Birdemic is not James Nguyen’s first movie. Oh heck, no. Seven years before that classic so-bad-it’s-goodness came about, there was Julie and Jack. It’s a romance. Yeah, that’s it.
The movie opens with footage of clouds. Lots of clouds. Two minutes of clouds. And then a shot of the Golden Gate Bridge and a guy driving to work. That takes another minute. A very long minute. The music is eerily similar to the soundtrack of a certain James Cameron epic about a doomed ocean liner that we all can’t help but remember.
As the dude enters his place of employment we get Office Space vibes, although there’s no blather about TPS reports or red Swingline staplers. The guy we saw driving to work is Jack Livingstone (Justin Kunkle), a near-Christopher Reeve lookalike who works selling STELLAchips’ new chip, “Millenium X,” whatever those are. Jack’s job involves cold-calling other tech workers from his very dull, gray cubicle. These other tech workers survey their own very dull, gray cubicles and inform Jack they don’t need what he’s selling. The pressure’s on, too, because Jack’s boss, who just happens to be named Bob, raises everyone’s quotas because this new chip is just that important.
Since work-life balance is a thing, Jack’s friend, Mark (Will Springhorn) tells Jack that he needs a girlfriend and points him to some new dating site. Jack is skeptical, but he tries it anyway, and soon meets someone named Lady Renegade, who says she pretty much “lives inside her computer.”
When Jack and Lady Renegade meet, she turns out to be a beautiful blond named Julie Romanov (Jen Gotzon), and she and Jack hit it off right away. They make the rounds of all the most tourist-y of San Francisco’s tourist sites, and things seem to be going pretty well. Jack, however, gets impatient and wants to move things forward. “None of this is real,” he says as we see the Palace of Fine Arts pixilate for the teensiest second.
I’m sorry, what?
That’s right, Jack and Julie are dating via virtual reality, and Julie gets extremely evasive about herself and where she lives. All Jack knows is that she works in voice recognition tech and went to Grant College.
So, Jack starts digging. He goes to see Julie’s former co-workers, her former college roommate, her former professor at Grant College (it’s James Nguyen, by the way). He finally goes to Julie’s parents’ house and talks to her mom and dad, Julie (Tippi Hedren) and Tom (Jack Knutson).
Julie might be mysterious, but one thing is for sure: She’s not the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons eating Hot Pockets and tapping away at a computer while ruminating on the many intricacies of the Prime Directive. Or is that insulting to the Comic Book Guy? Probably, but either way there’s more to Julie than meets the eye and Jack is not gonna be a happy fella.
OK. So. Julie and Jack. It’s kinda like Somewhere In Time but with computers, seeing as, again, Jack does look remarkably like Christopher Reeve. Problem is, it’s hugely boring, unmemorable and familiar for awkward reasons.
There are also a few pointed parallels between Julie and Jack and The Room, as not only do the characters go to the same locations in both films, but Julie and Jack ride Cable Car 57 just like Tommy Wiseau. I was surprised that Jack didn’t buy Julie roses from the same flower shop and say, “Hi, doggie.” Since these movies came out in the same year it’s clearly a coincidence, but I digress.
Other than that, Julie and Jack is a typical James Nguyen film. Its romantic leads work in computers. Jack cold-calls other companies trying to sell products. The dialogue is clunky and broken. There’s plenty of bad acting, such as the scene when Julie sounds like her nose is stuffed up and every character sounds wooden. There are also very bad filming angles, mostly involving the camera not moving with the actors and cutting off various body parts, especially faces, or the actors sitting off to the side with most of the scene empty. That happens all through the movie.
The characters are Nguyen types, too. Remember Rick, the sex fiend from Birdemic? He and Mark have a lot in common, but at least Rick was monogamous. Mark, who’s going at a new woman every time Jack sees him, makes Rick look downright innocent. And no, we never hear Jack say, “Oh hi, Mark,” although we really, really want to, but we don’t get the chance because Mark’s new conquests always answer Mark’s door for him.
Oh, and remember Damien Carter, the guy who sang the creepy and unromantic “Hangin’ Out With My Family” in Birdemic? He’s in Julie and Jack and he still sings, only he’s playing a minister and doling out life advice to a depressed and lonely Jack.
Also making an appearance is Patsy van Ettinger, who played Nathalie’s mom in Birdemic. She plays Jack’s mom in Julie and Jack. It’s a minimal role.
On one point, though, does Julie and Jack have something that no other James Nguyen movie has had since: An actual appearance by Tippi Hedren, and for one uncomfortable minute it seems that she’s behind the woman Jack thinks of as Julie Romanov because she is also named Julie. We see her wax lyrical about her birds before filling Jack in on her daughter, and that clip would, of course, infamously appear in Birdemic during the motel room scenes, but Hedren’s corporeal form has never graced a Nguyen film since.
How Nguyen met Hedren is indeed a mystery. Hedren doesn’t mention it in her autobiography and no available press says anything about it. The only slight possibility is that since Hedren has been so instrumental in helping Vietnamese immigrants start nail salons, Nguyen may have met Hedren via a friend of a friend scenario. What is clear is that he’s a huge fan and includes Hedren in all of his movies somehow.
If anyone is looking to see Julie and Jack, be warned: It’s extremely tough to find outside of the RiffTrax universe. Actually, that may be a good thing, because beyond the connections to Birdemic and The Room, Julie and Jack is not exactly going to linger in the mind for too long, and the RiffTrax guys keep it from being a total snooze. I wish I could say Nguyen improved as a filmmaker after this, but we all know he had a different destiny waiting.
Another review is coming up on Monday. Thanks for reading, all, and as usual, I hope to see you then…
Julie and Jack is available on Amazon Prime (RiffTrax version only).
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