SPF-18
SPF-18
PG-13 | 29 September 2017 (USA)
SPF-18 Trailers

18-year-old Penny Cooper spent years pining for Johnny Sanders Jr., but when a mysterious musician shows up on the beach, Penny is torn.

Reviews
maysy

When I watched the trailer and read the summary this movie seemed to be very good but it wasn't. The acting of the protagonist (penny) was not good and it's seemed like there is no connection between the actors to the story. The best thing that happened to that movie was Noah who played Jonny that he is super hot.

... View More
knittingandcatsarelife

I make a habit of watching awful movies for fun and this is the first movie I could not finish. I made it halfway through the movie and there was still no plot. The acting is atrocious and the outfits are absolutely hideous. The celebrity cameos were embarrassing to them and their careers. The characters were poorly developed and did not represent the proper age range they were supposed to. Everything in this movie is predictable and cliche. DO NOT WATCH! SAVE YOUR EYES!

... View More
natekochis

My sister and I were looking for something to watch, didn't have to be perfect, but we were bored. Turning on Netflix, my normally helpful suggested list recommended this film. I have had explosive diarrhea ever since my viewing 'experience'. NEVER, and I mean never have I seen a film with writing that is so out of touch, so poorly thought through, so nonsensical. My little sister, 16 (the target audience) thought this was just as awful as I did. The plot doesn't exist. The movie doesn't have purpose, things just kind of happen without reason. I sincerely hope that anyone involved with the production of this film never finds work again. I hope that you are sorry for the sins you have committed.

... View More
SpookyUser

SPF-18 is a bad movie but not bad in the same way Fast and the Furious; Geostorm or any other mainstream movie is bad, it's bad almost exclusively because making movies is hard and this is the first movie Alex Israel has made. In fact, I almost feel empathetic toward Alex Israel, the film now hitting Netflix is going to result in a barrage of negative reviews and some really amazing negative reviews like the one above mine. We might even see this movie join the ranks of "Troll 2" or any other "so bad it's good movie." Yet, when I watched this movie it had a strangely positive effect on me. I think this is because I watched SPF-18 while taking a break editing my own short movie. In fact, it was exactly after I had finished the first cut of my movie and felt nauseous after seeing how unwatchable it was. Taking a break watching a "nice" movie - I thought - might make it easier to edit and distract me from the the reality of what I had made. Instead what I watched was SPF-18. During the movie there was a lot going on in my brain, the first scene played with the main character doing a type of Vlog or whatever and I thought the movie was shaping up to be interesting. Then the film proper started. I noticed the bad acting first, as it's the most noticeable, and to begin with I considered stopping the movie - but instead I continued watching it. As the movie played, I started just feeling bad for Alex Israel. I thought of what went into making my own movie; how hard it was trying to find good actors; how long it took to film; how high the hopes we had going in were and how mediocre and quite frankly unwatchable the results were. All this while watching the cringe delivery of lines frankensteined together with drone footage made me imagine Alex Israel on set trying to explain each character's motivation in the hot sun, when probably he was unsure himself; the millions of takes it took to get a shot of a Jeep turning off the road that was ultimately for a scene that turned out to be so unnecessary i'm surprised it even came up as an idea. But most of what I was thinking is that Alex Israel knows SPF-18 isn't good, just like I know the movie I'm currently editing isn't good. Not only that, anyone watching the final cut of SPF-18 knows it's not good. The actors, the grip and Pamela Anderson doing her completely necessary cameo - they all know it's bad. And yet here we are watching this movie on Netflix. This is certainly not what Alex Israel imagined in his brain when thinking of the movie and I can feel that deep deep deep down the movie has some goodness in it. If the script had better dialogue, if the acting was better we might have been watching something like Garden State, instead of what the film now is. But that's not what happened and this is what we are ultimately left to judge the movie by. What we are left with, while probably not what Alex Israel wanted, had a profoundly positive effect on me. As soon as SPF-18 was over I went back to editing feeling invigorated, for one reason alone: However bad my movie was, it wasn't going to be SPF-18 bad. I felt permission to suck. To a further extent, I, like Alex Israel, am going to make tons of bad movies before I make a good one. This is ultimately why making movies or choosing any creative pursuit is hard. Not because it's hard to technically make the film - though that too - but rather because it's hard to make bad things when you know that they are bad during the production of the bad thing. The slow and tortuous dynamic of making something bad and then getting a little bit better and then making something bad again but being a little bit better is how art works. You only get better by sharing it with the world. While there are certainly savants who have made perfect movies on their first try - that is not an accurate picture of how ordinary art is made. David Bayles and Ted Orland highlight this extremely well in their book "Art and Fear." Ordinary art is a skill that you get better at by getting humiliated most of the time. This message of "Art and Fear" and others like it, is hard to remember on it's own and it certainly is easier to remember when you are in between projects and harder to convince yourself of in the process of them. But to me SPF-18 provides the perfect reminder of "Art and Fear", "The War of Art" and others like them. Pressfield puts it best in this single sentence: "It's better to be in the arena, getting stomped by the bull, than to be up in the stands or out in the parking lot."SPF-18 is exactly what Pressfield meant by that line. Being in the arena is not pretty, but it's worth it, because eventually; after getting knocked down enough times you will have made something worth making. I look forward to Alex Israel's next movie because I know that it will be better than this and, perhaps, in a couple years we might be looking back on Israel as a talented director.In the meantime I'm going to get back to editing my movie and perhaps, in the future sometime, watch SPF-18 and read this review again - when I need reminding of this message and how crucial it is to any creative endeavour.

... View More