ZEMANOVALOAD A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2005 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): **
Well shot and sprinkled with funny snippets of clever dialog, ZEMANOVALOAD is nonetheless a dud that never manages to amount to anything, no matter how promising it keeps seeming.
John Davies (Ed Byrne), who can't deal with the real world, is a writer of soap operas and movies tells us, "that's why I write. I can make everyone intelligent, witty, erudite." And like all writers in the movies, he's always way, way behind on his schedule and being mistreated by his over-demanding producer. But none of this really bothers John as much as the loss of his girlfriend, Suki, who dumps him and cleans out his place just before the story begins.
And speaking of cleaning, John suffers from an obsessive compulsive disorder that causes him to spend hours scrubbing already clean floors and triple checking already locked locks. The problem is that this part of John's behavior -- including his incessant conversations with his tattooed index fingers named Bob and Prince -- is never believable or woven convincingly into the rest of his life.
Most of the story concerns John's attempt to get the world's most beautiful woman, Czech model Veronika Zemanova, to go out with him and to have a small, non-speaking part in one of his productions. She has man-made breasts the size of watermelons, which we observe in about one thousand still pictures and in countless short video clips. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I got really tired of seeing her huge hunks of silicone.
The only part of the movie that works consistently is a series of "true things" thoughts of John's, all neatly numbered. Typical of these are: "True thing number 78: Winners get laid. But you have to keep winning to keep getting laid." and "True thing number 337: You'll never know the answer if you don't ask the question." Here's my own personal true thing number one. Movies most in need of a script doctor are those least likely to realize it.
ZEMANOVALOAD runs 1:31.
The film is being shown as part of San Jose's Cinequest Film Festival (www.Cinequest.org), which runs March 2-13, 2005.
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