Chris Fuller's no-budget experimental film attempts to capture the feelings of anger, unease and loneliness plaguing the youth of St. Petersburg, Florida shortly after a series of race riots. I say attempts, because this film is ultimately a bunch of parts that don't add up to much of a whole.Fuller follows three young people, two men (one played by himself) and a girl, only one of whose names we even learn through the course of the film (though all of the characters have names according to the closing credits). The film is purposefully disjointed. We see these kids zoning out, having sex, getting drunk, starting fights, all of it interspersed with voice overs and footage pulled from real-life news shows, including one utterly gratuitous segment showing Budd Dwyer committing public suicide at a live press conference. This segment has outraged viewers for its insensitivity, but really it doesn't feel any more gratuitous than most of the rest of the film. Everything's gratuitous when you're not given anything to care about, and I certainly did not care about these people or their lives.I feel like this film was meant to enrage me, to give me a dose of the vague but palpable cultural oppression that makes the characters in it act so self destructively, but it instead made me shrug my shoulders with indifference. Fuller didn't make me understand why these people's lives are so miserable, and he certainly didn't make it clear to me what I could do about it, let alone make me feel like I even WANTED to do anything about it.Grade: C

Just because one comes out from a movie like this saying, "I could do this", doesn't mean it's a bad thing. In fact, for all we know, this film could have been much more difficult to make than it appears. After all, it took almost eight years to complete. But the simplicity behind it -- pretty much no character or story arc, and wordless at times -- is what makes this a good film.If you go into the theater knowing there isn't much to the story other than people wallowing around during the time of the 1997 St. Petersburg Riots, you'll appreciate the movie for what it is. If you're expecting "Apocalypse Now" or "Lord of the Rings", you'll find this film boring and dull. It's not that you don't get it, it's just not your cup of tea. But don't criticize a film because it wasn't what you expected.The film's soundtrack is wonderful. It either fits the mood of the film, or goes completely against the mood which makes things feel disoriented which is what we expect most of the characters to be like every moment of their lives. The amateurish and authenticity in the acting is also worth a looks -- it's very plausible that when we see these characters throwing punches at each other, they're actually fighting; and that if we see characters drunk, they probably had too much to drink. You don't see films like this frequently and it's nice to have another filmmaker like Chris Fuller added to a short list of such underrated and fearless directors like Larry Clark and Harmony Korine.Fuller is also impressive because of some of the strings he has pulled to get this film distributed. While your average person may not know Din Thomas, Jacob Reynolds, Keith Morris, Blag Dahlia, the band Leftover Crack and Robert "Bob" Hawk; all of the above are notable people who have participated in the production of this film. You also have to wonder, not only how such a young filmmaker could get such a budget and amount of notable cast/crew, but if Fuller actually had a permit to film on the Sunshine Sky Bridge, the St. Petersburg Pier and the house of the late writer/poet/painter Jack Kerouac. Whether Fuller had connections or pulled some strings, it's impressive.The only thing that should be criticized is the footage of R. Budd Dwyer's public suicide. While one can argue that its inclusion helps the audience feel uneasy and hopeless, it's actually nothing more than a copout. If Fuller wanted to further express such a mood, he should have done it through characters, soundtrack and/or story like he was doing the first hour and the final fifteen minutes of the film. It's also exploitive. Dwyer's inclusion is completely unnecessary, as it has nothing to do with anything. Just because a character jumps off the Sunshine Sky Bridge doesn't mean there's any comparison to R. Budd Dwyer shooting himself at a press-conference. The only comparison is that they're both suicides, and that is very weak storytelling.One can understand that somebody who wants their film to be known relies on word-of-mouth, and the best way to accomplish this is shock value. But to add footage of R. Budd Dwyer just shows that Fuller is being a little too desperate. Because of this (and until Fuller comes to his senses and removes the Dwyer suicide), "Loren Cass" can never reach must-see value because the majority of its viewers are just going to watch for the few short (but haunting) moments of Dwyer committing suicide.Because of this one (but major) flaw, this film gets: **½ out of ****

It's natural for anybody hungry for edgy film-making and in search of interesting young talent in the field to be excited by twenty-something firsttimer Chris Fuller's Loren Cass, a movie about dead end youth in St. Petersburg, Florida in the wake of the 1996 race riots. The film actually debuted in 2006 and 2007 at Dennis Hopper's CineVegas Film Festival, but is getting increased attention now that it has been picked up by Kino International. It opened July 24, 2009 at Cinema Village in New York -- over a decade from when young Fuller began work on it. (Datelines are a bit confusing, but he clearly began on it in some form in his teens.) Nathan Lee gave Loren Cass a rave in the NYTimes. Variety (which covers everything but looks for the commercially viable) earlier called Fuller "a genuinely original film-making talent." The Voice calls the film "radical" and "a powerfully unsettling debut." This film indeed shows ambition and talent and radical stylistic ideas about sound design, a passionate nihilism, and a mature approach to editing. But it's primarily a festival film, more notable for promise than for finished accomplishment. Raves tend to omit the point that it's numbing and unrewarding to watch, due to a lack of clarity in the sequences, a disjointedness created by the meandering, affectless plot-line, the collage technique in the overall composition, and repetitiveness and confusion in individual scenes.The actors, some of them, show aggressive verve and energy, particularly Travis Maynard, who plays Jason , a skinhead musician with a penchant for piercings and chugging 40-oz beers. Kayla Tabish, who Fuller has said is the most talented, plays Nicole, the slutty night diner waitress who sleeps with anybody who expresses an interest, and has a more extended relationship with Cale, a garage mechanic played by Fuller himself under the pseudonym of Lewis Brogan, who rarely speaks a word.There is no denying that the audio is used in an original way. Besides the original trumpet solos of St. Petersburg composer Jimmy Morey, musical choices for the background include Don Caballero, Billy Bragg, DJ Shadow, the punk rock band Propagandhi, Leftover Crack, Hüsker Dü, Choking Victim and Stiff Little Fingers. Sound design by Gary Bogges utilizes archival voice-overs including Charles Bukowski reading his poems and black radical commentator Omali Yeshitela exhorting his audience to see the Florida race riot/revolt as a brilliant revolutionary action. Such commentary fits with a few blurry street clips of the riots themselves, but is unrelated to the monosyllabic scenes between the film's handful of characters, and adds to a sense of anomie already markedly present in the scenes themselves, which linger on dead-end jobs, waiting by the roadside, wordless couplings, and driving in old American cars. Jason even lies down in the middle of the road waiting for his coworker to pick him up, a suicidal gesture softened by the fact that there appears to be no traffic on the road. Jason pops pills and imagines his own death in various forms, including going up in flames in an armchair. Fuller's editing skill reveals itself in how smoothly he slides from the mundane to the surreal.Color is sometimes bright, sometimes drab, the 16 mm images by William Garcia not without art. A sketchy, desultory plot-line focuses on days put in at undefined jobs, nights of drinking, brawling, and sex. While it may not be so clear, film summaries indicate there is an assault on a black motorcyclist, just as there was by the cop James Knight who started the rioting on October 24, 1996 by killing Tyrone Lewis, a black man, mistakenly suspecting him of driving a stolen vehicle. In the film the assault leads to a series of roadside mêlées and nighttime rival gang encounters. Some inconsistencies in look make Nicole seem at one point to have morphed into somebody else, while two of the uniformly thin, hardscrabble young men (confusingly described in blurbs and reviews as "adolescents") occasionally look like the same person. Secondary characters merely have generic titles like The Suicide Kid, The Punk Kid, The Fight Kid, etc. These must be the marginal young deadbeats who get drunk in a truck bed and are hauled off in dead of night by police.But there are mitigating factors that help explain the raves and the IFP Gotham Award for "Best Film Not Playing in a Theater Near You." There's no denying the passion behind Fuller's project and his commitment to being a fimmaker, given that he began working on this project when he was so very young.Some writers have been outraged by inclusion of archival footage of a R. Bud Dwyer blowing his own brains out at a filmed 1987 press conference. This is a shocker, as is the deafening sequence of a hard core punk concert. Apparently the Dwyer death is not utterly gratuitous: he was a crony of Fuller's great-grandfather. It all contributes to a referenced sense of confusion and despair, evidently felt as appropriate to the violent upheaval of the St. Petersburg riots. But despite the historical reference and the moments of horror, violence, and disjunction, Fuller's detached camera and desultory action don't quite provide an satisfactory objective correlative for what's roils inside him and the viewer emerges frustrated. There's a lot going on here, but perhaps because of the lengthy gestation period, it doesn't come together. It's hard not to agree with Slant's Andrew Shenker: "Fuller leaves plenty of room for the viewer to create his own meaning, but in the end, it's not clear how much meaning the filmmaker has brought to the project himself."But the Austrian IMDb User was doubtless also right when he wrote, "Despite being far from perfect, this was the freshest film I've seen in quite a while."

This is a prime example of what can result out of limited financial means and filmmakers trying to make the best of it. Chris Fuller produced, wrote, directed and edited his debut "Loren Cass" (which was shot on 16mm) and on top of that also took an acting part. And he accomplished the feat of making a movie, that (at least in parts) feels like something new. The world of small town teenagers who grow up without hope for improvement is a common topic, but hardly portrayed as energetic and extreme as in Fullers film. He repeatedly uses speeches and poems to overlap scenes, which creates a cool atmosphere (and I mean cool as in cold). The film works best when it concentrates on the three main characters. Always when Fuller loses them out of focus also the verve seems to decrease and scenes are emerging that end in itself. New also means not everything's working. Despite being far from perfect, this was the freshest film I've seen in quite a while.