The Oranges (***1/4)

Lots of adults have a childhood best friend with whom they grew apart. For Vanessa (Alia Shawkat), who narrates this dramatic comedy, that friend was Nina (Leighton Meester), who eventually fell in with a more popular crowd and left the North Jersey suburbs for more glamorous places. But Vanessa has kept up with Nina because her parents (Hugh Laurie, Catherine Keener) are the neighbors and best friends of Nina’s parents (Alison Janney, Oliver Platt). The theme of friends growing apart is regrettably minor; instead, the main plot involves Nina’s quickly discovered romance with David, who is Vanessa’s father (Laurie).

The older actors don’t look like the parents of the younger ones playing their daughters, but they’re all pretty good, and all of the characters are fairly sympathetic, though the prime trait of Janney’s is being overbearing. Meester does both the wayward daughter thing and the flirty seductress thing well. You can tell how much fun Nina is having when David introduces her to friends they run into at a restaurant. Nina invites the surprised couple to sit down; their awkward declining of this offer is as amusing to Nina as it will no doubt be to viewers of the film. The potentially heavy subject matter is generally given this sort of light touch, as befits a film that is mostly a comedy. However, the story concludes realistically and in reasonably satisfying fashion.

IMDb link

viewed 10/11/12 7:10 pm at Ritz Five and reviewed 10/11/12

Happy, Happy (***1/4)

Couples living next door face the hard truths of their relationships in rural Norway. One pair, the more sophisticated of the two, have just relocated, but it’s Kaya (Agnes Kittelsen), the wife in the other couple, who unwittingly instigates things with a social invitation. Isn’t she gorgeous, Kaya says to her husband. But does this reflect security or merely doubt about her own sexual attractiveness? Slightly quirky (a men’s vocal quartet introduces each segment of the story), slightly comedic, and slightly unsettling (Kaya’s young son plays master and slave with the other couple’s boy, who was adopted from Africa), the drama never gets too heavy, but satisfyingly shuffles the deck on its characters’ lives.

The Man Next Door (***)

An Argentine furniture designer and his neighbor engage in passive-aggressive war of wills when the latter attempts to install a window with a view right into his high-rise unit. Almost this entire film is set in and around Curutchet House, the only building in South America designed by the architect Le Corbusier. (This is a minor plot point, as tourists turn up taking photos, or asking to see the inside.)

The designer explains that his wife is the one who doesn’t want the window, though he doesn’t either, and the neighbor plies him with gifts and promises to abandon his plans, but doesn’t. The film uses this tiny, almost absurd situation to examine these characters. The designer is kind of a jerk, and the neighbor is simply odd. A seriocomic edge pervades the film. The designer’s daughter won’t speak. The neighbor makes art out of 9mm shell cases. And much of the film is punctuated by the sounds of hammering coming from the apartment of the man next door.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz 5 [Philadelphia Film Festival] and reviewed 10/19/10