I recently attended a free pre-screening presented by IFM and the New Times at the South Beach Regal Cinema. The film exhibited was The Ballad of Jack and Rose, which was written and directed by Rebecca Miller and starred her husband Daniel Day-Lewis. The quality of the Ballad was reminiscent of Ashley Simpson's performance at the Orange Bowl, and I found the film to be more agonizing to watch than a rectal exam. In the movie, Daniel Day-Lewis plays Jack Slavin a loaded tree hugging x-hippy with a severe heart condition, who is trying to make everything right in his final days. He is living with his daughter, the Electra complex ridden, Rose (Camilla Belle); on a quiet part of an island, were he built some kind of free-loving environmentalist commune in his acid filled glory days. Now older and dying, Jack Slavin turns to his money hungry girlfriend, Kathleen (Catherine Keener), along with her two sons, the very feminine Rodney (Ryan McDonald) and hell-bent grimy horn dog Thaddius (Paul Dano), to move in with them, thinking they can be Rose's family once he dies. The only thing Jack doesn't bank on is that the model family he had chosen was even more deranged than his own. The characters are poorly written, the story is half thought out, the dialogue was excessively overdramatic and corny, and the performances from nearly all of the cast members are atrocious. With an especially arresting performance by Camilla Belle, that should land her ass in jail. Her character Rose is so loony you start to think that maybe she was the result of how the LSD had affected Jack's sperm during her psychedelic conception. Half way through the movie I felt as if I had taken that dire brown acid at Woodstock that wavy gravy had warned us about, and was bad tripping and caught the fear. Eventually, the ominous vibrations subsided and I became so bored that my behavior had resorted to the menacing childlike measures of an obnoxious little ankle biter in a busy grocery line. I began to bother my companions and considered walking out of the movie, but I decided to stay for the hokey melodramatic comic relief. The ending proved to be a classic, standing as a beacon amongst those that were simply slapped together as an after thought.As Dave Chapelle put it in the Rick James episode – I wish I had four hands so I could give this movie four thumbs down.