You Are Here (2010)

(On Cable TV, February 2014) I’m not sure if there’s something wrong when a movie has me daydreaming furiously… about things that it doesn’t do. Low-budget Canadian production You Are Here is a big grab-bag of philosophical ideas thrown haphazardly on the screen in what approximates a science-fiction premise but ultimately isn’t much more than random stuff strung together. Hence my hesitation: While it’s fun to see John Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment presented on-screen, while You Are Here’s writer/director Daniel Cockburn (better known as a conceptual artist) occasionally plays with clever ideas, unorthodox presentation format or compelling vignettes, it doesn’t add up to anything more than a collection of things, not a satisfying coherent narrative. So it is that I found myself drifting away from the movie, more interested in what it could have done with the same ideas had it been more disciplined, -heck- had it even been interested in delivering a story rather that bite-sized vignettes. I really wanted to like this film better than it did, but there is something about its execution that doesn’t work.