VIDEO: The trailer for The Lost Coast
If cellphones as plot devices don't ruin film narrative, maybe e-mail will. It certainly diminishes the mood of Gabriel Fleming's latter-day version of After Hours (with a little bit of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie). The film opens the morning after as Jasper (Ian Scott McGregor) types out a message to his out-of-town girlfriend Wendy describing the weird Halloween he had together with his high-school friend Mark, Mark's girlfriend Lily, and fourth wheel Caleb. The free-floating ambiguous sexual tension in the air is only amplified by the carnival atmosphere in the streets (did I mention that the film is set in San Francisco?), the quartet's inability to locate the party they want to go to, and chance encounters with weirdos and a dead guy ("More on that later," Jasper taps on his keyboard). Fleming excels at the exact, funny, bizarre detail (Caleb's costume for example, and the long-awaited appearance of Shanti), but the e-mail is strictly spam.
