 Originally Posted by major jay
C'mon Kraken, it rendered you speechless? You're an articulate guy, so give us the rundown.
Watching the trailer makes me think it's just a one trick pony, stunningly bad effects, and the rest being a snoozefest. (but I hope I'm wrong)
I'll give it this, it is DAMN entertaining, just not in the way the director originally intended.
The movie is beyond amateurish - the editing and sound recording/design are particularly awful, actually worse than the effects: for example, a character asks a question then stands looking awkwardly at the other individual for an unneccesarily extended period of time, there is a pop on the soundtrack and then background noise goes silent (because there is no separate "environmental audio" recording, only the noise picked up while recording dialogue using the camera's built-in mic), then the shot cuts to the other speaker, who says their piece and stops, we hold on them standing, staring in silence, for about ten seconds then suddenly jump to the next scene. The acting is also horrendously wooden and the dialogue is embarrassingly awkward (on the first date, the couple spend about five minutes of screen time discussing the guy's stock options). There is also, literally, no logic or motivation behind almost anything the characters do, or even any real sense of narrative purpose; even before the birds attack, they just seem to spend most of their time wandering from one incident/scene to another, and the remaining time is mostly spent telling each other at length about the events that have just happened to them, which the audience have already witnessed. Hell, we even get to see the lead character's entire drive to and from work, including an extended stop off at a filling station, during which nothing of note happens. 
Now, if you think this sounds boring, you'd be wrong. The whole movie is positively hypnotic. Honestly, I literally could not take my eyes off it. It was like my brain refused to accept it was not intentionally bad; in fact, part of me still wonders if the movie's awfulness is not, in itself, a clever marketing ploy that was planned from the start. I know I'm probably mad, but some of the terrible set-pieces just seem too deliberately constructed, the lack of perspective (both visual and mental) just a little too finely-tuned, and the hilarious dialogue misfires just too perfectly timed and executed to wring the maximum of hilarity from every exchange. It's just too perfect. I reckon Nguyen is either incredibly naive or incredibly crafty.
Either way, hats off to the man. There is clearly a lot of his personality in this film - there are a bunch of ideas and opinions and characters that are clearly just lifted clean out of his head and piled slapdash into the camera. It's very messy and terribly executed, but coming away from the movie you feel like you have had a kind of insight into someone else's mind (if only by accudent). And it's kind of sweet.
I will say this: I genuinely laughed and I genuinely cried (granted, the latter was a result of doing too much of the former), and it's not often a movie hits me as hard as that. Forget all those cheapskate, piss-poor zombie knockoffs and bottom-feeding professional mockbusters that duck it out on the IMDB bottom 100: this movie is like nothing you've ever seen before, it's going to become very well known and entertain a lot of people and make Nguyen a crapload of money. And as shitty as the movie is by almost every technical and artistic standard, I think if a movie brings entertainment to people and some measure of success to its creator, then it's not truly a failure.
I say good luck to him.
P.S. In short, just imagine Duck Hunt: The Movie made by enthusiastic ten-year-olds.
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Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. [click for more]
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