Achieves the holy trinity of painful earnestness, combining cute animals, sick teenagers and an idealistic belief in love and goodness that's actually deceptively judgmental.
Jack and Jill vs. the World (2008)
Runtime: 87 mins
Reviews
Written, directed, acted-in and produced by Parise, she's proven her creds as a one-woman employment agent. But, by now, she should be picking up that directing is a weak spot.
Blind to the fact that it should be rising up against its own formulaic kind.
Parise no doubt intends the pic's attention to the disease -- plus animal adoption and fair trade coffee -- to be socially enlightening, but it feels suspiciously like sympathy-mongering.
More farce might have served the film well; as Parise draws from a playbook of medical melodrama and romantic-comedies clichés, her moral about living outside the box becomes harder and harder to swallow.
There's an overwhelming and quite repellent amount of gloss applied to the finished product, yet underneath it all are many scenes of honest emotional confession, distributed through wonderful atypical performances.
Considering the talent assembled, the only audience draw here is the prospect of getting out of the rain.
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by: christinascia 4/28


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