The Boys & Girls Guide to Getting Down

Review in a Hurry:  This schizophrenic how-to for prospective nightlifers has some slick, funny narration and postproduction work. Unfortunately, the sub-infomercial acting, scripting and direction render the rest of the film (as in, most of it) essentially unwatchable.

The Bigger Picture:  Sociologists of the future, we give you exhibit A on why nobody was particularly depressed when Los Angeles finally slid into the Pacific: An off-putting hybrid of bad sketch comedy and perverse edutainment and wildlife filmmaking, The Boys & Girls Guide to Getting Down approaches hard-partying L.A. hipster culture with a gentle, reverential mocking, trailing a dozen or so youngish thangs and commenting on their quests for fun.

It's the sort of thing that might work if the performances were anything but a painfully awkward embarrassment to the spirit of community theaters everywhere. (Are there no unemployed actors in Los Angeles who can convincingly pretend to have fun?) Or if the story elements—a bunch of arbitrarily connected nightlife scenes that function less as plot than as unintentional existential nightmare—could possibly stand on their own. Or if the script at least called for the onscreen performers to say something mildly amusing once in a while. Or (maybe!) if the film was about 75 minutes shorter and thus had almost no time to wear out its welcome.

As things are, though, the Frankensteining of the surprisingly deft, deadpan narrated sequences and the woefully inept storyline is too jarring to maintain the film's illusion of hipster fairyland. Far from being a nice place to live, after viewing this Guide, you wouldn't want to visit there either.

The 180—a Second Opinion:  Okay, the sidebar in which a pair of scientists investigate the effects of partying on mice is legitimately funny. And if hipness is truly your aspiration, The Boys & Girls Guide does offer some helpful tips to wannabes searching for ways around those velvet ropes. Then again, if the subject matter is really that interesting to you, don't you by definition have something better to do with your evenings?