The quite long opening sequence of Twelve Thirty grabs you in a way that few opening scenes do. No title or credits, no music, just this strangely fascinating and consistently surprising conversation between two young kids, extended over several different locations. I confess, during this sequence I was considering the possibility that this film might be playing in the same league as Eric Rohmer, or certainly Richard Linklater or Tom Noonan. Silly me!

Twelve Thirty certainly sustains certain attributes of those filmmaker’s movies, namely constant dialog (with almost nothing else going on) and no music. But that’s where the similarity ends. After that interesting first sequence that seems to portend so many possibilities, the film actually becomes quite boring, the dialog instantly turning from entertaining to gratingly dull. The story has almost no coherence – first it’s about the young guy’s sexuality, then it’s about the second daughter and her Satanist friend, then it’s about the mother and her gay ex-husband, and then it finally settles on a quite lame and uncompelling father-daughter reconciliation tale. The only thread of connection binding this mess together is that the same characters appear in each segment, but their behavior is completely inconsistent, changing depending on whatever that segment calls for. So, in the beginning, the young guy is really gentle and articulate, then later he’s a savage date-rapist, and then finally he turns into Seth Rogan. The young daughter starts out as a dazzlingly confident, almost Rohmereqsue woman, then becomes a stupid, capricious, inarticulate modern teenager, and then settles on being a timid, almost mute daughter. It gets kind of insulting after a while that you are asked to just swallow all these senseless variations for no reason at all.

So we have here a film made up of 8 or so long segments of pure dialog, pasted together, each rather boring,  and each connected to the others only tenuously and unconvincingly. It’s like they had this one promising opening scene, and thought “okay where can we possibly go from here?” They settled on a really bad imitation of Richard Linklater’s writing. It really left a bad taste in my mouth.

The only value Twelve Thirty has is as an example of just how difficult it is to write a solidly good dialog-based movie, let alone a great one. It accomplishes the easy part: have the characters talk all the time. Beyond that, it doesn’t have a clue.