The best movie nobody in the world ever saw

A comment from frequent-and-always-welcome visitor Divinity about (sort of) meeting Joss Whedon got me to thinking about the only time I ever managed to meet a movie director, and what in the world ever happened to her.

Has anyone but me (and, of course, the 20 or so people in attendance at the screening at the 1998 Rehoboth Film Festival) ever seen Susan Skoog's movie "Whatever"? Probably not, which is a real shame.

Millions more have seen "Garden State," another (and admittedly superior) New Jersey flick, and of course the movies of Kevin Smith, but those movies don't come to close to invoking the sense of time and place that Skoog managed to pull off with '80s New Jersey in "Whatever."

The plot, in a nutshell, focuses on two very close high school girls who are headed in different directions. Liza Weil, who would go on just after this flick came out to play Paris Geller on "Gilmore Girls," plays Anna Stockard, who is content to just party her way through high school until an art teacher inspires her to want more from life (sounds cheesy, I concede.) Chad Morgan, who has most recently been working on episodes of "Robot Chicken," plays her friend who, well, likes the boys and the booze just a bit too much.

It doesn't get much deeper than that, and yet Skoog's movie turned out to be, in my opinion, one of the truly great and honest movies about teenage angst, thanks mostly to a remarkable performance by Ms. Weil. You want to reach onto the screen and just choke her as her character just continues to make all the wrong choices. She wears her scars on the surface here, and they all ring true.

Has anyone else but me seen this somewhat-great movie? According to the IMDB, it was apparently the end of Susan Skoog. She has exactly no credits after 1998. How is this even possible? You can't even get "Whatever" on DVD, but if anyone is curious I'd be happy to mail them my copy on VHS (as long as you promise to return it, of course.)

I tried to even find a YouTube clip, but the best I could find is one posted by some kind of smoking fetishist called "luvstasmoke" which simply strings together the many times Liza Weil lights up, legal and otherwise, in the flick. I couldn't in good conscience post that here, so instead enjoy this rather gratuitous clip of Liza Weil and Alexis Bledel kissing on the great spring break episode of "Gilmore Girls." Now, if that doesn't brighten up your Monday it was probably just doomed from the start.