DVD Review: 'Angels in Stardust', Starring AJ Michalka and Alicia Silverstone

With trailers, and intriguingly written summaries, movies can often be misleading. Take Love Happens for example. A movie title that sounds like it's all about romance, but the actual romance is only one-fourth of the story. This is exactly the case with Angels in Stardust, a film that comes off sounding like it's going to be one thing, but is something else entirely. The plot is shaky, the characters flat, and the story boring and hard to sit through. 

Vallie Sue (AJ Michalka) lives in the small town of Tardust. Yes, Tardust. There might have been an "S" in the beginning of the name somewhere, but that's all been forgotten, much like the town itself. It comes off as a dusty, backwoods kind of place, where strange people live and everything's very nitty gritty. And while Vallie Sue seems like she's accepted all this, she still dreams of getting out of the town. In order to gather her thoughts and sort through the

questions she doesn't ask anyone else, she goes to an abandoned drive-in movie theater and converses with a cowboy (Billy Burke), who's really an actor on TV and isn't really present for these conversations, only a figment of her imagination. 

Vallie Sue's a pretty tame teenager in comparison with her outrageously hormonal and flaky mother Tammy (Alicia Silverstone), who sleeps with men in hopes to find one who's rich enough to take care of her, and pays no heed to her children's welfare. So Vallie Sue's forced to take care her younger brother Pleasant (Adam Taylor) and get through the days living in her unsafe trailer park community. The movie decides to throw in some drama three-fourths of the way through when a girl goes missing and Vallie Sue thinks she sees a couple of men in her community do something to her, including a man named Tenkill (Michael Spears), who always helps take care of her brother. 

Angels in Stardust is the type of film that you can never really get into. Its story is lacking and so are its characters. It's also misleading in its title since there are no angels present in the film, even though Billy Burke's cowboy character is firmly sporting feathery wings on the back cover of the DVD. It almost toys with the viewer as it sets itself up one way and delivers something completely different. 

The film boasts that it's about Vallie Sue and her hopes and dreams to get out of Tardust, but it generally just takes us through the motions of the town and is wearisome after awhile because it pretends to have a real plot when it doesn't. The mysticism of her talking to a cowboy that only exists in her head doesn't work overall and almost feels like it doesn't fit in with the rest of the film. The conversations are abrupt and seem like they're tacked onto the film rather a fluid part of it. The movie doesn't feel authentic enough and don't offer anything in the way of depth or meaning, though it tries really hard to do so. And the scenes come in go in an almost choppy and dismissive fashion, which takes the audience out of the film with its abruptness. 

The film is misleading, a title that comes off sounding like a religious movie, but isn't. The mysticism of the cowboy in Vallie Sue's head doesn't add anything to the story and the scenes aren't fluid at all. The cast is alright, though the script doesn't help them at all. Their characters are not very well-rounded and with no real plot to go on, it almost looks like they are trying really hard to make something out of a movie that doesn't have much to go on in the first place. Slow-going and very tiring to sit through, Angels in Stardust is a movie that's easily forgotten.