not horrible nor great

hyped garbage

Expected more

Brilliant and touching

Good, but not great.. Based on the reviews, I expected to like this film a bit more than I did. I love quirky independent films and I am a big fan of Morgan Freeman. So, it pains me to say that the writing (dialogue) was clunky. The characters were interesting and offbeat but some of the relationships that developed did not seem credible. Casey Affleck, Christina Ricci, and Brandan Sexton III were all very good. That said, I thought that the idea of portraying the struggle of people in a small town and the juxtaposition of the quirky (ice cream cone, beach in the desert) with the clear tedium and pain of life in an economically depressed and largely abandoned town was interesting.

"Desert Blue", the nickname of a central character, tells of a handful of young adults in a ramshackle desert town who have too much time and too little to do with it. The film is long on talent but so short on story one can only wonder how it ever got into production much less distribution. Slow, monotonous, boring, and dumb, "Desert Blue" is one of those B-flicks which one watches with detachment always cognizant of the fact the characters are actors going through the motions required for their paycheck. For fans only. (C)

I enjoyed this movie thoroughly. This movie, led by an ensemble cast of young and rising actors (Brendan Sexton, Kate Hudson, Casey Affleck, Christina Ricci), starts slowly but gathers momentum nicely. Skye (Hudson), an up-and-coming actress with her own cable comedy, gets trapped in a small California town well off the highway when a chemical spill shuts down the only road in and out of town. Stuck far from her world -- in a town without cable or cell phones -- Skye is befriended by Blue (Sexton) and meets the local "gang" -- five kids without much to do. Over two days punctuated by explosions -- the results of Ely's (Ricci) love for illicit bomb making -- the group bonds together in unexpected ways.

This is a nice, sweet film. It will, however, be quickly forgotten since there is nothing terribly new here. The acting is very strong. All in all, it's worth watching.