Take Me Home (2012)

I generally trust Netflix's rating predictions for me. They've got 3000+ titles worth of data on me at this point and get darn close -- within half a star of my thoughts -- 90% of the time. So when this popped up as a 4-star recommendation and I saw it starred Sam Jaeger from Parenthood (a show I still miss more than a year after it left the air), I was on-board. Well, Jaeger not only stars, he wrote, produced, directed, and cast his wife as his co-star. And though I readily admit that I have very little to judge him on, my impression is that he's only got a talent for one of those five jobs.

The set-up: Thom is a struggling photographer in NYC who can't land a job and is getting evicted from his apartment. He owns a unregistered cab which he uses to grab some illegal fares when he's short, which is what he's doing when Claire flags him down. Claire has just walked in on her husband having a conversation with a woman in their home, which upsets her and lands her in Thom's taxi demanding that he just shut up and drive her wherever... which eventually turns into driving her to California where her estranged father has just had a heart-attack.

This was obviously shot on a shoestring budget, but that's not the problem. The problem is that these two are written as, basically, garbage people. She's the type that screams at a cab driver (before she has real cause to do so) and doesn't let her husband know where she is for several days. He's the type that thinks it's fine to indulge in a little upskirt voyeurism, liberate the continental breakfast food from hotels he's not staying in, and steal cash from his midwestern parents. Each takes their turn falling asleep at the wheel, endangering a highway's worth of travelers. So of course they're meant to be in love, right?

I was not amused nor was my heart warmed. Stick to acting, Jaeger.

D