Directors: Kevin Kolsch, Dennis Widmyer
Writers: Kevin Kolsch, Dennis Widmyer
Cast: Alex Essoe, Amanda Fuller, Noah Segan, Fabianne Therese, Pat Healy, Maria Olsen
Runtime: 98 mins.
2014
As you can see above, the DVD cover for Starry Eyes features a young dehydrated woman with her head tilted at a strange angle. She's probably looking up at that bizarrely generous pullquote from Time. "Did you see the same movie I did, Michael Roffman?" she asks. "Or maybe it's that you've never seen any of Lynch or Cronenberg's work." After all, those are two directors known more than anything for their uncanny weirdness, their ability to make us squint and squeam and walk away feeling gross, but also feeling like we'd just witnessed something totally unique.
The Starry Eyes DVD cover literally features a woman with stars on her eyes. That's pretty on the nose for a movie about eyes.
The central beat-you-over-the-heady metaphor gets even worse when you start watching the movie. Our protagonist is this girl Sarah (Alex Essoe), and she wants to be a star (!), but hasn't managed to land a breakthrough role. So instead of living the la-la land dream, she's stuck working at a lousy restaurant called Big Taters (essentially Hooters but potato-themed) and hanging around with a group of lousy millennials who just want to hang around at the poolside and party in dumb ways. But when a mysterious production company called Astraeus (!) Pictures (which means "starry surprise" in Greek or something like that) posts an ad seeking a young actress full of life and eager to give herself to the production of a film called The Silver Scream (!), she feels she has found her breakthrough role. Unfortunately, the casting process requires more of Sarah than she may be willing to give... such as her immortal soul (!).
