I Want and Need More
Jones Dillon (Elijah Wood - The Lord of the Rings) shows up at college with his large trunk before anyone arrives and as the other students swarm in he decides it is not for him and finds a room in a house to move into. Soon after he meets the other residence, Jane (Franka Potente - The Bourne Identity) a quiet photography who initially mistakes him for a stalker, Lisa (Mandy Moore - A Walk to Remember) an actress who takes a shine to him and also Brad (Aaron Pearl - Growing the Big One), a painter with a cowboy fetish. Jones is a bit artistic to with a fondness for writing an imagination which often seen him slipping into fantasies about a more exciting life including sexual encounters with Ma a seller of second hand furniture.
"All I Want" is a tease, it has a good cast, a lot of amusing scenes, and an off beat nature which says I am an indie movie but I am not inaccessible. But it keeps offering this but never seemingly to go anywhere other than throwing amusing scenes at us in the journey of Jones as he grows up in his own place. It makes it a flipping annoying movie because it keeps you watching, waiting for something more than an amusing scene but never giving you anything.
As such I have to say that writer Charles Kephart has concocted some genuinely funny scenes. Are regular excursions into Jones's fantasies from pulling a bazooka from his trunk to deal with a car which nearly hit him to a sexual fantasy about Ma seducing him are amusing. And there are lots of fun scenes, the buying beer scene followed by Jane mistaking Jones for a deviant are both amusingly clever. And credit should also goes to director Jeffrey Porter for keeping all this fun and accessible and not going to far off the beaten track.
Continuing on the praise front the entire cast also deserve praise as they all play their comical parts well; Elijah Wood, Franka Potente, Mandy Moore and Aaron Pearl all deliver entertaining performances. The daft thing is that their characters are not that deep, in fact some of them have no depth what so ever but because they are quirky they are interesting.
The trouble is that whilst we have amusement and entertaining performances and even interesting characters because of their quirkiness the movie never seems to be going anywhere. It keeps on throwing these amusing scenes at us but that is all and no matter how enjoyable they are the fact it doesn't really go anywhere makes it forgettable. It is also forgettable when it comes to the depth because when you have Lisa trying to say something deep it just doesn't come across as interesting or to be honest deep.
What this all boils down to is that "All I Want" is amusing, it has amusing characters and amusing scenes but because it struggles to really tell a story it becomes forgettable.
