As his thirtieth birthday approaches, Herman Spooner (Matthew Lillard) is in danger of losing both his job and the roof over his head. See, his boss down at the used car lot doesn’t think he’s making as many sales as he should, and his parents think it’s time for him to leave the nest and get a place of his own. Spooner’s down in the dumps until he happens upon Rose (Nora Zehetner), a young woman on her way to the Philippines to teach. He’s never met anyone like her, and he’s determined to make her stay.

CRITIQUE

Spooner is indistinguishable from pretty much any other recent quirky indie rom-com. These movies have become just as generic and big-budget action flicks and underdog sports stories. Can’t somebody please get up and change the record?

Spooner looks exactly like most of these movies; the cinematography and shot compositions bring to mind the work of people who’ve been mainlining Wes Anderson movies. Spooner also sounds exactly like most of these movies; its score is bubbly, the songs on its soundtrack lush, jangly indie pop. The characters are meant to be askew but recognizably human, but most of them seem to have wandered in from the indie version of central casting. The plotting is painfully obvious from the beginning, with no surprises along the way. Remember the days when people turned to this sort of movie as a respite from homogenized studio fare? Now where are they supposed to turn?

I knew things weren’t looking so rosy the moment I saw the gorilla. See, there’s one of those big inflatable gorillas sitting on the car lot where Spooner works, and I just knew there would be multiple cutaways to the gorilla, and that at some point Spooner would stop and stare up at it, with alternating close-ups of his face and the gorilla’s. Director Drake Doremus (whose career has consisted of making movies--Douchebag, Moonpie--that play festivals but don’t get any sort of theatrical distribution) didn’t let me down--only a few minutes in and Spooner’s eyes were locked on the gorilla’s. If you show a gun in the first act, somebody has to use in the third; if you show a giant inflatable animal, somebody has to stop and stare into its face.

I suppose it’s best not to give the movie too much thought. Not because it creates its own universe, one which exists in a sort of Venn diagram where its world and ours slightly overlap, but rather because it doesn’t add up. The movie follows a sort of insert-quirkiness-here template, stopping to shoehorn in the oddball stuff rather than allowing it to develop organically. Spooner’s parents want him to move out because they’re moving to Florida (from California, mind you; they’re also not old enough to have retired, but never mind), but they still throw him a birthday party just like they do every year, donning tinfoil crowns and making him his favorite foods.

Why? Because his parents have to be doing something goofy the first time they meet Rose. Spooner’s mother sets him up on a date with an older woman who likes to hit the sauce. Why? So Spooner and the woman can go to the only hotel in town’s bar, thereby making it easy for Rose, whose car is in the shop and can’t leave town until it’s been repaired, to walk in and see them. The fort Spooner built when he was little is still sitting in his parents’ yard. Why? So he and Rose can climb inside and have a sweet bonding session (this after they’ve made cute over burgers, made cute while taking a dip in a hotel pool, made cute while jumping on the beds in her hotel room, and, yes, made cute while spooning), and so Spooner can crawl back inside afterwards and pine for Rose, thereby allowing his father to come spray him with a water hose and yell at him to get out.

When you get right down to it, Spooner is a sitcom. And not a good one, either. It’s predictable and pointless, an indie romance for people who plop themselves down every afternoon for an hour of According to Jim. It was inevitable, I suppose, for the genre go this way, but it seemed to happen rather fast.           

THE VIDEO

Seeing as how this is a cheap indie flick and was shot on digital video (most likely with consumer-grade equipment), the 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer is okay for what it is. The bold, nearly radioactive primaries that dominate (see, I told you they’d been watching Wes Anderson movies) often look very good, and there are times when the movie looks far slicker and more expensive than it should. But the image has a way of shifting in quality at random moments (at times even between shots in the same scene), suddenly losing its nicely filmic look and becoming digital in appearance.

THE AUDIO

The Dolby Digital 5.1 track has an okay stereo spread but makes no use of the surrounds whatsoever. Music and dialogue sound perfectly okay, albeit in a lo-fi sort of way. A Dolby Stereo track is also included; no subtitles options are available.

THE EXTRAS

No extras are included.

FINAL THOUGHTS