Little Athens Is Irritating and Tedious

I tend to veer away from R-rated movies, but I’ve found some very enriching films that just happen to have filthy language, or sometimes more than their share of violence, so once in a while, I’ll disregard the rating and give such a movie a shot. Especially if I’m a fan of one of the actors involved. That’s how I ended up watching Little Athens, the 2005 indie flick written and directed by Tom Zuber.

I was drawn in because of Jorge Garcia, who so lovingly portrays one of my all-time favorite characters on LOST and who has demonstrated, via his blog, podcast and a wide variety of interactions with fans, that he is a man most deserving of the adjective Awesome. So I figured that if nothing else, his part in this movie would be worth watching. Sadly, even he, playing Pedro, a down-on-his-luck pool boy trying to scrape together enough money to pay his rent, failed to engage me, as did fellow LOST alum DJ Qualls as Pedro‘s buddy Corey.

Like LOST, Little Athens features a large cast of characters, many of whom are connected in various ways. Unlike the show, however, the movie never makes any of them very compelling or sympathetic. By the end of the movie, I still had trouble telling many of them apart. Aside from Pedro and Corey, I was most interested in Jessica (Jill Ritchie), who is sweet enough when interacting with her young babysittee Katie (Jasmine Jessica Anthony) but who ditches her to deal with the fallout of her abusive boyfriend contracting an STD.

The movie reminded me of The Chumscrubber, which similarly deals with aimless youth, though the main characters there are slightly younger, and the older generation is more visible. Here, it’s just a bunch of 20-somethings dealing drugs, cheating on each other, stealing from each other, getting into violent skirmishes, spewing as many profanities as they possibly can and sinking in a sea of apathy. I kept waiting for the movie to get more interesting, for it to start going somewhere, but I felt as bewildered and bored at the end as I did at the beginning.

I really hate to pan a movie involving one of my favorite actors. But Mom and I spent the whole film exchanging unimpressed glances, and Dad gave up on it entirely. Dull characters. Little plot. Crude dialogue. An exceptionally annoying series of four notes on what I think is a cello, repeated far too often. These are the components that make up Little Athens. I didn’t laugh, I didn’t cry, it didn’t move me, and I can’t recommend it to anybody else. I think I’ll just stick with LOST...