As the title might suggest, the film depicts our city as a land of little opportunity and lots of meth, and the plot centers around various people who hope to leave it. Being a relatively recent transplant myself, I wasn’t offended. I would guess that native Barstonians will be split between love and hate of the film, if it ever finds distribution and makes its way to theaters.

Some people will probably relate to it, like the man who reportedly said to director Peter Paige when he came across the film crew on Main Street, “Leaving Barstow? That’s what I gotta do!” Others will probably feel that a bunch of outsiders had no right to typecast Barstow without really getting to know the town and its good features.

The film centers on 18-year-old Andrew, who is socially inept, smart and angsty. He works in a bookstore — a dead give-away that none of the filmmakers are actually from Barstow, which doesn’t have a bookstore — lives with his single mom, who seems to be bent on recapturing her youth through cleavage-baring shirts and an inappropriately young aspiring country singer boyfriend. Andrew’s main sources of support are his best friend, Carlos; his teacher/father figure Mr. Johns; and a late-night radio DJ who goes on long, rambling on-the-air rants because, as he puts it, “There’s nobody listening at this hour, and if you are awake, you’re probably on meth.”

Enter Jenny, the attractive newcomer, who somehow got stuck in Barstow on her way to L.A. and dreams of an acting career. We never find out how Jenny ended up marooned in Barstow working at a Chinese restaurant and living in her grandmother’s apartment; or why Mr. Johns, who makes it clear that he didn’t want to end up as a high school teacher Barstow, got derailed from his chosen path. Likewise, we never find out exactly what Andrew’s ambitions are, outside of leaving his hometown.

Being a reporter, I like to have details and specifics, so some of the film’s omissions left me fretting. The vagueness may have been intentional, to make the story more universal, or maybe it simply came about because the movie was written by an actor in his 20’s who was more interested in the characters’ inner struggles than in nitty-gritty details.

The acting is definitely the movie’s finest feature. The characters felt like real people, with human flaws, loves and dreams. I didn’t feel that I was watching people acting; I felt as if I was simply a voyeur in the lives of these people for two hours.

The storyline was a little overly dramatic, piling bad luck on poor Andrew’s head until I wondered if he was going to go on a shooting rampage. Overall, though, it was an intelligent, heart wrenching movie about people who feel trapped in their lives. Unfortunately for Barstow, if the movie ever reaches theaters, our town will probably become a national synonym for that feeling. But hey, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, right?

Check out more info and the film trailer here.

Abby Sewell | reporter

I actually thought it was an April Fools joke when I came into the office on Tuesday morning to learn the police department had called in the explosive experts from Fort Irwin to examine a potato gun. True, the concept of a spud gun may be foreign to most, but for me and a couple of friends confined to the back roads and farm pastures of Ada, Michigan, it was a good time on a weekend night.

I did not see the gun confiscated by the police on Tuesday but I imagine it looked similar to the contraption my friends and I used to launch entire potatoes hundreds of yards with just a few squirts from a hair spray can, essentially a long plastic tube with some sort of ignition device at one end. I won’t go into detail about how to make a potato gun — as noted in the article, it is illegal to possess one in California.

My childhood pursuits were short-lived. Only on a few nights did my friends and I sneak onto the high school football field to conduct distance and accuracy tests. We could easily shoot the spud the length of the field but could never hit the broad side of barn, which I believe we tried once. Other nights we drove around the back roads launching spuds into farmers fields and stirring up quite a ruckus among the cows and llamas. Llama farming was really taking off in Ada during that time, don’t ask me why.

We never hit anything, to our knowledge, and spent most of our time figuring out which brand of hair spray acted as a better propellant. We singed a few eyebrows and burnt a few fingertips and then moved on with our teenage lives.

Aaron Aupperlee | city editor