When
the apocalypse comes, books will definitely have an advantage over the
internet. An aspiring grad student would
agree. She was planning a career as a
librarian. Unfortunately, the end of the
world complicates matters. However, it
takes a while for her and her hard partying BFF a while to notice Armageddon
looming during their southwestern road trip in Brea Grant’s Best Friends Forever (trailer here), which premiered
last night in Part City at the 2013 Slamdance Film Festival.
Harriet
is the sensitive one, who spent a short stint in a mental hospital following a
suicide attempt. Following the long held
tradition of low budget genre movies, her best pal Reba is kind of trampy. After graduation, Harriet packs up the AMC
Pacer for grad school in Texas, convincing Reba to tag along for the ride. While they are on the road, a mysterious
terrorist attack leads to a series of nuclear explosions. The two women are not listening to the news
though, preferring music and the occasional “Oprah” moment to the outside world. Their first inklings something might be amiss
comes when three hipsters carjack their Pacer.
Eventually,
the breakdown of civilization strains their relationship. Of course, nobody claims responsibility for
the cataclysmic act of terror, lest it offend anyone. In one awfully strange exchange, several
characters want to blame North Korea, to which Reba replies she is Chinese, as
if the PRC were as benign as Luxemburg. Indeed,
the third act threatens to undo much of the good will established by the co-leads,
depicting a rather nasty nativist martial law sweeping across Texas.
Since
Grant co-wrote and co-produced with her co-star Vera Miao, viewers are pretty
much stuck with them as Harriet and Reba, respectively. Fortunately, they have some nice bickering
buddy-buddy chemistry together. Still,
this is clearly a genre film with a female audience in mind, casting men in exclusively
either predatory or ineffectual roles.
While Grant comes in with geek credentials from appearances in Heroes and Halloween 2, as well as her work co-writing the 1920’s zombie comic
We Will Bury You with her brother
Zane, neither of the two seems particularly comfortable with the odd action scene. Frankly, everyone in BFF would rather talk than do anything else, but the dialogue does
not have the sort of snap it should.
