Sadly Over-hyped

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Here's a tip for all aspiring screenwriters out there. If the middle part of your script really has nothing to do with the beginning or ending, that means you've written a bad movie and need to start over. The people behind Klepto never learned that lesson, so they wasted their time and mine making this dog of a film.It starts out as the story of Emily Brown (Meredith Bishop). She's a young woman of average attractiveness who also happens to be a compulsive shoplifter. She doesn't steal for money, she just takes things to make herself feel better. Emily is seeing a therapist and taking an enormous amount of medication to deal with her OCD, but her need to steal is getting worse and she's becoming more reckless. When we find out her mother is coming for a visit and witness a couple of flashbacks to Emily's childhood with a man who's face we never see, it seems like Klepto is going to be a family drama about the secrets of the past and how they've shaped a young woman in unfortunate ways.However, the movie largely ignores all of that after the first 20 or so minutes and instead focuses on the story of Nick Diaz (Jsu Garcia, whose first name appears to be missing at least one vowel). Nick is a store security guard who sees Emily stealing and lets her get away with it because he's inexplicably captivated by her, even though he's actually prettier than she is. Nick is a former criminal with a very bitter ex-wife. He's trying to go straight and start his own security agency, when he's not trying to get into Emily's pants. Nick can't get a bank loan, so he lets his degenerate friend Marco (Michael Irby) talk him into doing a drug deal. The plan is that Nick will get the money from an Armenian gangster he knows named Ivan (Henry Czerny), buy 20 thousand pills of ecstasy from one of Marco's contacts, give Ivan the pills and keep a cut of the money for themselves. Things go wrong, a couple of things happen solely because the story needs them to happen, and Nick ends up asking Emily to steal something for him.At this point, the movie seems to suddenly remember it was supposed to be about Emily, her compulsive shopper of a mother, Theresa (Leigh Taylor-Young), and the supposed secret of their family. The utterly underwhelming secret is revealed, Nick demonstrates for the audience that most career criminals are immensely stupid and then the story ends without ever coming close to justifying the hour-and-a-half of my life I threw away watching it.With the director also being a co-writer and the two leads also serving as producers, I think it's fair to say that Klepto is one of those movies that gets made so the filmmakers can enter it into festivals in the hope of getting noticed by some studio executive. But no studio executive, no matter how high on cocaine or distracted by hookers, could ever look at this movie and think the people who made it are worth a minute of his time.This story has absolutely nothing intelligent to say about compulsive shoplifting, compulsive shopping or childhood memories. Nick Diaz' story is nothing but a string of clichés interrupted only by moments when the Almighty Plot Hammer blatantly pushes the story along. The acting is perfectly fine, but the only character who does anything even remotely interesting is a drug dealer played by Michael E. Rodgers. When the best role in your film is a bit part that's barely on screen for 5 minutes, that's another sign you've written a bad screenplay.The direction of Klepto is professional-looking but never more than ordinary, except for one long tracking shot that's clearly in the movie just because the director wanted to show he could pull off a long tracking shot. The effect is a bit like making macaroni and cheese out of the box and throwing a hot pepper in the mix, just for the heck of it.Klepto is one of those movies that make you shake your head and shrug your shoulders. It doesn't have anything to say, yet also fails to say nothing in an intriguing or provocative way. Given the time, energy and money that goes into even a low-budget film like this, it's a mystery why any of the people involved ever thought THIS was the movie to which they wanted to devote themselves.

This film ultimately fails, and its really a shame. About halfway through the scriptwriters appear to just walk off and leave and the rest of the film falls flat on its face.As a movie in its own right, Klepto is a disaster, however as a directorial debut (is it??) it is actually not bad - some of the use of music and the editing reminded me of the film Primer.If the plot and script clumsinesses could have been resolved, this would be a film I could recommend to others. As it was (I bought it cheap), I kept the blank translucent box spare but threw the cover insert and the disc in the rubbish bin.To the actors, director and writer(?) - please don't give up, you failed this time but you showed enormous potential.

I too have seen KLEPTO and consider the listed review from Austin to be wildly inaccurate. KLEPTO is a self-assured directing debut by a director that has a bright future. So what if he chooses to tell a story through multiple angles? Must every film review of every film begin with the Hollywood formula, specifically that a film must follow a singular protagonist through a specific set of paces that we have all become so sensitive to that we can predict them in our sleep?!Tom Trail has the good sense to take the O.C.D. psychological disorder and frame it in a real life situation, make it feel as though it could be the basis for those noises you hear coming through your own apartment wall, the life experience of a neighboring stranger you've never seen...His "Emily" as played by the juicy Meredith Bishop with conviction, despite her having to remain frail and unhinged, falls prey to the wiles and incliniations and ultimate scheme of the devious Security Specialist (watch for Jsu Garcia to become the next Latin male superstar in the Benicio Del Toro mold!). It's not at all "heavy handed" as one reviewer previously reported. It's a dance of sorts, the way "Nick" inserts himself into Emily's life right as her neurotic mother comes to stay for an unwanted visit.For me it was the fascinating and visually strategic lines of two people paths coming together, becoming inextricably intertwined, that was so fun, so involving. This succint (the flick is a brisk 84 minutes) and astute character study breaks out of the gate at race horse's pace and never lets up! The photography, the smaller supporting roles, the music (some of it performed on a classical piano even!), and one of the best single take "long shots" of the year (eat your heart out Scorsese!) all approximate the material to the perfect degree. This film is like a complicated meal, one with many ingredients, all vital to its final finish as a dish...nothing is peppered in here with the "heavy hand" suggested by the previous reviewer and the result? Delicious and full of depth.Find this film, whatever it

The premise of the film is a good one...girl gets her jollies from stealing stuff, and she ends up in a bit of trouble when a security officer notices her. Unfortunately, the film drops the girl's journey at this point and focuses on a myriad of issues that it will drop later, leaving you asking "Why?" at the climax rather than caring about what is happening. The film looks pretty good on-screen...I wish they had used some of their time in writing a decent script, and not just in the editing bay. Little of the dialouge is believable, and instances that bring people together are better written in soap operas than they were here. The film invests in characters it throws to the wolves later, making you wonder why you even watched the life of this person. Silly tricks start subplots, and dialouge rather than action end them. The big moment in the film is something you figure out as soon as the crisis is introduced.I saw the trailer after I saw this film, and it reinforced my thought that the idea behind the film is intriguing. The log line on this film is a good one...but the film itself doesn't stick with it. If you're going to make a film about a girl who is addicted to stealing, make it about that girl. Don't use the middle of the film to take me five other places and then later come back to this girl and expect me to care. And if you're going to write a film with a female protagonist, give us a character that is written as a person and not as a guy's idea of what a girl is/should be.