SEPTEMBER MORNING

SEPTEMBER MORNING

In 1968, Hy Averbach directed an amusing little comedy entitled "Where Were You When The Lights Went Out"; it centered around the 1965 blackout on the east coast that pretty much crippled New York City. It starred Doris Day, Robert Morse, Terry Thomas, Jim Backus, Steve Allen and a few other comedians of the day. It was funny and poked fun at the charades of some select New Yorkers during a crisis.

I'm not really sure what director/writer Ryan Frost was shooting for with his first feature length film about a bunch of college age kids who gather together to watch the unfolding of the 9/11 attacks in New York. You get this feeling that he watched "The Breakfast Club" or "The Squid and the Whale" or even the more cerebral "Carnage" and decided that he could make a movie kinda like that only about the 9/11 attacks.

In brief, Frost hired a bunch of D-lister actors whom he may have met in the mystical actors unemployment line. The only one with a name is veteran actor Max Gail who gained fame 40-years ago on the TV show Barney Miller. The rest - Oatric Cage II, Troy Doherty, Mike Grant, Katherine Hughes and Micheal Liu - are happy when they get cast to play 'Man Standing In Line #2' in a low budget commercial.

The good news is their bleak carreers won't be damaged by this yawner, it is clearly the script that needed a total re-write. The set is one room in a dormitory (keeping it cheap) with the group discussing the attacks before diverting off on pics of sex and pizza. Seriously, far too much time was devoted to the delivery of a pizz and the concept that one of them, Shelly (Taylor Rose), is a virgin. Actually!

Their conversation is interrupted by the resident assistant (Michael Liu) who caught them smoking a cigarette and may or may not report them for doing so. They drink and reveal stuff that quite frankly you could care less about.

All of this takes 90-minutes of your life for there to be no conclusion. There is no payoff. There is no reward; not even a juicy sex scene that would have helped immensely. Nothing.

"September Morning" is little more than a junior year film class project that wants to be more profound than it is but is actually very shallow and boring. If I'm director Ryan Frost's instructor, I'd give him a 'D'... at best! -- GEOFF BURTON

GEOFF BURTON

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