Cupid's Mistake (2001)
reviewed by
James Brundage
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Cupid's Mistake
Directed by Young Man Kang
As Reviewed by James Brundage
We all know the feeling. We love them, but they love someone else. All right, it might not even be that we love them, but we at least have a vested interest in finding yourself snuggled next to them late at night. It happens all the time, and there isn't a damn thing that anyone can do about it. With all of the times Cupid's arrow has misfired, let's be glad he doesn't like to do a William Tell on all of us.
In fact, Cupid may strike gold and make us love the one that loves us everyone once in a while, but in the general he's got all of the accuracy of a Brittney Spears song... he hits everything but the mark, get's everyone all riled up over nothing, and makes us turn out a lot of Hollywood dribble in the hopes of getting further in a relationship that is going nowhere.
Such is the subject of Young Man Kang's (not a typo, it's really his name) film Cupid's Mistake, in which girl number one likes guy number one who likes girl number two who like guy number two who likes girl number one. Yes, we're back in geometry class studying this love rectangle, hoping that it doesn't turn to dribble like just about every other Hollywood romance.
Filmed on a budget of $980, Cupid's Mistake works off of improvisation, bizarre videography techniques, and incredible acting from complete nobodies in the acting world. Yet it still ends up keeping us from being sick to our stomachs, only has one time that we see the reflection of the videographer, and is romantic besides... all of which makes us wonder why the hell we pay for a $10 million Julia Stiles/Freddie Prinze Jr vehicle that does none of the above and makes us feel like we're going to vomit from its utter lack of quality besides.
Kang deserves credit for conceptualizing an editing a no budget film on no budget, finding a distributor (Pandera Cinema) despite having no budget, and also making a film that actually entertains on said budget of zero. The slick videography techniques Kang uses are readily available using almost any video editing software, and Kang edits his movie so smoothly that the 90 minutes of it fly by.
Yet I'm really not praising the emperor with no clothes because he saved the cost of fabric... really. The quadrangle behind Cupid's Mistake is well set up, the story solid and the acting as solid as you would expect from actual professionals (they are all credited actors, just none you would recognize), and the improvisation lends a real credo to the dialogue (although there is no "Gillian's Island" monologue, this kicks the shit out of the Blair Witch Project's conversations). I would go so far as to venture that Cupid's Mistake would be a pleasant art house romance without it being the up and coming poster boy of the digital video revolution that it is.
Of course there are flaws. Although the acting is solid and the conversation real, the actors still come off as slightly fake. At points it becomes clear that the dialogue is attempting to reach predestined points, and that the story has needed trimming here or there, and some of the visuals just don't work as well on video (which tries to compensate for natural lighting that could have served great purposes at certain points) as they would on film, but all of these flaws would have been eliminated (at the efficiency Kang works on) with an extra grand or two in the coffer. All in all it's a solid indie flick, not perfect, not bad, and definitely worth a view.
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