Awful direction

There are moments that are good, mostly with Christopher Plummer. But the heavy handedness of the direction is really distracting and takes away from the story. It tries too hard and comes across as extremely amateurish. There are often moments with dialogue that seems very forced ? the mother and husband, and the bullies bragging about their movie for starters. The movie had potential and they should have handed off the script to a better director who could have worked the script a bit more and stayed out of the way of the actors. But the way it's done, the script is underdeveloped, some of the characters and dialogue are flat, and the misguided stylistic choices get in the way of the parts that are genuinely working.