I enjoyed the first 20 minutes of this film - sort of - there was an atmosphere.

I was hoping for a certain growth of character development and some semblance of a story.

There was NONE.

This film seems mostly to be about the disappointment of getting older. The first half of the film is sureal and magical, it was also quite funny with bizarre existential questions being thrown around but never answered; I guess the subtext is: you don't need answer them because you're young. The second half of the film seems to be about the inevitable unfulfilled expectations and the loss of connection with people who have taken a different life path to you. Overall the first half is more enjoyable to watch and the second half is incredibly slow and down beat however, I think it leaves you feeling exactly what the film makers intended.

This small gem of an 'indie' movie has 'indie classic' written all over it. Opening on one of those American summers we all wish we could have lived through Tyler Taormina's "Ham on Rye" is a film that, in its first five minutes, could go any way. A Sofia Coppola "Virgin Suicides" rip-off? Surely not. Another gross-out teen comedy? No, these teens are too well-scrubbed, their parents perhaps just a little too off-the-wall. Come to think of it, everyone we meet in the first five minutes is just a little too off-the-wall. Is this a horror movie? Is Michael Myers lurking in the sunshine?

Perhaps it's that uncertainty demonstrated in the first five minutes that makes this the kind of movie you know you're going to treasure and if there's a precedent maybe it's the early films of Richard Linklater or something David Lynch might have made when he was sixteen, (as it progresses it certainly drifts off into Lynchian surrealism). There's no plot and the lack of 'action' is bound to alienate even its potential audience, teens of a certain age. Cineastes, however, will have a field-day with the onscreen images conjuring memories of other films as well as, hopefully, their own teenage years when doing nothing actually felt like doing something, (and there's an awful lot of doing nothing here). It's a young person's movie for sure and you could say Tyler Taormina has definitely arrived. i loved every bizarre moment.