I've been on an Eric Nemoto kick lately. I don't recommend anyone else do the same, but the mere existence of his filmography is a curiosity to me. Never before has so much video footage been dedicated to events of so little consequence. Case in point: The Landline Detective asks us to endure an interminable single-shot scene where the protagonist plods through a meandering conversation with a random telemarketer. When Nemoto depicts the life of a typical elderly person, he is absolutely brutal in his honesty.

And Nemoto's movies are, first and foremost, all about the elderly. I get the impression that he recruits his actors from a retirement community's improv troupe. Obviously there's nothing inherently wrong with movies by and about old people, but we're not talking about Carl Hiaasen writing for Helen Mirren here. This is Eric Nemoto writing for people who seem to have never done a lick of acting before they qualified for social security.

Nemoto makes his movies in Hawaii, but you'd hardly know it from the sets. Most of his scenes take place in unremarkable interiors or nondescript suburban neighborhoods that might as well be Kansas in June. I guess Hawaiians in their sixties don't spend much time on jet skis.

A typical Nemoto film tends to be around two hours long, and...well, there's just no excuse. Not even Abe Simpson strays as far from the point of a story as Nemoto. In my review of The Landline Detective, I mentioned that the mystery at the movie's center held a tiny bit of my interest despite the drudgery of everything around it. Most of Nemoto's movies don't even have that much going for them. Over the course of twenty-some total hours of visual storytelling, Nemoto has produced maybe two hours of actual story.

But for all of Nemoto's failings, his ultimate Achilles heel is his tin ear for dialogue. Every conversation is simultaneously dull and uncanny. And boy howdy, do his characters love to belabor a point. There's a sequence in So Close Shig where the protagonist pretends to answer questions from a crowd of imaginary reporters, which is just an excuse for him to engage in expository speeches for half an hour. That's not an exaggeration. Between that and a scene where he takes a road trip while delivering a monologue to a semi-conscious passenger, most of the movie consists of a single character summarizing its entire plot.

Given all of the above, I think I've identified the archetypal Eric Nemoto joint: Juniper Lane. It's two hours long, it was shot in Hawaii, and the entire thing takes place at a neighborhood board meeting where the residents are bickering over the installation of a new traffic light.

Can a movie with such a low-stakes premise be entertaining? Absolutely. Parks and Recreation mined similar premises for comedy all the time. Unfortunately, Nemoto isn't any better at constructing a joke than he is at making a concise point.

I'm only assuming this is supposed to be a comedy because that's how it's tagged on IMDb. I saw no evidence of it in the movie itself. There's a bit in the beginning where a board member tells a resident that if she wants to speak at the meeting, she's required to submit a written proposal twenty-four hours in advance. The joke is that he's just kidding and there's no such requirement. The woman doesn't think he's funny, which is the only moment of verisimilitude we get from any of these abstract caricatures of people.

The story's conflict is between the old board members who support the new traffic light and the young residents who oppose it. The old people are concerned about a recent incident where a ninety-year-old woman nearly got hit by a car. The young people are worried that another traffic light will make their commutes too long. This movie does everything it can to keep the stakes as low as possible. I found myself praying for a team of ninjas to crash through the ceiling.

The generational animosity is as bland as the traffic light debate. The old people think the young people spend too much time on their cell phones and use too much profanity. The young people think the old people are pompous and out of touch. Even the groups' preconceived stereotypes are milquetoast.

This movie is jam packed with Nemoto's trademark beating around the bush. Forty minutes pass before they get around to discussing the goddamn traffic light. The board spends ridiculous amounts of time voting on trivial matters like the order in which they should address their list of open issues. I can imagine a joke in there somewhere, but showing all those votes happen in real time is not a joke.

One of the residents compares the meeting's contentiousness to 12 Angry Men. Yeah, she's a little much. Later she gives a speech that the other characters are supposed to find eloquent and persuasive. It sounded more like she was reading the basicest aphorisms she could find from a wall of dollar store needlepoints.

The last ten minutes of this snoozefest invalidate the entire movie by revealing that the board's majority was never in favor of the traffic light in the first place. If the topic at hand wasn't so utterly trivial, that ending might have given me an existential crisis.

Once again, however, I have to give Nemoto credit for his brutal honesty. He genuinely captured all the excitement you can expect to find at a real-life neighborhood board meeting. IMDb was wrong. Juniper Lane isn't a comedy. It's nihilism writ small.

2 out of 10.

Seen on Tubi.