Laggies (***1/2)

A laggie sounds like it might be an affectionate British term for what Americans call a slacker, but it may just be an invention of director Lynn Shelton or her screenwriter, Andrea Seigel, referring to someone who has not made much forward progress in life. This would describe 28-year-old Megan (Keira Knightley), who is doing menial work for her indulgent father (Jeff Garlin) and hanging out with her old high school friends despite signs — signs too heavily underlined by the script — that they’ve grown apart. When her longtime boyfriend wants to move forward (by marrying her) and she catches her father cheating on her mother, she retreats.

She does this unconventionally, by hanging out with 16-year-old Annika (Chloë Grace Moretz) and her friends and lying to her boyfriend about her whereabouts. Shelton and Seigel make this unlikely scenario more plausible that it might seem, and work in themes of parental abandonment, infidelity, and teen drinking — and a pet turtle — while making the story cohesive. Sam Rockwell plays Annika’s divorced dad; while Knightley only has a handful of scenes with him, they’re charming enough to credibly set up the later plot developments.

Set in and around Seattle, this is billed as a comedy, and it is funny at times, but it seemed to have almost as much dramatic impact as Shelton’s last film, Your Sister’s Sister. In both cases, she pushes characters together in ways that surprise us —save for the cliché ending — and makes it work.

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viewed 11/7/14 4:15 pm at Ritz 5 and posted 11/7/14

The Wonders (***1/4) [screening]

A Jerusalem bartender and sometime graffiti artist (Ori Hizkiah) gets mixed up with a burly private investigator, a cool redhead, and a kidnapped spiritual guru in this offbeat mystery. Lured by curiosity, noble intentions, and a bribe into helping spy on the imprisoned rabbi, the bartender spends most of the film trying to figure out if he’s being played by the investigator, played by the redhead, or both, and also wondering why the rabbi seems uninterested in being rescued. It’s a slightly longish tale, but keeps you guessing while delivering a satisfying conclusion.

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viewed 10/20/13 12N at Ritz East [Philadelphia Film Festival] and posted 10/20/13

Hello, I Must Be Going (***1/2)

Back in 1994, Melanie Lynskey got her first part, in Peter Jackson’s psychological drama Heavenly Creatures. While her costar went on to Titanic and Oscar nominations, the New Zealnd-born actress settled for smaller parts and television guest spots. But I noticed her in last year’s Win Win, and her wide-ranging performance as newly divorced 35-year-old Amy should vastly upgrade her future roles. As the film begins, she’s moved into her parents’ (Blythe Danner, John Rubinstein) suburban New York house, slept late, and stayed in. Not a good way to meet a man, but when 19-year-old Jeremy (Christopher Abbott) pays a visit with his parents, they begin a furtive affair.

Despite the age difference, it makes sense in a way, since both of them are at a similar stage in life. The movie’s title comes not from the Phil Collins album, but from a Groucho Marx line, so it makes sense that the story is told with humor as well as feeling. I kind of expected the scene where the two lovers are caught in an awkward position, but it was still one of the funnier such scenes. The parent-child dynamic is captured with more intricacy than the romantic one; Mom is the one more prone to push her Amy to do something with herself, but as things turn out, her relationship with each of them changes, and so does she.


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viewed 9/17/12 7:30 pm at World Café Live and reviewed 9/20/12

Jeff, Who Lives at Home (***1/4)

Jeff (Jason Segel) is, in conventional terms, a loser. When we meet him, he’s half watching an infomercial in the basement, where he sleeps. An odd phone call turns out to be a wrong number, but Jeff's the kind of person who thinks there are no coincidences. He thinks, instead, that the call might be a clue of some kind, a path to destiny. Pat (Ed Helms), who lives in a modest apartment, is, in conventional terms, an ass. When we meet him, he's just blown a bundle on a Porsche without telling his wife (Judy Greer).

Jeff and Pat are brothers. So are writer-director team Mark and Jay Duplasse, whose last film, Cyrus, was also about a man living with his mother. This movie is in a similar style, taking a fairly realistic approach to a fairly odd character and focusing also on the mother, who here is played by Susan Sarandon. Her storyline is about trying to deal with a son who she can barely motivate to do a simple home repair before she gets home from work, where she has surprisingly acquired a secret admirer. Meanwhile, her sons wind up tailing Pat’s wife, whom he suspects may be having an affair. These scenes are quite funny and play the brothers’ opposite personalities against each other.

Naturally—that is, both inevitably and seamlessly— things turn serious. The brothers Duplasse seem to agree with their main character than everyone has a destiny, and their effort to have all three family members experience a kind of redemption all in one day may seem strained to those who, like me, believe otherwise. Nonetheless, this is funny when it means to be, quirky yet approachable, and sharp in its depictions of the characters, including Rae Dawn Chong as the mother’s coworker.

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viewed 3/13/12 7:30 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 3/16/12

Lapland Odyssey (***1/4)

If you see only one Finnish comedy this year, make it this genial comedy about one slacker’s overnight quest to finally get the “digibox”— digital TV converter—his wife has been asking for. Besides fitting into the slacker-comedy subgenre, it’s also a road movie. The humor is not especially culturally specific, but there does seem to be just a bit of the melancholy that hangs over a lot of Scandanavian films I’ve seen, like 101 Reykjavík, which paints winter in Iceland as a similarly dark force that dampens the soul of men, though not so much women. Beginning with the tale of a tree where five generations of men have hanged themselves is a bit bleak for a comedy, even if it happens to be told with gorgeous photography. But the hapless hero (Jussi Vatanen), traveling with his two pals and trying not to (again) disappoint his wife, brings the story to light and rather funny ending. I would have barely recommended the film but for the delightful…Finnish.

IMDB link

viewed 4/11/11 at Ritz East [Cinefest 2011] and reviewed 4/11/11

Tiny Furniture (***1/4)

Lena Dunham’s off-kilter comedy might seem a little less fresh if the main character were a guy who’d just returned from college instead of a girl. You don’t see as many films about slacker women on the dating scene as about men. But Dunham’s odd sensibility probably would separate the movie from its testosterone-fueled ilk—I’m thinking of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Knocked Up, and so on—no matter who her main character was. As it happens, Dunham, all of 24, not only wrote and directed but also stars as Aura, who’s returned from Ohio to live, again, with her mother, a Manhattanite who makes a living from photographing, yes, tiny furniture, among other artistic pursuits.

Aura’s had a college experience that’s neither good nor bad and has relationships with her mother and younger sister that are neither good nor bad, but a little of both. (Dunham’s real mother plays her mother.) There are two potential love interests. One is a broke You Tube “celebrity” who makes videos of himself spouting nonsense on a toy horse. The other is a chef hoping to score some pills off Aura’s childhood friend, with whom she has become reacquainted. So it’s not a romantic comedy, but a comedic drama about a more or less ordinary girl who has no idea what to do next.

It’s a little too quirky for the mainstream. The pacing is very good, but the characters are not typically cinematic, with a very flat affect, the exception being the childhood friend, whose early sojourn in London has resulted in her speaking in a British accent and calling herself “Tribeca’s solution to Marianne Faithfull,” a reference perhaps obscure to those too young to know of the 1960s Mick Jagger girlfriend-turned-addict-turned torch singer/actress. It occupies some middle ground between documentary (or reality-show) realism—notable is Dunham’s being both pudgy and willing to be filmed with a complexion that’s obviously flawed in some scenes—and self-conscious oddity, and between comedy and oddity. Typical is the scene in which Aura’s mother tells her it’s okay to sleep in her bed when she’s home, but not when she’s away, or when her sister laments Aura’s reoccupying the bedroom that’s now become the sister’s “special space.” Kind of funny, kind of strange. In my view, the naturalism allows it to escape pretentiousness, but I can see how others would disagree.

IMDB link

viewed 12/29?/10 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 1/4/11

Parade (***)

Tokyo is such a densely populated city that it seems like a fair number of the movies I’ve seen set there have this a subtext. Here four roommates, two of each sex, share an apartment, each coming and going and living the haphazard lives of twentysomethings. The movie is divided into segment focusing on each roommate: one who’s fallen for his best friend’s girlfriend; one who spends her time hanging out, waiting for her movie-star boyfriend’s occasional calls and hatching plans to uncover the call-girl ring that might be operating next door; one who’s kind of a wild girl; and one, the oldest at 28, who seems more stable than the others and is the only one shown working. And there’s a fifth roommate, a skinny homeless kid who happily shows up one morning to the confusion of the others. In the course of the film, we find out a little about each character, and they learn a little about each other. If there is a unifying theme, it’s how well do we know the people we know? (At one point, a couple of the roommates speculate on whether the newcomer might be the local serial killer, but his crimes turn out to be more petty.) The film is intriguing, but probably aimless for some tastes. The ending is possibly shocking, open to interpretation, but kind of anticlimactic rather than satisfying. One woman I heard, walking out of the theater, put it more succinctly. “Bunch of looneys,” she said.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz 5 [Philadelphia Film Festival] and reviewed 10/17/10

Knocked Up (***1/4)

With this movie, writer-director Judd Apatow establishes himself as a force to elevate the slob comedy to something an adult audience can both laugh at and relate to. As with his previous effort, The 40-Year Old Virgin, Apatow surrounds what Newsweek calls a “beta male” hero with a group of friends enjoying an extended adolescence and forces him to grow up.

Apatow’s avatar of maturation here is Seth Rogen, the shaggy veteran of Apatow ventures dating back to the beloved (by me, at least) Fox series Freaks and Geeks. A chance hookup with an out-of-his league TV producer (Grey’s Anatomy’s Katherine Heigl) leads to a sudden grow-up call when she becomes…expectant.

Rogen capabably handles the part of the slacker-cum-family man, and Heigl was a revelation. Did I believe they were a couple falling in love? No, I didn’t, and nor is there is it clear why no one ever brings up either abortion or adoption. The movie also feels a little longish; its segmented approach seems like it might have suited for an episodic, short-run sitcom. But even if you you don’t buy these two as a couple, you can probably understand them. The movie is full of tremendously funny punch lines that seem like things that the characters would actually say.

The other couple in the movie, played by Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann (as the sister of Heigl’s character), is also worth mentioning. Unlike the slacker posse, they function as something more than comic relief or sidekicks. They’ve got a long-running marriage that seems to still be a day-to-day negotiation, and I loved this view of a relationship in which neither partner is the sole villain and which will continue to resolve itself long after the movie ends. It’s the view of a grown-up, but one who still likes a good dirty joke.

IMDB link

reviewed 5/21/07

Failure to Launch (**1/4)

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A stupid premise—Matthew McConaughey’s parents hire Sarah Jessica Parker to date him so he’ll move out of the house—dooms this in the romance department, and most of the comic moments come from the supporting cast.

The title of this Matthew McConaughey-Sarah Jessica Parker romantic comedy is ready made for critics, but I think the name of McConaughey’s character, Tripp, is more descriptive, since it starts out okay but stumbles. Admittedly, the premise is very stupid. Tripp, 35, still lives with his parents (Kathy Bates and Terry Bradshaw), which provides him with both meal and laundry service and a way to scare off women when they get too serious. The movie’s amusing conceit is that men like Tripp, and their parents, form a whole subculture of learned helplessness. The parents are helpless too, unable to kick their grown sons out. And so, apparently, they must turn to women like Parker’s character, whose job is to date the aging homebodies until they leave on their own. Who knew that the key to becoming independent was to fall in love and then get dumped for the next client? I went home and thanked my dad for not hiring someone to be my girlfriend when I moved back home a few years ago.

So anyway, just like in McConaughey’s prior romantic comedy, How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days, his relationship with the woman is based on deception. No prizes for guessing what happens. With a setup like this, a movie can never hope to be a great romance, and Launch is only a little better as a comedy. The scenes between the two leads are a snooze. The best parts are those with the parents (including Bradshaw’s notable nude scene) and, especially, Zooey Deschanel as Parker’s peevish roommate. McConaughey’s easy charm should make him a natural for a romantic comedy, if only he can find the right script. (Here’s a hint: it won’t end with the other characters in the movie cheering the happy couple; if the story is good, the audience will do it…although that can be annoying too.)

IMDb link

posted 9/9/13