as you may know, go! was released nationwide this last friday.  this was certainly an event met with much excitement from coast-to-coast as doug liman (director of swingers) released his sophomore effort to the big screen.  while swingers was populated with a bunch of unknowns (at the time) - most notably jon favreau and vince vaughn - go! has taken the hottest young actors from indie films and television and thrown them together in an ensemble cast that rivals any of the scream flicks for teen notoriety.

we've got the cute katie holmes (dawson's creek), scott wolf (party of five), jay mohr (picture perfect & jerry maguire), sarah polley (the sweet hereafter) and taye diggs (how stella got her groove back).  unfortunately, their on screen interactions don't always live up to the hype that this film created among certain segments of today's youth.

it's hard to pinpoint exactly what went wrong here - the movie in and of itself is structured a lot like pulp fiction, with cuts in and out of story lines and time lines, a three named chapter setup, and beginning and ending with a scene in a diner - so, perhaps this left me with that too much borrowed, too little homage feeling.  the acting is not altogether unbelievable, and certainly the young ms. polley does a wonderful job as ronna, the supermarket clerk about to be evicted from her $380/month apartment.  the other actors as a whole are unremarkable, although jay breckin (clueless) is, as always, extremely funny, especially during a scene where he's claiming to be black (my mother's mother's mother, etc.).

something, though, on the whole, has gone wrong with this movie.  i can't help but focus on what was good about it, because there are certainly plenty of funny and interesting scenes.  we know that the story line revolves around an ecstacy deal gone bad, and the scenes shot from the perspective of the character who took two pills seems very real to life, almost as if the filmmaker himself was on the drug while shooting, and an interesting and new interaction with a cat.  swingers seemed to have a point - a story about a poor guy hung up on his ex-girlfriend and how he overcomes that to meet someone new - while this movie seems to have none.  none of the characters grow, change or reveal new sides to themselves, except perhaps the drug dealing todd gaines (timothy olyphant)

in simple, go! is a hundred or so minutes of entertainment, packaged with all sorts of surprises throughout that will certainly keep you laughing, enough to warrant seeing the picture, but don't go looking for that instant cult classic follow-up - this is no swingers. Grade: C+