{"id":16679,"date":"2010-10-16T08:48:58","date_gmt":"2010-10-16T13:48:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/?p=16679"},"modified":"2011-10-12T23:04:22","modified_gmt":"2011-10-13T04:04:22","slug":"pff-review-cafe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/2010\/10\/16\/pff-review-cafe\/","title":{"rendered":"PFF Review: CAF\u00c9"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Caf\u00e9<\/strong> is an independent film which has a lot going for it \u2013 an able and engaging cast, a nice location and some visually pleasing cinematography. Unfortunately, it is in the service of a script that while it has some moments, ultimately falls apart under the weight of its own ambitions.<\/p>\n

Caf\u00e9<\/strong> will have its world premier screening tonight at the Philadelphia Film Festival.<\/p>\n

A West Philadelphia coffee shop whose regular clientele make up a microcosm of the surrounding neighborhood. There\u2019s a computer geek who thinks that a pre-teen girl named Elly is hacking his computer. While a woman interviews prospective applicants for a local rehab center, a drug dealer (Jamie Kennedy) sits in the back of the caf\u00e9, desperately trying to blend in with the other locals. A copy stops in and chats idly about his junkie cousin. Stationed at a table by a window, a writer jots down observations of the various customers\u2019 comings and goings in a notebook. Meanwhile Todd the barista (Daniel Eric Gold) pines away for his co-worker Claire (Jennifer Love Hewitt) even though she is trapped in an abusive relationship.<\/p>\n

The movie starts with what has become a rather clich\u00e9d indie film trope \u2013 A glimpse of some sort of tragedy with the bulk of the narrative being a flashback that leads up to the incidence. Here, it is a number of gunshots ringing out after several officers enter the caf\u00e9. It\u2019s a device that is supposed to build tension as the film progresses, but it doesn\u2019t work here. It\u2019s mostly due to the fact that the lives of these characters don\u2019t intertwine so much as they just occasionally glance off each other. It\u2019s not that any of their stories aren\u2019t interesting, it is just that each character or pairs of characters are pretty much locked into their own storylines that don\u2019t impact on any of the others in any meaningful way.<\/p>\n

But to address my main problem with the script is to journey into spoiler territory, so proceed into this paragraph at your own risk. It becomes apparent early on that Elly\u2019s assertion to the computer geek (who goes unnamed in the film but is listed as \u201cAvatar\u201d in the credits) that everything is a computer simulation is indeed true. And from that moment, it becomes harder to be emotionally invested in anything that happens to caf\u00e9 patrons and staff. Why should we bother if the program could be switched off causing them to blink out of existence at any moment? Anything they learn won\u2019t have any real meaning. Elly and the Computer Geek And the final philosophical conversation between Elly and the computer geek stops the movie cold, which is disastrous, as it is trying to achieve an emotional moment.<\/p>\n

The performances here are uniformly good, good enough to make you dismiss the triteness of the screenplay. The cast is a mixture of some recognizable names (Hweitt, Kennedy) and relative unknowns, but they function well as an ensemble, with no one trying to outperform the others. Special notice should be given to teen actress Madeline Carroll, who brings the gravitas and wisdom needed for her role, no mean feat for an actor her age.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Caf\u00e9 is an independent film which has a lot going for it \u2013 an able and engaging cast, a nice location and some visually pleasing cinematography. Unfortunately, it is in the service of a script [click for more]<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[206],"tags":[4400,4389],"series":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-16679","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-review","7":"tag-cafe","8":"tag-philadelphia-film-festival-2010"},"aioseo_notices":[],"nelio_content":{"autoShareEndMode":"never","automationSources":{"useCustomSentences":false,"customSentences":[]},"efiAlt":"","efiUrl":"","followers":[],"highlights":[],"isAutoShareEnabled":false,"networkImageIds":[],"permalinkQueryArgs":[],"series":[],"suggestedReferences":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16679"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16679\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16679"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=16679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}