The web site is kind of sludgy and fucked up — it looks like
a MySpace page as tinkered with by a well-meaning boomer who has no idea what
they’re doing — and so, not surprisingly, I couldn’t get the trailer to work
for me, but I’m still have a passing intrigue in writer-director Jack
Piandaryan’s The Parallel,
a new independent film which will get its exclusive Los Angeles engagement on
Friday, May 11 at Laemmle’s Town Center 5
in Encino.

Starring Taylor Gerard Hart (who really looks like a ringer
for a young Jim Caviezel) and Margaret Scarborough, the movie is described as a
drama about a cocksure teenager who, full of himself and great expectations, wakes
up from a debauched night with his girlfriend’s best friend to find himself 20
plus years older and trapped in a bleak life he’d never imagined. That
probably sounds like a lot of marriages out there. I’m intrigued, I guess,
because I’m not yet sure where the movie’s line of division falls, and what
sort of “return” is broached or brokered, if any. I’ve always thought there’s a
fascinating movie out there to be made of a teenager’s loss of
innocence/intellectual awakening — being thrust against his will, in a very fantastical
but non-comedic way, into adulthood’s compromises, responsibilities and hardship, but then finding reward
and purchase in it. I doubt The Parallel
will be that film, but who knows? I
might try to check it out. For more information, click here.