{Crazy Eyes is screening in Seattle at SIFF Cinema Uptown from Friday, 7/30 through Wednesday, 7/25}

“I think that I have to tell you that my story is a lie. But in reality, every bit of this happened exactly as you are about to see it. Los Angeles. Every night feels the same in Los Angeles. If you are one in a million in this city, there are still seven more just like you. We’re all just duplications of copies of Xeroxes. Each of us living proof that there’s no one and nothing here.”

Crazy Eyes starts with this quote, and I liked it. I liked it enough to continue watching, even though by the end I wasn’t really sure what the point was.

Basically Zach (Lukas Haas, who, I’m sorry, will ALWAYS be that little boy in Witness to me)’s home life is unsatisfying. He’s a hard-partying super-rich LA dude who’s not used to taking no for an answer. Oh, and he has a kid. And a volatile ex-wife. And a stable of hook-ups that he calls endlessly until he finds one that will meet him to … hook up. 

So he meets “Crazy Eyes.” And let me stop here for a moment. The very fact that he can’t even call this girl by her name (Rebecca) is pretty insulting, non? Yeah, I think so. Anyway, Erica (play by Madeline Zima, my favorite character ever on Heroes, and also the little girl from The Hand the Rocks the Cradle—holycrap. CHILD ACTOR WORLDS COLLIDE) does kind of have crazy eyes. But that’s probably because she drinks excessively and is always bumping into walls and throwing up all over the place.

Charming.

The gist is that Rebecca is perfectly willing to hang with Zach, and even make out with him, but when it comes to sex, he’s pretty much “friend zoned.” Jokes about rape constantly fly around on screen while he’s struggling to get her panties off, and she’s struggling not to pass out. This? Is also offensive.

So what does it all mean? I don’t know, because it’s impossible to sympathize with anyone, and I was also constantly confused about whether I was supposed to laugh or cry about watching this girl stumble around and hurl every night, or seeing the man obsessed with her hook up with lady after lady so he can uh, “get some.”

Anyway. Bottom line: everyone is so shallow and surface-y, that you just. can't. care. Even his kid is kind of a horrible (little) person, for chrissakes. It just made me sad. So if that’s the intended effect, it worked. Crazy Eyes is kind of like a humorless Brett Easton Ellis script.

At one point, just when I was kind of starting to like Rebecca, she calls Zach “The biggest asshole in the world.”

Yup. That about sums up the movie.