Victoria Justice Grows Up. Indie Films to Watch.

"Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List"

starring: Victoria Justice, Pierson Fode, Matthew Daddario, Ryan Ward, Danny Flaherty, Griffin Newman
directed by: Kristin Hanggi
written by: Amy Andelson

This sort of rom-com was seemingly invented by "When Harry Met Sally," in which two friends of the opposite sex struggle to remain strictly platonic when one of them develops deeper feelings for the other and those feelings go unanswered. Unrequited love. Otherwise known as the story of Sean's life, so to speak. Needless to say, I dive right into these films.

This film sees Victoria Justice stepping out of the very large shadow of her child star thanks to significant roles in Nickelodeon television shows "Zoey 101" in which she was a co-star and her known show "Victorious."

Watching her in this film, it's hard to believe she is only 22 years old. She certainly brings the star-power and shows that she can front a movie on her own just from her abilities and talents. I could not take my eyes off her when she was on the screen. I mean, it helps that she's a gorgeous girl, but she also shined in her role as Naomi. I fell in love with her, quickly.

Naomi and Ely are best friends who are in college, yet living in apartments with their mothers in the same building. They've been best friends for years. They've developed a "No kiss list" that apparently helps keep their bond strong, but that is put to the test when one of them (hint: Ely) breaks the no kiss rule.

The film has a tendency to treat things as first-world problems that annoying twentysomethings seem to face in our country with a bit of fluff, but in a cute way. Then, the story gets deeper into each of the main character's life story and you start to feel for them, which is essential to film's like this working. Their background stories are sad and add to why Naomi, in particular, acts the way she does. In fact, she's the one that needs to experience growth by the end of the film for you to feel fulfilled and satisfied. The unraveling of the story takes some time as the characters are developed, and once things come to a head, it plays out like you would expect, with lies, deceit, cheating, and the inevitable reconciliation. The driving point of the film's story is: the realization that your life revolved around one person who does not look at you in the same way you look at them is certain painful (don't I know it); and you have to grow up one day and realize that you and that person will never have the relationship you crave and you have to be okay with that.

Ultimately, the film has a great message about communication for any relationship/friendship: honesty and transparency.

Both actors do a great job in their respective roles, but the film truly belongs to Victoria Justice and I cannot wait to see her rise up with many more prominent roles. I think she's ready!

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"Felt"
starring: Amy Everson, Kentucker Audley, Ryan Creighton, Elisabeth Ferrara, Brendan Miller
written and directed by: Jason Banker

"Felt" is an art film if ever there was an art film. It stars Amy Everson, who in real life is an artist, and she cowrote the film with the director. She apparently used some personal experience to help write the story, which certainly leaves you wondering if art can be cathartic, especially after suffering through something traumatic like the character in this film. It is implied, but never truly discussed or shown, that Amy is suffering through some lingering psychological effects of a sexual trauma (most likely a rape). Aside from not being able to find peace or sleep, Amy harbors many revenge fantasies which she plays out in the middle of the woods in the middle of nowhere dressed as a variety of bizarre characters she has created for herself with the fabric and other things she has collected- most significantly, she fashions bodysuits with a prominent focus on male genitalia. She regards her art and performance as a response to the rape culture and society's objectification of women, in general, which is a strong message to undertake, albeit an important one.

It is billed as a psychological horror film, but there is definitely a lack of horror until the very end of the film, but even the climax isn't horror specific. It is rather expected, honestly, because the film and its makers wear their intentions on their sleeves.

Sure, Amy is attempting to rebuild her own self-empowerment and confidence as a woman in a male driven society, but along with that, she is also building a rather scary vengeful attitude, which becomes quite clear when she meets Kenny and takes him out into the woods with her.

As a viewer, you become a bystander to the terror Amy wants to inflict and really all you want to do is help her out of her downward spiral.
It's certainly an interesting film and worth a viewing. 

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"People, Places, Things"
starring: Jemaine Clement, Regina Hall, Jessica Williams, Stephanie Allynne, Michael Chernus, Audrea and Gia Gadsby
written and directed by: James C. Strouse

In true Jemaine Clement fashion the event that starts this film in motion is a rather awkward encounter of the domestic kind when his character, Will (an adjunct professor and graphic novelist) catches his wife and the mother of his two little girls, Charlie (Allynne), in the midst of a sexual encounter with another man at one of their girl's birthday parties. With any other actor, perhaps, this revelation would lead to verbal fireworks and a physical altercation, but with Clement in the role, it's played more like a goof and awkward moment that sets the rest of the film in motion. Charlie, his wife, simply gives him a shrug, like she does not feel the need to explain why it happened and their marriage/relationship is over.

Then, we cut to a year later, for some reason, although being a part of that monumental year would surely explain a lot and I'm sure we would see some interesting things through Will's perspective, but instead, we see the afterlife of that year apart. We can see that Will is in a rut and has been, seemingly, for that entire year. The filmmaker wants us to see what the stasis of being in a rut is like. Will remains awfully courteous to his ex-wife, and we can tell it is for the sake of his daughters, but there's also a piece of him that always wants to keep the window of opportunity open that he and Charlie will get back together, because optimistic people just see things that way. He is very polite to the woman whom he loved, the same woman who basically shrugged their marriage away in a bathroom.

Will’s wounds are barely scabbed over. When he dumps his despair onto a roomful of undergrads, one of his students, Kat (Williams, a Daily Showcorrespondent), invites him over to dinner, thinking he might hit it off with her single mom, Diane (Hall). But the film means to do something more interesting than just dangle a new love interest. Diane’s troubled experiences as a divorcée and Kat’s bad memories of watching new boyfriends shuttle in and out resonate with the new normal that Will and his 6-year-old daughters (cute, but just props) are now muddling through.

This is a great indie film that has equal parts human study, relationship study, gently funny humor, honesty, and great acting.

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"The Last Time You Had Fun"
starring: Kyle Bornheimer, Eliza Coupe, Mary Elizabeth Ellis, Demetri Martin, Charlyne Yi, Jimmi Simpson, Todd Berger, Robert Baker, Sam Buchanan, Rachel Hardisty, Lawrence Mandley, Abigail Bankston, Thomas Barbusca
directed by: Mo Perkins
written by: Hal Haberman

Here's a film that includes four rather well-known, yet under the radar actors and actresses (in Mary Elizabeth Ellis best known for her part as the waitress on FX "It's Always Sunny.." series; Eliza Coupe from the underrated "Happy Endings" show that was recently canceled; Demetri Martin best known for his stand-up comedy; and Kyle Bornheimer from parts on "The Office" and "Perfect Couples" with Olivia Munn). It's a great indie film about one specific night where these four characters' lives collide.

Alison’s (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) mundane existence consists of tiptoeing around her grumpy deadline-driven husband and caring for her daughter, but that is all turned upside-down by the unexpected appearance of her troubled sister, Ida (Eliza Coupe), who has just left her unfaithful husband. In desperate need of an escape from the lives that they have been dealt, the two sisters decide to go out to a bar.

Alison just so happens to pick the most un-fun wine bar in all of Los Angeles, an establishment that just happens to be the very same location where Clark (Kyle Bornheimer) and his best friend Will (Demetri Martin) are celebrating Clark’s recent divorce. Clad in sweatpants, Clark does not actually want to celebrate, he would much rather be sitting at home with his kids watching a movie.

After a lackluster attempt at a pick-up, the foursome find themselves riding around LA in a fully-stocked, stretch limousine driven by a comically snarky driver (Charlyne Yi). Directed by Mo Perkins, the quartet proceed into the night, contemplating marriage, parenthood, infidelity and sexuality. The alcohol-fueled adventure repeatedly threatens to dip into a cheap display of drunken debauchery, but Perkins opts to keep the limo’s trajectory on the relatively straight and narrow.

The film is great because of the dialogue written and performed well by the actors. Even though the film takes place in L.A. (one of the least realistic places on Earth), it all plays out with a sense of realism and you feel like you could potentially be any of these four characters and this could be happening within your group of friends.

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"Safelight"
starring: Juno Temple, Evan Peters, Kevin Alejandro, Meaghan Martin, Christine Lahti, Ariel Winter, Will Peltz
written and directed by: Tony Aloupis

This is an indie film that really should not have been made because of it's many faults; it's almost a faulty comedic film because the entire premise is sort of ridiculous. You can't help but feel bad for all involved, but especially the two leads because, Evan Peters has proven himself with a variety of roles on "American Horror Story" and Juno Temple is now kind of an understated indie queen, except she seems to play a different version of the same characters. Here, she plays a truck-stop hooker stuck in a bad spot with her boyfriend/pimp. Evan Peters plays Charles, a crippled boy with a love for photography who happens to work at the same truck stop and he also harbors an unrequited love interest for Temple's character. Of course!

The film begins when crippled Charles rescues comely prostitute Vicki (Temple) from a beating at the hands of her pimp boyfriend, Skid, drawing the violent ire we know will explode later on. That's how these movies go. Charles' life sucks something terrible: His best friend is a wiseacre; his father (Jason Beghe) is dying; his brother died in the Vietnam War (this is a period piece for no apparent reason); he's terrorized by three bullies who always seem to be hanging around in the same spot every day. Why doesn't Charles go a different route to his lousy cashier job at the truck stop? Oh, and his mother left the family after he was born. But his life is peaches compared to Vicki's; apparently the only hooker servicing the rarely-seen truckers at this particular stop. Skid is a dangerous psychopath with no problems raping her in broad daylight. She feels safe and valued when Charles is around, and he gets a chance to break out of his shell with the only hottest girl in town.

What should be a romantic coming of age story where each character grows as they spend more time together and need each other to grow is anything but that. It's just filled with drama packed on top of drama. There's no chemistry between Peters and Temple, I mean like the Affleck-Lopez disaster of "Gigli." And the characters talk like they are reciting Hallmark cards to each other, like one of the worst Dawson's Creek episodes where you know these characters just could not possibly talk like that in real life. Forgive me for generalizing but this is the exact kind of film that you would expect to see of Oxygen Channel or Lifetime, except even they know there is not enough of a plot to engage the viewers.

Such a miss.

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"The Little Death"
starring: Bojana Novakovic, Damon Herriman, Josh Lawson, Erin James, T.J. Power, Patrick Brammall, Stephanie May, Tasneem Roc, Lachy Hulme, Lisa McCune, Kate Mulvaney, Kate Box
written and directed by: Josh Lawson

Kudos are due to Josh Lawson, the writer/director and star of this smart, funny, all around good time of a romantic comedy, in a world where rom-coms are predictable and cliche.
Lawson has taken the overused storyline of what drives women's fears about relationships, and spun it on its head, with a story about five couples, struggling, but this time it's because the men are wrestling with their own fears and anxieties about the respectively relationships when it comes to satisfying their women.

"The Little Death" tells a story about five couples and how their relationships change and evolve as their sexual fetishes come to the surface. Connecting the story, is a new neighbor to the five couples that has trouble finding just the right time to introduce himself.

Maeve (Bojana Novakovic) tells Paul (Lawson) she wants to be raped, sending the latter on a farcical quest to convince her when the time comes that the violation is “real.” It's a nervy premise, particularly as Lawson uses it: as a metaphor for a man's poignant eagerness to show his partner something new in the bedroom, which culminates in an attempted faux-rape scene that's played for laughs. But the ending represents a failure of nerve, turning the sketch into a routine comedy of marriage. Another episode almost veers into chilly Roman Polanski territory, featuring a woman (Kate Box) who discovers that she gets off on watching her husband cry, which spurs a variety of surprisingly ghastly manipulations with implications that Lawson wisely allows to hang in the air, with a conclusion that's reminiscent of an O. Henry story.

Dan (Damon Herriman) and Evie (Kate Mulvany) try sexual role-play at the behest of their therapist to open up routes of communication between them, and it goes smashingly well—at first. Evie, flush with orgasmic bliss, says that Dan should've maybe been an actor. Making the mistake of taking a post-coital sentiment literally, Dan becomes obsessed with the role-plays as performance art, reducing the sex element to a point that Evie becomes irrelevant to the fantasy. This is a striking metaphor for detachment, evoking someone lost in themselves amid their own emotional detritus, and it climaxes with Evie asking her husband where the Dan she once knew went. 

The film's title is a translation from the French phrase: la petite mort, which quite literally means "the little death" but is also a reference to an orgasm. Lawson's film attempts to look at the intersection between its literal and figurative meaning as well as finding that thin line between pleasure and pain, life and death, as well as sex and...you fill in the blank. I found the film to be about the pain of sex as an act so intensely subjective that it is impossible to experience it the same way with another person especially in a manner so fittingly personal as the expectations we set within ourselves. But, as I've learned throughout my own years of personal experience- you should not necessarily set an expectation in your mind of how the act is going to be , because that will inevitably only lead to disappointment, somehow and in some way. 

"The Little Death" deftly combines a little bit of naughty business, with lots of humor (some of which is on the dark side) and heart. This is not an easy task. The jokes are smartly intertwined within the story and just when they reach the absurd, they are held back. This helps balance the film and tell the story about the relationships as well, which is at the heart of this romantic comedy.

The film reminds me of another great rom-com that set the bar rather high itself, "Love Actually," although that film was better, this one comes in close behind it.

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"Best Man Down"
starring: Justin Long, Jess Weixler, Tyler Labine, Addison Timlin, Shelley Long, Frances O'Connor, Evan Jones, Michael Landes
written and directed by: Ted Koland

When a film opens with a wedding, but the focus is not on the happily, newly married couple, instead on the debauchery of the best man's drunken state, you would expect it to be a comedy (of errors, perhaps); but, when the same film ends shortly after the funeral of the aforementioned best man, you know the film clearly went into a darker territory the rest of the way. Whether it works or not is up to the actors and filmmaker. The newlyweds are Scott (Justin Long) and Kristin (Jess Weixler, whom I've loved since seeing her in "Teeth" and "Peter and Vandy"). The best man is Scott's best friend (sort of), a guy named Lumpy (played well and with some bittersweet depth by Tyler Labine). His unexpected death in the middle of the Arizona desert after a night of heavy drinking leaves the couple to argue several times throughout their next adventure, the first as a married couple, especially when it thwarts their honeymoon plans and shifts to planning and executing Lumpy's funeral, instead.

Both the film's comedy and the drama falls between conventional and blatantly derivative. Its darker side comes courtesy of 15-year-old Ramsey (Addison Timlin), a friend of Lumpy's who Kristin and Scott track down in northern Minnesota. Ramsey's story offers up a variety of stereotypes about small-town poverty (broken homes, crystal meth, a lingering potential of violence), but scant believability. Meanwhile, the repeated bickering between Kristin and Scott, means to be the source of laughs, in order to perhaps break up the tension and discomfort of Ramsey's reality.

To men, this was a missed opportunity for the writer/director, because clearly the story is there between Ramsey and Lumpy- and the fact that it was actually nothing creepy makes it even better. I wish this would have been explored much further instead of just an interesting footnote and eulogy for Lumpy's funeral.

Lumpy, besides being an obvious nickname, is an interesting philosophical character study of a man. Labine at first plays him as if he were impersonating Zach Galifianakis, but the character eventually veers away from that rowdy, irritating personality. In the larger context of the film, in which he's featured mostly in flashbacks, he becomes a placeholder for all that's just, righteous, and kind in the world—an imaginary standard against which Scott, Kristin, and Ramsey can judge their own shortcomings. That leaves the finer details of Lumpy's actual character and life fairly undetermined. And in part because he has some mystery to him, Lumpy becomes the most intriguing part of the film. 

Every other piece of the story falls into place by the end credits, tied up nicely with a bow, even the small sub-stories that seem a bit unnecessary and irrelevant. At its heart, with Lumpy as the centerpiece, this is a film about how the best-laid plans can go wrong in a split instant, even when you're trying to do the right thing.

I enjoyed the film even though it was not what I expected. And Addison Timlin, the girl that plays Ramsey, is certainly showcasing her talents and I can't wait to see her in more films.
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"Next Stop Wonderland"
starring: Hope Davis, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Callie Thorne, Ken Cheeseman, Alan Gelfant, Victor Argo, Cara Buono
written and directed by: Brad Anderson

This is a 1990s movie in every sense of the phrase, right down to the reference to VCR and videotaping yourself explaining reasons why the relationship is not working; plus, Hope Davis' outfits are sooo '90s.

That being said, this '90s rom-com is nearly perfect for its time period. Who would've known there was an actual Boston commuter-train line aptly named "Wonderland." The film prescribes to the notion that there is a perfect somebody out there for everyone, and that it's just a matter of being in the right place at the right time.

The film is about two Boston singles, Erin (Davis) and Alan (Gelfant), as they navigate their twentysomething lives and attempt to become something, while also trying to remain open to the idea of a lasting relationship, even though it seems far off in the distance for both of them. And yet, so close, as the premise of the film is that these two singles, would be perfect for each other, but they happen to just miss each other on the bumpy road of love and life.

So Erin, a night nurse played by Hope Davis, and Alan (Alan Gelfant), a plumber who aspires to be a marine biologist, keep crossing paths without noticing each other. Finally, they literally bump into each other on -- you guessed it -- the train for Wonderland. Like many things about this disarming movie, the symbolism of their portentous meeting works better than it has any right to. The idea of keeping lovers apart for most of a film is hardly original. Remember "Sleepless in Seattle"? But "Wonderland's" director, Brad Anderson, who wrote the script with Lyn Vaus, has a sharp eye for nuance and clearly sees the everyday ironies of single life.

There are a few minor characters that add a little breadth to the story of both main characters, including Erin's mom, who takes out a personal ad (remember those?) in the newspaper, which Alan and his buddies stumble across and make bets on who will get a response and a kiss first. Then, there's one of Alan's fellow students who seems to be a sexed-up cliche of a typical college student out for a good time and that's about it. 
And then, there's the piece about seeing Erin and Alan at their jobs often that adds to their own characters' depth. We can see and tell that they care about their jobs, that they have a devotion to their careers, which makes them even more likable. Erin works in a hospital and has a devotion to the kids in her ward. And Alan's ambition to improve himself with a marine biology degree makes him a suitable suitor for Erin. 

Davis and Gelfant bring a freshness to these roles. Davis has a wide- eyed innocence that makes you want to protect her. Both actors are so appealing, you root for the inevitable meeting to happen somewhere in the vicinity of Wonderland.