CAPSULE: This light-hearted documentary tells of what Jim Killeen discovered when he went on a quest to meet and interview other people whose names were the same as his. He meets a variety of people and never really comes to any surprising connections among them, but does just get to know six other people who by coincidence had his same name. The documentary is being released first on YouTube on Friday, April 25, 2008. But the film is a pleasant way to meet seven people whose names all happen to be Jim Killeen. Rating: high +1 (-4 to +4) or 6/10
Jim Killeen, a theater major at Wayne State University in Detroit, went west to be an actor and got two minor parts in two minor films in the late 1990s. Then one day he was playing around on the computer and put his own name into Google. To his surprise he found references to other Jim Killeens. He was curious about the other Jim Killeens. Who were they? What did they do? Did it have some common influence on them that he had had this name Jim Killeen? He decided to investigate who the other Jim Killeens were. His first find is in Cobh, Ireland, and is a jovial Irish priest named (well, of course) Jim Killeen. Father Jim is quietly proud of being a part of the priesthood and says nothing much unexpected or earth-shattering. His interview gives the director a chance to color the film with some nice Irish music and some nice Irish landscapes. The next Jim Killeen is a retired police detective from New York City. The detective tells some stories and anecdotes about his career on the police force. Detective Killeen investigated the carnage the Happyland Social Club in the Bronx when arson killed 87 people in 1990.
So with a priest and a policeman, do we expect that Jim Killeens tend to be straight-laced guys? No, Jim Killeen Number 3 of Denver, Colorado, is a swinger who is into group sex. So we go from hearing about the ecstasy of being a priest to hearing about the ecstasy of going to a sex orgy where (not very attractive) people turn out the lights and grope each other. Jim (the original) goes as far afield as Australia, Scotland, and Ireland finding people with the same name.
And so it goes, as Killeen interviews his namesakes and also an engineering vice-president of Google and discusses with him the project. Killeen earlier thought that Google might tell him that they did not want their name associated with the film project. Not too surprisingly, that was not a problem at all. After all, the film does not put Google in a bad light. Instead it showed somebody who had found a creative use for the Google search engine. That is really what Google is all about. The vice-president gives a little talk about democratization of data. Then Jim (the director) has his mother talk a little about Jim. He clearly wanted to get the film up to feature-film length without putting his audience to sleep.
In the end there seems to be little more connection among the Jim Killeens than there would be with men chosen at random. One Jim Killeen has no children while another has eight. Killeen asks each what the purpose of life is and he gets six different answers. Those differences seem hardly surprising. About all that would be expected of seven people named Jim Killeen is that they would be male and of Irish or Scottish extraction, at least if you go far enough back. So with very little content for the film to cover, Killeen has to hold the viewer by making the film pleasant. He is an affable man, but it is about all he can do to find enough to say to save the film from becoming trivial. His style is light-hearted and just barely has enough material to keep GOOGLE ME going for its 93-minute length. This is not a very ambitious film in theme or in aspirations. It will be showing on YouTube, presumably without cost. It is a semi-professional, semi-amateur production. It achieves its goals, and is moderately entertaining. That is probably enough. I rate it a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale or 6/10.
Film Credits: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt1176730/
Mark R. Leeper mleeper@optonline.net Copyright 2008 Mark R. Leeper