Critic asleep, or, the longest 77 minutes I’ve spent at the movies in ages. Australia in the '70s, and the mentally absent embarrassments new-kid-in-school Greta (Bethany Whitmore) calls Mom and Dad decide to throw their daughter a disco-themed fifteenth birthday party. All goes terribly wrong, and the embarrassment incurred causes the girl to retreat into a looking-glass fantasy universe overrun by freakish escapees from a hipster costume ball. "Formal to the point of suffocating" is the best way to describe this non-stop assault of precocious (albeit humorously-clad) geeks, jabbering dialog, lighting that alternates between overlit, Allied-Van-Lines-garish and Eveready dark, and center-scan compositions that are all inexplicably filmed in the Academy ratio. Had the filmmakers devoted one-tenth of the time they spent fretting over costume design on avoiding visual redundancy, there might have had something to look at. And if imitation is indeed the sincerest form of failure, someone should tell first-time director Rosemary Myers that Wes Anderson wants his personality back. On the same bill: Myers’ short film, The Pickle. (2015) — Scott Marks
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