'Loudmouth Soup'

This micro-budget amateur-acting exercise plays like The Anniversary Party without the frisson of marquee performers behaving badly. We get F-listers playing at being marquee performers behaving badly. The gimmick: Director Adam Watstein invited seven unknown actors to a Silver Lake house, provided each with an objective, and let them improvise their fantasy of a bourgeois Hollywood dinner party, replete with boozy melodramatics, surreptitious screenplay pitching, deteriorating social graces, and racial uniformity. Mercilessly, there were no second takes. The dialogue is strained from the get-go—as if the director held off-screen cue cards emphasizing "EXPOSITION: NOW!"—and the one-objective-per-character diagram should have stayed in acting class. Loudmouth Soup perpetuates the same shallow myths about Los Angeles that it pretends to indict, since its actors would gladly trade places with the Sundance-smash director, the glamorous starlet, or the Bruce Willis—meets—Adam Sandler action hero—all figures who withstand a sadistic comeuppance in the movie. The entire project underscores the desperate proclamation of one out-of-work "director's wife": "For God's sake, let's do something!"