(After going crazy on the phone for 4 hours and getting crazy---or crazier--with the medical profession I decided to go to the movies to escape real life. BIG MISTAKE!!! ;o)



Sean Penn directs his daughter (Dylan Penn) his son Hopper Penn and himself, giving top billing to Dylan, in "Flag Day". It is based on a true story about a con man father and his drug addicted teenage daughter with the latter turning around as a young adult.

Sean Penn has enough respect in the industry to get names like Regina King, Josh Brolin and Norbet Leo butz to do what may constitute as a 'walk-on', a cameo or blink and you miss them.

Now if he only could have gotten writers worthy of the actors time maybe, just maybe, the film wouldn't have been so boring. Penn always is an interesting actor and his daughter does show a spark of his brilliance when she is given the chance while Hopper really doesn't show what he may be able to do.

Based of Jennifer Vogel's memoir "Flim -Flam Man: The True Story of My Father's Counterfeit Life" she is not too easy on either herself or her father but she is too close to the subjects, and, maybe, too in awe of her father, to not have too many scenes of what she wished her father had been instead of the father and husband he wasn't.

The screenplay is repetitive and too much like other father and daughter stories where the latter wishes the former would change and, yet, by the opening of the movie we know he doesn't.

Penn gives himself scenes where he excels in bursts of anger and even a couple where in his being quiet he is forceful and he gives his daughter, in his first starring role, enough scenes to show she has the potential to excel in the business.

The direction is pedestrian, the photography okay but the screenplay and movie is a waste of time and BORING! Also, surprisingly, Penn falls into the trap of far too many voice overs instead of letting the actors do their work.