What DVD's are we Watching?

[wolf]

Manic -One of those "independent" films, which in this case means a lot of jerky, hand-held camera work with extreme closeups that's probably supposed to make you feel more a part of the action, but used too much it's distracting. There's also some heavy-handed cinematography, white-out lighting, and so on. It's about teenagers in an inpatient psychiatric facility, which when you first see it, seems to be part of a larger general hospital, and then you find that you're out in the country somewhere. There's a couple things they got wrong about the inpatient setting, but the accuracies outweigh these errors. The filmmaker doesn't just focus on the kids, you see the frustrations on the part of the staff as well, which makes this a very unusual film.