Director: Ethan Hunter
Screenplay: Ethan Hunter
Cinematography: Ed Fickle
Cast: Christopher Arbor, Travis Barkley, Catherine Campbell, Ed Fickle, Grant Henry, Ethan Hunter, Brunilda Rodriguez, Matt Shelton, Rachel Stephens, Nikki Talle, Cleve Williams

After two blissful years together Duo and Catherine’s love is put to the test when she decides to go away to school in Oxford. Duo after she leaves impulsively ships the entire contents nine hundred packages too himself. Along the way the packages somehow got lost. Duo’s roommate Travis returns from his trip from Mexico to an empty apartment. Travis and the rest of Duo’s friends refuse to let him waist away and slowly he starts to come around again. One day after nearly five months of separation Duo gets a phone call from Catherine who has returned home for the holidays and she wants to talk him right away. Does she still feel the way she did before she left or will she finally break things offs with Duo?

Romantic Comedies has never been a genre that really captured my attention. In more recent years films like Reality Bites and Chasing Amy where two that I really enjoyed and a lot of this had to do with their own unique spin on the genre. For Catherine opens with three friends sitting on a bench talking smack about romantic comedies and how they are formulaic. Ethan Hunter who wrote and directed For Catherine sets the standards pretty high by placing such a scene at the beginning since the film that follows also falls into many of the same traps his characters openly detest.

Also the way all the characters talked in this film I found to be distracting at times since they seemed to reeling off dialog like one would expect while watching a Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino film. You know the moments where everyone cleverly uses pop culture references when they talk. On the plus side most of this dialog is funny and it pays off. The acting feels stiff and dialog is delivered by most the actors in a monotone way. The directing is pretty standard with nothing that really stands out or grabs you.

For Catherine feels overlong at one hundred and seven minutes with several scenes that could have trimmed or altogether removed liked the scene where Duo and Travis go to Block Buster video and Travis loses his keys. One of the best moments in the film was when Travis and Duo tell one of their friends that his girlfriend has been cheating on him and that she has a website where you can go and talk with everyone who has slept with her. The bit where Duo ships everything to him and then it gets lost is priceless. I also enjoyed how slowly each lost package would be returned as they are found. For Catherine is a film that shows signs of greater things to come from its writer/director Ethan Hunter and hopefully for future projects he will have a much larger canvas to work on.

For more information about For Catherine visit 207 Pictures here.