Life imitating art, imitating life, imitating art. Or something like that.

The Blue Tooth Virgin, written and directed by Russell Brown, is the story of two friends, both writers: David (Bryce Johnson), a successful, wunderkind magazine editor, and Sam (former “Days of Our Lives” stud muffin Austin Peck, who can now be seen on “As The World Turns”), a previously successful screenwriter whose show is long cancelled and whose life has descended into a cautionary tale. When Sam gives David his new script, their friendship is tested by the fact that Sam’s work, quite simply, really sucks.

Watching the film, one must wonder how much of it is based on Brown’s own life. One of his characters waxes on about the “screenwriter’s circle jerk,” a phenomenon where writers don’t tell each other how shitty their material is. You can’t help but wonder if that’s what happened when Brown asked for feedback on this script.

Unlike the neurotically funny ramblings of Woody Allen or the pop culture-laced patter of Quentin Tarantino, Brown’s characters speak primarily in monologues that lack any insight, humor or wit. Filled with laborious back-and-forth conversations malformed out of un-ended, blathering dialogue lacking all flow or nuance about the purgatory of bad writing and creative constipation, it almost seems like a unwitting joke on Brown’s part.

It doesn’t need to be pontificated about when any of the film’s unfortunate audience members are witnessing it in practice throughout the film’s 80 exhaustive minutes. But the movie’s troubles don’t end with bad dialogue and painful pacing.

“Are there characters?” one character asks of Sam’s script.

“No,” he’s told.

“Hmmm. Sounds like an indie.”

Bluntly chiseled out of clichés and trite observations, The Blue Tooth Virgin’s cast is forced to go through the marionette motions of Brown’s misshapen and puerile characters rather than create fully flushed out or believable human beings. Both leads are bizarrely miscast. Soap star Peck is incomprehensible as the stunningly handsome but somehow invisible failure devoted to his avant-garde art, while Johnson is equally unbelievable as the charmed and impish established editor.

With terrible writing, stiff acting and unsalvageable direction, Brown needs to learn that cutting back and forth between two people yammering on while casting brightly hued lights across the faces of your actors is not the same as creating dynamic storytelling. Stagnant, dull and lifeless, The Blue Tooth Virgin is the kind of independent film that gives the genre a bad name.

Grade: D



The Blue Tooth Virgin releases in select theaters Sept. 25.