I am going to take you to "Afterschool"!!! OK, maybe after reading my pun-infested movie review, you might think of it more as puntention (I mean detention), and think that I have no class. But please just swim with these school of puns for a little while. "Afterschool" is a dark, quirky and semi-interesting film about an isolated prep-school teen named Rob who witnesses fatal drug overdoses of preppie female twins while working on an audio/visual school club project. Therefore, he is able to gather video footage of the twins' deaths. Rob is traumatized from the experience, and has difficulty coping with it. Rob's roommate is Dave, a cocky & arrogant bully who manipulates Rob on a daily basis and may or may not had a hand in the cause of the twin overdoses. Mr. Burke is the school director who is more concerned about the image of the school and its funders then of the ordeals and stress that teenagers go through. Amy is Rob's student partner in the audio-visual club and this Amy might be aiming for some Roboco**. Writer-Director Antonio Campos did develop an intriguing narrative on teenage angst, trauma, and insecurity; however, the immensely slow pace was more of an afterschool exercise of futility. Hey, I am down with slow pacing films, but Campos was too much of a "campesino" on the doldrums that hamper a slow-paced movie. His scribe was not a screenplayer valedictorian classic, but it did warrant a passing grade. I would not say it is Hollywood Miller Time yet for this young actor, but Ezra Miller's starring performance as Rob was a credible one even though it was a bit too monotone for my taste. Michael Stuhlbarg, of "A Serious Man", was superb as the self-centered school director Mr. Burke; Stuhlbarg is one seriously good actor that will probably garner a few Oscar nominations in his future. The rest of the supporting acting of "Afterschool", primarily comprised of teen actors, is not really worth mentioning, it's a D=Needs Improvement in my gradebook. "Afterschool" does barely make the grade, but it does not graduate itself to teenage movie genre superiority. *** Average

This was a Monster movie in that I needed to drink a 16 oz. Monster to watch it. I was falling asleep on this Ambien pill of a movie. This movie was awful. It was slow, plodding, and rudderless. I especially couldn't get over two things:

1.) The dead air. Long moments in which the camera wasn't pointed at anything in particular or long stretches of silence.

2.) The camera not moving. It was like the camera didn't have the ability to move up and down, so there'd be shots of chests, legs, or tops of faces. I don't think the cameraman zoomed in once the entire movie. Maybe director Antonio Campos was experimenting with this movie.

Fail.

The movie is about a boy named Rob (Ezra Miller who played a similarly weird role in "We Need to Talk About Kevin") in a boarding school. All we know from his very little speaking and even less activity is that he likes porn and violence. He saw twin sisters die in the hallway of his school and did nothing to help save their lives. In the end we find out, unsurprisingly, that he helped kill one of the girls by smothering her nose and mouth. It's possible there's more to this boy and I just zoned out, but that's what happens with slow pointless movies.

I'm trying to figure out why this was shown at last years New York Film Festival. At the same time I'm so incredibly happy that I didn't see it there and over paid for the privilege to watch paint dry. The plot of the film has an internet addicted teen at a prep school who is so disconnected with the world that the only thing real is what he sees in the You Tube clips or through his video recorder accidentally record the drug overdose of two of the girls in the school. We then watch as events play out. Long dull shots framed off kilter so as to cut off peoples heads combine together to reveal a story about teen life that is so artificial that you'd have to have limited exposure to either children or the films about them to truly be shocked at revelations. Alienation? Who would have thought? Drug Use? Amazing.Adults that are condescending and don't listen? Who knew? I kept waiting for something to happen, but nothing did. When the overdose occurs, I'm not sure how long into the film, a good distance, I was bored so my sense of time was all screwed up, I figured that the film would pick up. It really didn't. Honestly they sort of lost me with the opening montage of viral clips. One instantly got a sense of where it was going and what the filmmakers were going to be saying and the film didn't disappoint. I thought for awhile that the off kilter camera was always from the hero's point of view and then I realized that not, his head was chopped off sometimes too. Sometimes you wonder why a film can play something as prestigious as the New York Film Festival and not get a distribution deal or one that delays the release for a year or more, thats not the case here, its clear why no one picked it up, its dull and far from revealing. As I said at the outset the real question is how this dull little film ended up in any film festival at all.