Jimmy and Judy (2006)

Powerful

Don't listen to the negative reviews

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

The acting in this movie is really good.

Jimmy & Judy left me disappointed because I did not find anything original in the movie. While watching the movie many other better flicks similar to this one, came into my mind like Natural Born Killers, Badlands, Kalifornia etc.And I kept on hoping that there may be some twist in the plot but nothing happened. Another problem with this one is that the characters never got the time to develop.The acting was ordinary. Both Jimmy and Judy looked normal teens acting weirdly !I don't know why? Nothing was said or shown. So all in all you may miss this one and better watch any of the above mentioned movies.

There is a very brief period of many peoples' young lives, usually sometime in junior high school or high school, when it is cool to be a loser, an outcast. The girls like the guys that ditch school and get in trouble with the police and have disastrous relationships with their parents. That period of life does not, however, extend beyond high school, which might be why 21-year-old Jimmy (played by a plump, 30-year-old Eddie Furlong) manages to get a high school girl to fall in love with him. I love the irony here, by the way. Judy is clearly a smart and successful student who one day is attacked by a group of girls, the bad kids (by the way, do high school girls really do this? Definitely not when I was in school…), which Jimmy catches on tape because he films everything. Later he exacts vicious revenge on two of the people involved in the attack and shows it to Judy, who is horrified but ultimately touched that he would look out for her in such a way. Soon afterwards she falls intensely in love with Jimmy, who is not a far cry removed from the same kinds of jerks that attacked her in the first place. This is going to be a film that most people will either love or hate, although I happen to have strongly disliked it, but I didn't hate it. It's an extremely simply made film, shot almost entirely from the perspective of a home video camera and cut for the most part to run like an unedited MiniDV tape. There won't be any concern about motion sickness, but it's an intensely realistic portrayal of the lives of a couple of genuinely screwed up kids. In short, for a good majority of the movie it is genuinely unpleasant to watch, as it is meant to be. Personally, I knew a lot of people like Jimmy (minus the killing) in high school because I hung out with the wrong people for a couple years. These are the guys that never go home because they hate their parents and are always drunk or on drugs. I don't know why people hang out with people like that, they are highly unpleasant to be around, particularly the nutty ones like the crackhead that Jimmy and Judy shack up with for a couple hours midway through the movie. I like movies that bring back fun memories from high school. Jimmy and Judy brings back memories, but all the wrong ones. I bought the movie, by the way, because I was curious to see what Eddie Furlong was up to these days. He was phenomenal in Terminator 2 but his career never really seemed to go very far after that, except for his outstanding role in the spectacular American History X. I don't know much about his personal life, but he is a little TOO good at playing a dirtbag. It's also interesting that he looks so handsome on the cover box, because little Eddie has become quite the meatball.Anyway, his Jimmy in this movie is an unhinged lunatic with absolutely no redeeming values whatsoever, while Judy is pretty and smart. Whether you like the movie or not, believing her interest in him is no small feat. They are polar opposites and it's nearly impossible to understand what she sees in him, but their chemistry works well enough so I guess it doesn't matter. We do, however, see in great detail why Jimmy is so twisted (we are, after all, products of our environment, and his parents' relationship is one of the sickest marriages I've ever seen, in a movie or otherwise), but we learn nothing about Judy's past, including why she was being bullied at school. But the worst part of all, by far, is this ridiculous commune at the end of the film. It is a mixture of a twisted cult group and what I imagine Woodstock must have looked like. You see, there is some insane fanatic known as Uncle Rodney who has started this as a place for trashy people to go live. I think his exact words were "garbage people," meaning they are the garbage of society. Nice. I can see the appeal already. This Rodney is played by William Sadler, who must never have had a more pointless role. The only purpose he serves here is to make this already trashy movie look like preachy crap. You can feel yourself being punched in the face with the transparent "social commentary" when he gives his goofy, fiery speech near the end of the movie. You see, apparently he believes that by providing this retreat for the trash of society, they'll become stronger with each new addition, while the "outside world" gets weaker with every one, until they become so strong that they can rain garbage on the world that threw them away and then "fornicate in their ashes." Are you hearing this? WOW.I would hate to be the one to burst his balloon, but I have a feeling that the subtraction of a lot of criminals and junkies and drunks is not exactly going to make society weaker…Ultimately, the movie starts off as a serious downer and goes downhill from there. I was thoroughly depressed by the time it was over and couldn't even take my afternoon nap. I hate that. Note: Another IMDb user called this the best film at the San Fran Indie Fest. Boy am I glad I missed that one. And by the way, some lunatic from the San Francisco Chronicle has claimed that this is the movie that Natural Born Killers wanted to be, and at 1/20th of the cost. Yeah, right. They spent $500,000 on this? Scary. I would say that not more than about $1,200 made it onto the screen….

As a very open-minded and avid fan of film, I must say that this movie was distasteful and over the top for a variety of reasons. Basically, sociopathic teens turn to murder in the most predictable of steps while subjecting the viewer to grotesquely graphic images that only serve to disturb. It's a concept that has been done before, and done in a far more provocative way. The film has some different elements (i.e. the concept of the video diary and the extremely long, single-take scenes) and there are a few occasions where something genuinely interesting and unique is produced. But these moments are few and don't in the slightest make up for the one-dimensional, tired formula of "youth spinning out of control".Edward Furlong is inarguably flawless in his delivery of the role, but that's really the only slightly positive statement that can be said for the acting. The directing grows sloppy in the second half and loses all the intimacy and realism that made the film mildly interesting at first. The sound editing is irritatingly unrealistic and sometimes takes the movie to a place dangerously close to kitsch. And the writing is dull at best; every scene is PAINFULLY transparent in its intended character or plot development and basic, simple points in the setup of the story (why is Judy so horribly harassed at school?) go entirely ignored.Lacking any real style or purpose and with an irritating, smug arrogance, "Jimmy and Judy" is a self-indulgent parade of predictability and shocking images with no real counter-point. Frankly, not worth the time.

I've seen a lot of bad movies lately, but HOLY HELL!!! When I first heard about Jimmy and Judy, I was mildly interested. Two young (rolls eyes) lover go on a violence and destruction rampage. Kinda a new NBK or Bonnie and Clide. Well it was far from any of those classics. J & J is just persistent boredom. Long shots of NOTHING!! Annoying ?acting? by furlong, random nudity, horrible tattoos. OH GOD!! the TATTOOS!!! Okay, heres a game you can play while watching this movie. Each time you see a fake tattoo (looks like they went to staples, bought a 12 pack of sharpies and colored in some tribal crap. Awful.) take a drink. Aside from the tattoos and the acting, the entire thing being done in a hand cam by the characters gets old FAST. It felt constantly forced and not natural at all. SPOILER: One shot in particular that I laughed at was towards the end after Jimmy gets the crap kicked out of him by the commune people. Let me set the stage: the guy just had a beating to within an inch of his life; he comes to at night and grabs his CAMERA turns it on and carries it with him as he stumble around to get to his van and back to the house to kill people. Now, maybe I'm crazy, BUT... If I was just stomped by about a half dozen large hillbillies, when I came too I really don't think my first act would be to reach over and turn on my flippin handy-cam. Spoilers over.Final thoughts: Skip Jimmy and Judy unless you want to laugh at a horrible story, boring and pointless directing, and Ed Furlong looking like a fool.