Quality of Life

Kev Robertson's gritty camerawork and a musical soundtrack mixing hip-hop, punk and electronica add to the ambience of this impressive shoestring-budget indie.

This is a small -- if rough -- gem of a film.

While Burnam and Garrison imbue their characters with authentic-feeling frustration and anger, they never succeed in making them especially interesting; it's hard to care in any serious way what becomes of either.

The ending, which unnecessarily veers toward lumpy, overwrought melodrama, undoes the scrappy elegance the film previously displays in fits and starts.

A minor movie, modestly made, that develops to a counterculture beat but ends with a status quo conundrum: Is selling out the new keeping it real?

Picture's cliched underlying story of restless youth plays as too naive for an older audience and too provocative for teens.

With a clumsy hip-hop score permeating every free inch of the soundtrack and ugly 16mm cinematography that would never be allowed out of Film School 101, the audio-visual experience is a wreck. The quality of Quality of Life is non-existent.