★★★★★★★★★★ 5/10

Virgil Gurdies (Mark Schiembmeir) has good taste. He should, he develops and combines flavour profiles for a living. He despises his job though. What he loves are his girlfriend Angie (Sydney Andrews) and artisanal goat cheese. Now if he could only combine the two.

When Angie moves away for work, the couple drifts apart. Virgil turns to cheese making to fill the void. With zero experience, he starts his cheese venture with the help of a hermit (Dan Braverman), Yens his baker friend (Stephen Taylor Fry) and Artois the goat.

Virgil and Angie are a believable couple. The acting was okay and despite some overacting, the leads grew on me as the movie got longer. There are some memorable supporting characters. Yens had some funny scenes involving him and illegal cheese transactions. Virgil’s boss  appears as two different characters and has a hilarious chase scene.

Written and directed by Bogart brother team Cliff and Kyle. This is their first feature on graduating a few years earlier. Cliff worked at cheese shop and Kyle had a long distance relationship. So they combined what they knew and made this film. If life experience could only make up for film making experience, this would have been an awesome film. The problems are:

1. It starts with the their script, it’s simply overwritten. Yes Virgil, you hate your job. I get it.
2. The brothers are too indulgent in their film making. They use a dream sequence device which at first I thought was well done. However, when I’ve seen enough sequences that I lose count. It’s too much.
3. Too many scenes. The audience doesn’t need everything spelled out to them. Work smarter, not harder.
4. Editing, not enough and when it was done it was done poorly. The film was shot in HDCAM so we get to see all the poorly timed edits unfold in crystal clarity.

According to the producer, the film had 140 scenes and 50 locations in 4 cities. That sounds like a lot for a bunch of first time indie film makers with no money. Yet here is their work. It’s not bad and it’s not great. Regardless, I applaud their first effort. I might have only given the film a middling score but I look forward to seeing their future work.

IMDb rating 6.0/10 51 votes

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