It's funny to consider that the single most used (and abused) drug in America is only not receiving its film debut. Rolling by Billy Samoa Salleebey ambles through the lives of a dozen ecstasy users to organize and document the events that transpired on one average but dangerous night out. To make an awkward parallel: if Swingers met Scared Straight and had a baby on E, that baby might be Rolling.
Though the plot is fully scripted and cast with actors, Rolling is produced in the style of as a documentary. As such, the film alternates between talking head interview footage of each of the cast of characters and coverage of their lives at home, at work and with their lovers. When the disparate characters find each other at a rave and end at the house of a wayward college student (en route to a career in law, no less) each makes decisions that ultimately contribute to tragedy.
What's good about the film is its interest in E as a culture. Though the characters are a little archetypal, they serve a larger, more cautionary role in this story "based on true events." The cast is as varied as it is common: the actors look like girls and boys next door and they act just like any average person set in front of a camera would…uncomfortable and aware they’re being watched. In addition, with so many characters, you’re libel to identify with at least one of them. The whole: "these kids could be you" idea comes up a lot, and reasonably so.
The film is quite successful depicting a controversial issue amply, involving all its degrees of safety and danger, but never resorting to prescription. You could carve as many arguments to legalize the drug as arguments to ban it out of the film, and though the approach to faux documentary is hardly original, the elements that are brought together for the final product make a concise and meaningful enough package to make the whole endeavor pretty worthwhile. Totally worth seeing if you’ve ever rolled but totally not worth seeing if you’re actually rolling. This is nothing like Heavy Metal so don’t get confused.
By Sara S, contributing
A quirky drama cast with Southland to Southwest exiles, Mojave Phone Booth is an ensemble piece about disparate characters joined by their connection to a dilapidated phone booth in the desert. Word spread about this ramshackle phone booth. People wrote about it on the Internet and talked about it on the radio. With the tone of legend people would visit the strangely mythic booth and await a phone call from a woman in another place. A kind of catharsis came from the phone calls, along with a sense of destiny. These characters found the booth, at sea in the desert – so to speak – and when the phone rang, it rang for them. True, none of the participants ever met Greta (Shani Wallis), the woman on the other end, but these characters seem at peace with the distance. It’s the less literal forms of distance that plague them in their “real” lives.
Something like an Amorres Perros set in Nevada, Mojave Phone Booth tracks four characters, each of whom is suffering by the hands of lovers who believe themselves guided by forces: Beth (Annabeth Gish) is obsessed with the discarded audio/video tape she finds on the highway and uses this to separate herself from Tim (Kevin Rahm), who wants Beth to commit so badly he throws ethics out the window; exhausted waitress Alex (Christine Elise McCarthy) is in love with a Glory (Joy Gohring) who is unwittingly using the conceit she’s filled with alien parasites to wedge a space between she and her lover; and Richard (Robert Romanus) obsessively contends that his marriage with Sarah (Missi Pyle) was a happy one based solely on what looks like happiness in one, worshipfully overplayed, home movie. Mary (Tinarie Van Wyk Loots), the down and out expat from South Africa, is the only character with her bearings, but the world is working hard to mould her into a form befitting the inhospitable landscape.
Mojave Phone Booth is beset with imperfections, (the score is a little stilted and the cinematography is occasionally messy) but it does more than a decent job dealing with a social and emotional dysfunction that is all too abstract. It’s hard enough to identify this kind of alienation, to say nothing of making a film about it. Certain aspects of the film are pretty wonderful. Beth’s obsession with discarded tape leads way to a number of rather inspired metaphors about the unfulfilled yearning of each character to find a connection. Each character suffers in their stunted ability to communicate, each of them seeking some kind of vehicle -- videotape, audiotape, telephones, robbery – to facilitate a connection, all flailing in their pursuit. Inevitably, every hero is his or her own worst enemy, thus making it hard to identify a culprit for the systemic malfunction present in these characters lives. Is it a modern condition that they suffer through? Is it in the Nevada water? Are these characters suffering a low level sunstroke? Hard to say, but it’s easily a film that will keep you contemplating long after its ended.
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"liable", not "libel".
Ecstasy is the single most used (and abused) drug in America? I highly doubt that. I imagine that pot, speed, and maybe a few more are more widely used than E.