they just filmed wherever they could, and it does come off as very ordinary.

This is not a film I would recommend seeing. From the description it sounded so interesting and touching but the characters are annoying and not believable, and ultimately the story doesn’t flow.