The Worst Film Ever

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Did you people see the same film I saw?

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

This was filmed at the store my brother is co-manager of! His family is even in the film plus many other locals. We saw the preview and I love the "guy with the sausage" line. I know many of the local people that would like to have a copy of this so if any one finds where they might be distributing it let me know. The initial part of the story is actually truthful - Hegedorns has been a family owned business with the one store and an ice cream store since I can remember. They are surrounded by the big boys like Tops, Wegmans and more - BJs is in their back door. But they still survive. One of the funniest was my niece played her true roll as a cashier and then you'd see her in the deli and then as a customer.

Director Mark Foggetti synchronizes cast, characters and plot to produce a light, yet engaging film. Mark has a knack for casting, and in drawing out performances of his actors that strike just the right chord for the material. Checkout is no different. Michael Parducci is especially effective as Nick, who, throughout the story, experiences a full range of emotions from love to lament, anger to forgiveness, exasperation to hope, and pulls them all off convincingly.Yes, there are some sophmoric characters, caricatures and situations, as one reviewer has pointed out, but these are but light-hearted adornments to what is, at its center, a multi-layered love story: the love of a mother and son; the love of two brothers; the love among friends; the love of a man and woman. No one is perfect. No one sells out. No one is unaffected.If good storytelling is about conflict, and it is, then this is a very good story. The good guys win and that's okay.Stay tuned for more good stuff from Mark Foggetti. He's just getting warmed up.

I had the pleasure of seeing this little independent comedy at a recent film festival in Southern California and found it captivating.The two leads are charming, talented and worthy of further exposure in films. In fact, while Burt Young (ROCKY 1-4) was the only familiar face in the cast, I thought the other performers were uniformly good in their roles, which is rare in a low-budget independent film, where often friends and family are pressed into service. Clearly, this was a cast of professionals and they served the film well.The premise was something unique and I always respond to originality when I see it in films. A likeable man-child, still pining for his lost love and looking for his place in the world, starts a dating service in the family-owned supermarket where he works. There are numerous funny sequences involving how people are put together in this highly unusual context. A subplot involving a threat to bulldoze the market for a parking lot, while not as engaging, still works well as a counterpoint to the dating service aspect of the story.Director/cinematographer Mark Foggetti gives a thoroughly pro look to his film. Low budget movies usually look like it, owing to poor production values, underlit scenes and amateur level acting. CHECKOUT has none of these faults and indeed, looks like a studio-produced feature.If you're looking for an evening of light entertainment, you could do much worse than CHECKOUT.

I went in to this movie thinking it was going to be the next Clerks, but left feeling let down. The humor was weak and the characters fairly flat. That isn't to say it was all bad, the idea of the dating service in the grocery store seemed like pretty fertile material, but the director switched focus to the cliche'd "save the Mom-and-Pop store from the evil corporation guy". I felt like if he would have just stuck with the dating service plot, he would have come out with a much more memorable movie. Now, to do the film justice, I am from the Rochester area and loved the way he portrayed Webster. In fact, the best Kevin Smith (of Clerks) homage here was giving props to his hometown. Webster, NY is to Checkout what Red Bank, NJ is to Clerks. The director wisely threw in a date at Nick Tahou's. Trust me, as far as things to do in Rochester, a garbage plate is at the top of the list. I was lucky enough to see this film at the Little in Rochester so everybody knew when the odes to the town came up and appreciated them.