Reflect

The Sedona location struts its sweet little red rock a*s in front of the camera. Good girl, Sedona. Think of the Arizona destination as a hippie New Orleans with energy vortexes and weed instead of booze and vampires. Yes, I weekend there when I can. Reflect is also packed with superior visionary trip sequences achieved through clever effects and laser-fast edits. It scores very high as a movie to smoke pot, too, which also happens to be the same audience that’s keen on the Sedona scene. Kippel’s writing also wields an impressive dispensing of the authentic spiritual goods draped on the hooks of some real dramatic swerves. I was startled by how much mumbo jumbo was unjumboed by the end. So when the movie impresses, it really impresses.

“If this sounds like a pretty good movie, you don’t even know the half of it.”

So it is a pity about the glaring structural flaws like the missing arms of the Venus di Milo being replaced by wire hangers. First off is some clever but misfired satire on the spiritual tourist industry. Yes, it is funny and very on-target. However, poking fun at how cheesy metaphysical marketers can be results in some bleed-over into ridiculing the spirituality itself. I know I was paying less attention to the mystic material when someone portrayed as a moron was yammering about it. This isn’t a fatal flaw, as Kippel shifts gears into serious and the astral possibilities become more attractive.

What flat-out doesn’t work is the unneeded conceptual addition of the galactic game show. It over-defines the mysterious parts and cheapens what was quite a wonder. It doesn’t help that the #1 game show in the universe looks like it wishes for a public access budget. It is almost like Summer showed the rough cut to James, and he didn’t get it unless it became a game show. If only some magical cutting tool could remove all the cancerous game show parts. Then, you would have an indie movie for the ages and would rate it much higher. As it stands, Reflect more than qualifies for instant cult status and lots of promise for Kippel’s future filmmaking. Just no wire hangers next time.