A guy asked me this morning if I was going to post some kind of review of Reed Morano‘s Meadowland (Cinedigm, 10.16). My first response: To what end?

Meadowland is about the Big Numb of grief. Grief wanderings, grief enzymes, grief injections. Grief as a huge swimming pool filled with jello and no escape ladders. In short, the kind of movie that you definitely want to visit and immerse yourself in. But don’t listen to me. Listen to Guardian critic Jordan Hoffman, who has called Meadowland “terrific.”

None of Meadowland works unless you buy that a young couple can leave their three- or four-year-old kid inside a bathroom inside a service station with the dad waiting outside, and then the dad knocks on the door and…nothing. The kid just magically disappears. No trace of him here, there, anywhere. And no one ever sees him or reports him. The vanishing. Speaking as a father of two sons I didn’t buy it at all and so the whole movie, for me, was untrustworthy bullshit. A highly indulgent downhead sink-in.

The grief membrane that Olivia Wilde and Luke Wilson are caught inside is everything and I mean EVERYTHING in Meadowland. Grief grief grief grief grief grief grief grief grief grief….not to mention grief grief grief grief grief grief grief grief grief grief grief grief grief and more GRIEF.

Much worse than this is the fact that Wilde, beset by (you guessed it) that old bugaboo called GRIEF, decides to impulsively have it off Kevin Corrigan of all people.

Meadowland put me into a state of mind that enveloped me like the blues, like heroin, like quicksand, like melancholy fog. It drained my soul, made me feel weak and nihilistic. But it did make me want to briefly be Kevin Corrigan, and I never thought that would happen.

In short, it made me feel “terrific.”