4 Films on a Snow Day
"The Pill"
starring: Noah Bean, Rachel Boston, Anna Chlumsky, Dreama Walker
written and directed by: J.C. Khoury
It's a interesting risk to have two characters who are not exactly likable to any degree and a bit more of a risk to have them not really change much. I mean, they are both still rather selfish by the end of the film, which provides an ending that is predictable given the set-up.
The characters in question are Fred (Noah Bean) and Mindy (Rachel Boston). We meet them in the midst of what will be a one-night stand as they enter Mindy's apartment, heavily petting and making out. Sex is inevitable, but first they stop to play a drinking game ("Never Have I Ever") because let's face it their maturity level is rather low if they're still getting off on having one night stands. Fred does instant that he should go, but he's convinced by Mindy (and what guy wouldn't be convinced to stay by a very attractive girl who really wants to have sex, no strings attached). Fred has trouble putting on a condom and Mindy falls asleep, then Fred does, too. Mindy wakes up first and is feeling frisky, so she straddles Fred, the only trouble being that there's no condom.
Now, for whatever reason writer/director Khoury has decided that the eccentric and promiscuous Mindy has to be Catholic. Perhaps in the loosest sense she is, meaning that there are some things she believes in when it comes to her faith. For example: not having an abortion, if God forbidden (pun intended) she gets pregnant by Fred. And two, not inadvertently killing their baby with the morning-after pill ("an abortion pill," Mindy states). Okay, that's fine, but what about the bigger concerns or issues here (re: no concern for STDs and apparently no concern for unwanted pregnancy). Mindy should have been written as a stronger female than she's truly given credit for, but with that being said I did enjoy seeing Rachel Boston play her just outside the lines of being a fatal Manic Pixie Dream Girl and it's enjoyable to watch Fred squirm in almost every interaction they have after sex.
And so, Fred spends the next day trying with all his might to convince Mindy to take the morning-after pill, for both their sakes. You can tell that Fred is hiding something though, and it's not just the undesired potential baby. He has a deeper secret: SPOILER: he has a girlfriend (played by the all-grown up Anna Chlumsky, you know, from "My Girl") whom he lives with and has a rather cushy life with (re: she's quite the dominate female).
Fred spends the day with Mindy (stopping for a bizarre interval with his girlfriend at their place, which kind of throws the viewer off in terms of the timetable), because Mindy has to take two doses of the pill, with a 12 hour interval, and since Fred as been quite an asshole to Mindy, he decides to make it up to her by spending the day with her. The only trouble with this is the Mindy is relationship-minded and in so doing, Fred strings her along, intentionally perhaps, with false promises of a romantic commitment. Everyone knows, once he gets what he wants, he'll go right back to his girlfriend and try really hard to forget his indiscretion. Mindy is slightly unhinged and it would have been great to really dive further into her psyche, since she's really the driving force of the film. Everything really depends on her.
I did actually enjoy this quirky indie film because it had some intentions, but the writing failed its strongest character, for me, Mindy. All 3 characters are not totally despicable, but they have clear intentions and are a bit narcissistic, but then again doesn't that all define your twenties? You never really sympathize with Fred, because he remains loathsome through the whole film, in fact, at the end, you really don't want him to get the girl. But alas....
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"Nobody Walks"
starring: John Krasinski, Olivia Thirlby, Rosemarie DeWitt, India Ennega, Dylan McDermott, Justin Kirk, Rhys Wakefield, Emanuele Secci
written by: Lena Dunham and Ry Russo-Young
directed by: Ry Russo-Young
Olivia Thirlby is a bit of a newcomer for me as far as seeing her in films, which has been great since I really starting focusing more on the films I watch and who's in them because of my film project, which in case you couldn't tell, I've decided to continue onward.
Thirlby plays Martine in "Nobody Walks" which was written by Lena Dunham (whom I love) and this character is ripe with Dunham idiosyncrasies. Her personal life is a bit of a wreck from the minute she arrives in Los Angeles, to work on a film project. Her most recent relationship ended in a lawsuit, and she's clearly an emotional wreck as well, having never really come to grips with her reality. It's like leaving New York to pursue this film project was her way of forgetting about it, but she's about to wreck emotional havoc on the family members who take her in.
Nobody in this film's story seems to really be able to effectively communicate their emotions or inner turmoil and/or read the signals given off by everyone around them. I attribute that to the fact that Dunham wrote these characters, and again that seems to be a signature trait of hers. I like it, but it makes interactions between characters uncomfortable to watch as an outsider/viewer.
John Krasinski plays Peter, the sound technician who is helping Martine edit her film. He's a long way from his lovable role on "The Office" as Jim, but he is versatile enough to pull it off. An actress I love, Rosemarie DeWitt, plays his wife who is also a therapist, Julie. Julie's friend is Martine's college mentor and that's how Martine found her way to Los Angeles, briefly. The two women never get the chance to bond, but Martine and Peter's close-quarters relationship (they toil away in his sound-proof studio) inevitably leads to romantic sparks, a situation whose narrative significance is diminished by the fact that Martine ends up involved with most of the men she brushes up against.
Julie has some growing tension, sexual or not with one of her flirtatious, Hollywood-type patients (played by Justin Kirk). And then, there's Peter and Julie's sexually confused and budding daughter, Kolt (played with intriguing heart and soul by India Ennenga, she's not going away anytime soon). She has an unattainable, creepy love interest in her much-older Italian tutor and an unexciting prospective boyfriend in their pool-boy.
As Julie pragmatically explains to her daughter, you don't necessarily find the right person, just the right time to settle down. This fits in with the film's refreshingly candid, illusion-free viewpoint on the personal concessions that accompany maturity, sanding off the quixotic edges while holding onto a kernel of romance about the mechanics of love and lust. These characters may be compared visually to the scorpions in Martine's harshly monochromatic film, but there's a real sense of care taken in depicting their fragility, which leaves them helpless in the face of their own confused desires.
I like the film, nonetheless, even if its cast is an unfortunate bunch of "good people" playing conflicted, not necessarily bad people, but rather morally confused individuals.
Martine never has a chance to really be an explored character, although her place in the world is a bit more defined and clarified for her when she's asked to leave by Julie, who subsequently tells her, as well, that this will probably be the last she hears from anyone in the family. I'd like to think that if Lena Dunham had more time and space to help define and explore Martine as a young woman, she'd have eventually gotten there. This is too brief of a film to really get any deeper than she can, as a great writer of coming-of-age stories, thanks in large part to her fantastic series "Girls."
...........................................................................................
"Life in Flight"
starring: Patrick Wilson, Amy Smart, Monique Gabriela Curnen, Lynn Collins, Zak Orth, Rashida Jones
written and directed by: Tracey Hecht
This is a film that never really gets off the ground or the runaway. For a film with a deeper title that implies there will be some truths examine past surface level, it really only delivers that which we see play itself out on the screen, which really isn't much. Yet again, we have a man who is married (this time) to a very controlling and organized women who runs the house and their lives.
Patrick Wilson plays some kind of construction bidder/negotiator for a large firm looking to cash in big on a deal that has financial implications that could have him and his family well-off for the future. He's depressed-beyond-belief with his career choice (?) and/or the way his life has seemed to turn out. He is seeking some kind of liberation (perhaps briefly) from his overbearing, materialistic wife (played by a grown up, now, Amy Smart). That's when he runs into the free-spirited and spunky (but still not completely explained or explored further than the surface) character played by Lynn Collins ( who really gives it all she's got, but just falls too short of anything even remotely likable or even sympathetic). She falls for the married guy, of course.
This could have been a chance to delve into a study of the modern American family and its subsequent breakdown thanks to the 21st century and all its expectations, but the dialogue is lackluster, at best, and there's really no action. Patrick Wilson is almost even more depressing as his character than Zach Braff's coming-of-age character in "Garden State." They are both quite depressed, for different, yet similar reasons. Someone else has been running their lives and they want out or at least some say and control.
There's really nothing here to shake a stick at, especially since its running time is only 75 minutes.
....................................................................................................
"The Dish and the Spoon"
starring: Greta Gerwig, Olly Alexander
written and directed by: Alison Bagnall
Writer-director Alison Bagnall apparently never met a moment she didn't want to drench in preciousness, and if so, she certainly picked the right actress to portray this preciousness: Greta Gerwig- who, I'm convinced is the best indie actress and quite underrated. I may be slightly in love with her, as well, though. Bagnall's story revels in familiar tortured-soul-longing-for-connection bathos and gray-desolate atmospherics via its story of Rose (Greta Gerwig), a woman introduced bawling and moaning hysterically over her husband's infidelity. Decked out in a knit hat and an oversized coat worn over full-body pajamas, Rose is a hysterical mess of a woman who pays for beer and donuts with crumbled bills and change found in her hatchback, only to then head out to the blustery beach and an abandoned lighthouse to mope, where her plan is complicated by the discovery of a slumbering British teen boy (Olly Alexander). The boy has no name, is in the States because he followed a girl who subsequently left him, and, wearing an ascot and boasting a head of big frizzy hair, resembles a mini-Tim Burton- AHA! That just came to me, although I struggled the entire movie thinking he looked like a younger version of someone else! That's it!
Though it makes no sense, Rose takes him under her wing, instigating a ragamuffin odyssey in which they move into her parents' summer home to play house and plot how Rose can find and kill her husband's mistress (Eleonore Hendricks).
Rose forces (?) the boy to gender-bend role-play as a means of acting out her anger and self-loathing, and engaging in marriage fantasies that lead the couple to take costume-shop photos in old-time bridal gown and suit.
Rose's breakdown is conveyed with frantic, crazed intensity by Gerwig, but it exists in a vacuum of believable circumstance, emotion and behavior, as Rose and the boy's dependent, semi-romantic relationship takes place solely in a twee netherworld of incessant dressing-up and aimless wandering.
That things come to a head at a dance where patrons don 18th-century clothes is indicative of the film's overweening quirkiness, which also infests an earlier visit to a brewery where the two play hangman (with Rose's lipstick) on the bottom of a beer vat, or a later sequence in which Rose abandons the boy at a bar, only to return to find him charming the establishment on the piano. Bagnall's empathy is sincere, but her tale is a thing of unconvincing fantasy, and her cornucopia of formulaic imagery—sights of undulating flocks of birds relate to Rose's search for direction and harmony, while shots of Rose and the Boy staring off into the sunset speak only to the material's overwhelming conventionality.
A lot of nothing happens in this story, but Greta Gerwig is delightfully crazy, nonetheless. She's a woman off her hinges, but the unlikely connection and bond these two characters share is inexplicable, at best.
starring: Noah Bean, Rachel Boston, Anna Chlumsky, Dreama Walker
written and directed by: J.C. Khoury
It's a interesting risk to have two characters who are not exactly likable to any degree and a bit more of a risk to have them not really change much. I mean, they are both still rather selfish by the end of the film, which provides an ending that is predictable given the set-up.
The characters in question are Fred (Noah Bean) and Mindy (Rachel Boston). We meet them in the midst of what will be a one-night stand as they enter Mindy's apartment, heavily petting and making out. Sex is inevitable, but first they stop to play a drinking game ("Never Have I Ever") because let's face it their maturity level is rather low if they're still getting off on having one night stands. Fred does instant that he should go, but he's convinced by Mindy (and what guy wouldn't be convinced to stay by a very attractive girl who really wants to have sex, no strings attached). Fred has trouble putting on a condom and Mindy falls asleep, then Fred does, too. Mindy wakes up first and is feeling frisky, so she straddles Fred, the only trouble being that there's no condom.
Now, for whatever reason writer/director Khoury has decided that the eccentric and promiscuous Mindy has to be Catholic. Perhaps in the loosest sense she is, meaning that there are some things she believes in when it comes to her faith. For example: not having an abortion, if God forbidden (pun intended) she gets pregnant by Fred. And two, not inadvertently killing their baby with the morning-after pill ("an abortion pill," Mindy states). Okay, that's fine, but what about the bigger concerns or issues here (re: no concern for STDs and apparently no concern for unwanted pregnancy). Mindy should have been written as a stronger female than she's truly given credit for, but with that being said I did enjoy seeing Rachel Boston play her just outside the lines of being a fatal Manic Pixie Dream Girl and it's enjoyable to watch Fred squirm in almost every interaction they have after sex.
And so, Fred spends the next day trying with all his might to convince Mindy to take the morning-after pill, for both their sakes. You can tell that Fred is hiding something though, and it's not just the undesired potential baby. He has a deeper secret: SPOILER: he has a girlfriend (played by the all-grown up Anna Chlumsky, you know, from "My Girl") whom he lives with and has a rather cushy life with (re: she's quite the dominate female).
Fred spends the day with Mindy (stopping for a bizarre interval with his girlfriend at their place, which kind of throws the viewer off in terms of the timetable), because Mindy has to take two doses of the pill, with a 12 hour interval, and since Fred as been quite an asshole to Mindy, he decides to make it up to her by spending the day with her. The only trouble with this is the Mindy is relationship-minded and in so doing, Fred strings her along, intentionally perhaps, with false promises of a romantic commitment. Everyone knows, once he gets what he wants, he'll go right back to his girlfriend and try really hard to forget his indiscretion. Mindy is slightly unhinged and it would have been great to really dive further into her psyche, since she's really the driving force of the film. Everything really depends on her.
I did actually enjoy this quirky indie film because it had some intentions, but the writing failed its strongest character, for me, Mindy. All 3 characters are not totally despicable, but they have clear intentions and are a bit narcissistic, but then again doesn't that all define your twenties? You never really sympathize with Fred, because he remains loathsome through the whole film, in fact, at the end, you really don't want him to get the girl. But alas....
.....................................................................................................
"Nobody Walks"
starring: John Krasinski, Olivia Thirlby, Rosemarie DeWitt, India Ennega, Dylan McDermott, Justin Kirk, Rhys Wakefield, Emanuele Secci
written by: Lena Dunham and Ry Russo-Young
directed by: Ry Russo-Young
Olivia Thirlby is a bit of a newcomer for me as far as seeing her in films, which has been great since I really starting focusing more on the films I watch and who's in them because of my film project, which in case you couldn't tell, I've decided to continue onward.
Thirlby plays Martine in "Nobody Walks" which was written by Lena Dunham (whom I love) and this character is ripe with Dunham idiosyncrasies. Her personal life is a bit of a wreck from the minute she arrives in Los Angeles, to work on a film project. Her most recent relationship ended in a lawsuit, and she's clearly an emotional wreck as well, having never really come to grips with her reality. It's like leaving New York to pursue this film project was her way of forgetting about it, but she's about to wreck emotional havoc on the family members who take her in.
Nobody in this film's story seems to really be able to effectively communicate their emotions or inner turmoil and/or read the signals given off by everyone around them. I attribute that to the fact that Dunham wrote these characters, and again that seems to be a signature trait of hers. I like it, but it makes interactions between characters uncomfortable to watch as an outsider/viewer.
John Krasinski plays Peter, the sound technician who is helping Martine edit her film. He's a long way from his lovable role on "The Office" as Jim, but he is versatile enough to pull it off. An actress I love, Rosemarie DeWitt, plays his wife who is also a therapist, Julie. Julie's friend is Martine's college mentor and that's how Martine found her way to Los Angeles, briefly. The two women never get the chance to bond, but Martine and Peter's close-quarters relationship (they toil away in his sound-proof studio) inevitably leads to romantic sparks, a situation whose narrative significance is diminished by the fact that Martine ends up involved with most of the men she brushes up against.
Julie has some growing tension, sexual or not with one of her flirtatious, Hollywood-type patients (played by Justin Kirk). And then, there's Peter and Julie's sexually confused and budding daughter, Kolt (played with intriguing heart and soul by India Ennenga, she's not going away anytime soon). She has an unattainable, creepy love interest in her much-older Italian tutor and an unexciting prospective boyfriend in their pool-boy.
As Julie pragmatically explains to her daughter, you don't necessarily find the right person, just the right time to settle down. This fits in with the film's refreshingly candid, illusion-free viewpoint on the personal concessions that accompany maturity, sanding off the quixotic edges while holding onto a kernel of romance about the mechanics of love and lust. These characters may be compared visually to the scorpions in Martine's harshly monochromatic film, but there's a real sense of care taken in depicting their fragility, which leaves them helpless in the face of their own confused desires.
I like the film, nonetheless, even if its cast is an unfortunate bunch of "good people" playing conflicted, not necessarily bad people, but rather morally confused individuals.
Martine never has a chance to really be an explored character, although her place in the world is a bit more defined and clarified for her when she's asked to leave by Julie, who subsequently tells her, as well, that this will probably be the last she hears from anyone in the family. I'd like to think that if Lena Dunham had more time and space to help define and explore Martine as a young woman, she'd have eventually gotten there. This is too brief of a film to really get any deeper than she can, as a great writer of coming-of-age stories, thanks in large part to her fantastic series "Girls."
...........................................................................................
"Life in Flight"
starring: Patrick Wilson, Amy Smart, Monique Gabriela Curnen, Lynn Collins, Zak Orth, Rashida Jones
written and directed by: Tracey Hecht
This is a film that never really gets off the ground or the runaway. For a film with a deeper title that implies there will be some truths examine past surface level, it really only delivers that which we see play itself out on the screen, which really isn't much. Yet again, we have a man who is married (this time) to a very controlling and organized women who runs the house and their lives.
Patrick Wilson plays some kind of construction bidder/negotiator for a large firm looking to cash in big on a deal that has financial implications that could have him and his family well-off for the future. He's depressed-beyond-belief with his career choice (?) and/or the way his life has seemed to turn out. He is seeking some kind of liberation (perhaps briefly) from his overbearing, materialistic wife (played by a grown up, now, Amy Smart). That's when he runs into the free-spirited and spunky (but still not completely explained or explored further than the surface) character played by Lynn Collins ( who really gives it all she's got, but just falls too short of anything even remotely likable or even sympathetic). She falls for the married guy, of course.
This could have been a chance to delve into a study of the modern American family and its subsequent breakdown thanks to the 21st century and all its expectations, but the dialogue is lackluster, at best, and there's really no action. Patrick Wilson is almost even more depressing as his character than Zach Braff's coming-of-age character in "Garden State." They are both quite depressed, for different, yet similar reasons. Someone else has been running their lives and they want out or at least some say and control.
There's really nothing here to shake a stick at, especially since its running time is only 75 minutes.
....................................................................................................
"The Dish and the Spoon"
starring: Greta Gerwig, Olly Alexander
written and directed by: Alison Bagnall
Writer-director Alison Bagnall apparently never met a moment she didn't want to drench in preciousness, and if so, she certainly picked the right actress to portray this preciousness: Greta Gerwig- who, I'm convinced is the best indie actress and quite underrated. I may be slightly in love with her, as well, though. Bagnall's story revels in familiar tortured-soul-longing-for-connection bathos and gray-desolate atmospherics via its story of Rose (Greta Gerwig), a woman introduced bawling and moaning hysterically over her husband's infidelity. Decked out in a knit hat and an oversized coat worn over full-body pajamas, Rose is a hysterical mess of a woman who pays for beer and donuts with crumbled bills and change found in her hatchback, only to then head out to the blustery beach and an abandoned lighthouse to mope, where her plan is complicated by the discovery of a slumbering British teen boy (Olly Alexander). The boy has no name, is in the States because he followed a girl who subsequently left him, and, wearing an ascot and boasting a head of big frizzy hair, resembles a mini-Tim Burton- AHA! That just came to me, although I struggled the entire movie thinking he looked like a younger version of someone else! That's it!
Though it makes no sense, Rose takes him under her wing, instigating a ragamuffin odyssey in which they move into her parents' summer home to play house and plot how Rose can find and kill her husband's mistress (Eleonore Hendricks).
Rose forces (?) the boy to gender-bend role-play as a means of acting out her anger and self-loathing, and engaging in marriage fantasies that lead the couple to take costume-shop photos in old-time bridal gown and suit.
Rose's breakdown is conveyed with frantic, crazed intensity by Gerwig, but it exists in a vacuum of believable circumstance, emotion and behavior, as Rose and the boy's dependent, semi-romantic relationship takes place solely in a twee netherworld of incessant dressing-up and aimless wandering.
That things come to a head at a dance where patrons don 18th-century clothes is indicative of the film's overweening quirkiness, which also infests an earlier visit to a brewery where the two play hangman (with Rose's lipstick) on the bottom of a beer vat, or a later sequence in which Rose abandons the boy at a bar, only to return to find him charming the establishment on the piano. Bagnall's empathy is sincere, but her tale is a thing of unconvincing fantasy, and her cornucopia of formulaic imagery—sights of undulating flocks of birds relate to Rose's search for direction and harmony, while shots of Rose and the Boy staring off into the sunset speak only to the material's overwhelming conventionality.
A lot of nothing happens in this story, but Greta Gerwig is delightfully crazy, nonetheless. She's a woman off her hinges, but the unlikely connection and bond these two characters share is inexplicable, at best.
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