Saw this movie at the Idaho film festival and it totally blew me away.
Here's a review:
What do violent and deranged meth-heads, your mother ramming a dildo up the ass of your closet-transvestite father, and the burning flesh of the guy you just ran over in your car all have in common? Why, they're all things you would eagerly capture on film, of course!
If you're Jimmy Wright, that is. Edward Furlong co-stars in the film "Jimmy and Judy" as a junior-college dropout plagued by the deceptively normal facade of suburbia and obsessed with his hand-held video camera.
Jimmy's camera thus becomes the lens for the entire film. Fortunately, directors Randall Rubin and Jon Schroder have crafted "Jimmy and Judy" with a cogent plot, raw, fearless script, and superb casting that prevail over the shaky, blurry, amateur style that made "The Blair Witch Project" so irritating.
At its core, "Jimmy and Judy" is a tale of luckless lovers. Jimmy has loved Judy (Rachael Bella) since childhood, and has the tapes to prove it. The timid Judy is likewise an outcast at her high school. When Jimmy, never one to let social norms hinder his impulses, takes revenge on Judy's bullies and shows her the footage, she is wooed and the two embark on an anarchic ride through the forgotten states of Middle America.
Throughout their misadventures- ones involving drug abuse, sexual violence, and gunplay- Jimmy and Judy manage to retain an innocence not afforded to characters in flicks with similar concepts such as "Natural Born Killers." What provides this naive sincerity is the rare chemistry Furlong and Bella invoke coupled with the film's intimate home-video style. By the time Jimmy plugs a cop in the head in a frantic getaway scene, we're rooting for the pair and blaming it all on bad luck and the simple desire to not be alone.
In a word, "Jimmy and Judy" is ballsy. Not many indie films making claims for edginess have pulled off this sort of material with such honesty. A good example is Jimmy's scene where he first meets the messiah of the cultish smack-factory commune. While "Uncle Rodney" (William Sadler), clad in tattoos and ripped flannel, preaches his thoughts on uniting the "garbage culture" of society in his dark, tattered shack, he brandishes a knife and pets the hair of a tweaked-out junkie aching for the fix only he can give. Amid this resonance of dueling banjos and the dark underbelly of American life, we are bizarrely gripped by the depravity. That something so far gone from most audiences' experience also rings so true is a testament to the film's finesse.
The filming technique is a theme that's worth examining from a larger outlook. Jimmy and Judy alternate handling the camera, documenting everything from a genuinely sweet haircut to an attempted rape. At first, Judy repeatedly asks, "Why do you have to film everything?" Jimmy just wants to document all the important parts of his life. But in today's world of MySpace and Facebook photo narcissism and a grand jury sending journalist Josh Wolf to prison for not yielding videotapes of a protest, how much photo documentation is too much? Are we on digital media overload? The filmmakers take an opportunity to pose contemporary questions with this unique narrative.
Aside from any politicized tangents, Jimmy and Judy are at the heart of the film. We pity them for their bad decisions, but that pity is accompanied by empathy and endearment. Aw, c'mon Judy, snorting drugs isn't good, we find ourselves thinking. Watching their devolution becomes as emotional as if we were bumping along down lost roads with the collapsing pair themselves. It's not a film for the squeamish, but what truly good love story can go without this much gore, tragedy and risk?
This movie has a weird way of sucking you in and making you forget that you are watching a scripted film and not someone's home movies. Edward Furlong is at his best and won a best acting award for his performance. This movie is hard core indie, so don't bother to watch if you are expecting some cheesy happy ending and are not prepared to be shocked.
Jimmy and Judy, for better or worse, is in your face and not afraid to to be there. Jimmy and Judy is all sex, drugs, and more sex and drugs. This is way more like Sid and Nancy, not Alex and Emma.
Here's a review:
What do violent and deranged meth-heads, your mother ramming a dildo up the ass of your closet-transvestite father, and the burning flesh of the guy you just ran over in your car all have in common? Why, they're all things you would eagerly capture on film, of course!
If you're Jimmy Wright, that is. Edward Furlong co-stars in the film "Jimmy and Judy" as a junior-college dropout plagued by the deceptively normal facade of suburbia and obsessed with his hand-held video camera.
Jimmy's camera thus becomes the lens for the entire film. Fortunately, directors Randall Rubin and Jon Schroder have crafted "Jimmy and Judy" with a cogent plot, raw, fearless script, and superb casting that prevail over the shaky, blurry, amateur style that made "The Blair Witch Project" so irritating.
At its core, "Jimmy and Judy" is a tale of luckless lovers. Jimmy has loved Judy (Rachael Bella) since childhood, and has the tapes to prove it. The timid Judy is likewise an outcast at her high school. When Jimmy, never one to let social norms hinder his impulses, takes revenge on Judy's bullies and shows her the footage, she is wooed and the two embark on an anarchic ride through the forgotten states of Middle America.
Throughout their misadventures- ones involving drug abuse, sexual violence, and gunplay- Jimmy and Judy manage to retain an innocence not afforded to characters in flicks with similar concepts such as "Natural Born Killers." What provides this naive sincerity is the rare chemistry Furlong and Bella invoke coupled with the film's intimate home-video style. By the time Jimmy plugs a cop in the head in a frantic getaway scene, we're rooting for the pair and blaming it all on bad luck and the simple desire to not be alone.
In a word, "Jimmy and Judy" is ballsy. Not many indie films making claims for edginess have pulled off this sort of material with such honesty. A good example is Jimmy's scene where he first meets the messiah of the cultish smack-factory commune. While "Uncle Rodney" (William Sadler), clad in tattoos and ripped flannel, preaches his thoughts on uniting the "garbage culture" of society in his dark, tattered shack, he brandishes a knife and pets the hair of a tweaked-out junkie aching for the fix only he can give. Amid this resonance of dueling banjos and the dark underbelly of American life, we are bizarrely gripped by the depravity. That something so far gone from most audiences' experience also rings so true is a testament to the film's finesse.
The filming technique is a theme that's worth examining from a larger outlook. Jimmy and Judy alternate handling the camera, documenting everything from a genuinely sweet haircut to an attempted rape. At first, Judy repeatedly asks, "Why do you have to film everything?" Jimmy just wants to document all the important parts of his life. But in today's world of MySpace and Facebook photo narcissism and a grand jury sending journalist Josh Wolf to prison for not yielding videotapes of a protest, how much photo documentation is too much? Are we on digital media overload? The filmmakers take an opportunity to pose contemporary questions with this unique narrative.
Aside from any politicized tangents, Jimmy and Judy are at the heart of the film. We pity them for their bad decisions, but that pity is accompanied by empathy and endearment. Aw, c'mon Judy, snorting drugs isn't good, we find ourselves thinking. Watching their devolution becomes as emotional as if we were bumping along down lost roads with the collapsing pair themselves. It's not a film for the squeamish, but what truly good love story can go without this much gore, tragedy and risk?
This movie has a weird way of sucking you in and making you forget that you are watching a scripted film and not someone's home movies. Edward Furlong is at his best and won a best acting award for his performance. This movie is hard core indie, so don't bother to watch if you are expecting some cheesy happy ending and are not prepared to be shocked.
Jimmy and Judy, for better or worse, is in your face and not afraid to to be there. Jimmy and Judy is all sex, drugs, and more sex and drugs. This is way more like Sid and Nancy, not Alex and Emma.