Tag: Relationships

THE INVITE – Review

A couple invites another couple, their new neighbors upstairs, over for dinner, but that ordinary thing opens the door to an evening neither couple seems likely to forget. The smart, dark comedy THE INVITE is part “Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf” and part “God of Carnage,” yet neither, as it deals with adult matters of relationships and sex with biting, frank humor. THE INVITE pits hosts Angela (Olivia Wilde) and Joe (Seth Rogen), a bickering couple dissatisfied with life who are dismayed by the noise the new upstairs neighbors make, against those upstairs neighbors, Spanish divorcee Pina (Penelope Cruz) and her widower husband Hawk (Edward Norton) as they dance around the issues the hosts have in their own rocky marriage and Joe’s resentment of the loud, late night sex noises they hear nightly from Pina and Hawk’s apartment.

with searing, frank humor. THE INVITE pits hosts Angela (Olivia Wilde) and Joe (Seth Rogen), a bickering couple dissatisfied with life who are dismayed by the noise the new upstairs neighbors make, against those upstairs neighbors, Spanish divorcee Pina (Penelope Cruz) and her widower husband Hawk (Edward Norton) as they dance around the issues the hosts have in their own rocky marriage and Joe’s resentment of the loud, late night sex noises they hear nightly from Pina and Hawk’s apartment.

Olivia Wilde directs as well as starring in this sophisticated, sometimes squirm-inducing comedy dealing with grown topics. The cast is superb, individually and as an ensemble, and Wilde’s direction is strong as well. THE INVITE is an excellent showcase for this fine cast, giving the actors real red meat to sink their teeth into. Although it is a comedy, THE INVITE is dark, even hard stuff, with many uncomfortable and even squirm-inducing, if funny, moments, as it frankly, and maybe even perversely, addresses matters of real-life relationships and life.

Joe and Angela’s marriage is in trouble, and the noisy neighbors upstairs are not helping matters. Neither of them are happy people. Seth Rogen’s Joe is a failed musician who now teaches at a local community college without enthusiasm, and seems to wallow in his despair, avoiding even touching the piano he still keeps in his study. He clearly feels a failure but seems determined to embrace that misery as his identity. Angela is a frustrated stay-at-home mom, who cares for their daughter and spends too much money, who is bursting with pent-up frustrations, including over her husband’s embrace of misery. They bicker constantly.

We see plenty of that bickering but the comedy opens with an orchestra performing in a theater. The sole audience member is Seth Rogen’s Joe, clearly their teacher. Yet when the performance ends, he says little and hurriedly leaves, exiting the theater with a bulky item that turns out to be a foldable bike.

After absurdly struggling up San Francisco’s hills on that ridiculous foldable bike with its tiny wheels, Joe arrives home and is dismayed to learn his wife has invited the upstairs neighbors to dinner. He chides her for not letting him know about the dinner party, although she contends she told him the night before. She chides him for not bringing home some wine, while he contends she never told him to do that. However, since the new neighbors are coming to dinner, Joe thinks it gives him the chance to confront them about the late-night loud sex noises they have been enduring since the new couple moved it. Horrified, Angela forbids him to do that, because she wants to try to befriend the neighbors before raising that topic.

Joe and Angela are still arguing when the guests show up. Everything goes wrong from the start, including what Angela planned to serve for dinner and the lack of wine.

Despite the missteps, things start to go better than expected. Joe is distant, grumpy and brutally honest even towards the guests, although he stays away from the banned topic of noise, but surprisingly, the neighbors’ reaction is an unexpected admiration for his refreshing honesty. It turns out Pina is a therapist, a sex therapist actually, and she and her husband Hawk value honesty above all.

The couples seem to be hitting it off, when new surprises emerge. However, Joe and Angela’s tendency to snipe at each other starts to set off Pina, who is outspoken and sometimes even prickly. When Joe takes a swipe at gentle, quiet Hawk, he gets a response he doesn’t expect. To avoid spoilers, we will leave it at that, and just say things go in very unexpected directions, surprising both couples, and the audience as well.

This is adult comedy, but not particularly graphic, more just honest, sometimes embarrassingly so, about sex and relationships. This also is not laugh-a-minute comedy, although it has wit and its farcical side with some laugh-out-loud moments. This is darkly humor to make you think as well. Many of the scenes are so honest and close to the mark, that couples (or anyone who had been part of a couple) may likely to squirm or cringe with discomfort at something familiar. Other moments are more likely to fall outside most personal experience.

THE INVITE, which was a hit at Sundance, is actually American remake of a 2020 Spanish comedy. The original Spanish film, THE PEOPLE UPSTAIRS. was an adaptation of Cesc Gay’s play and has been called an adult comedy for its focus on sex and relationships, although it is more frank talk that visually graphic. The original Spanish film also sparked French, Swiss, Italian and South Korean remakes. The Spanish film’s script was written by the playwright but this remake was written by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. A planned 2023 version, with different cast and director, didn’t get off the ground before this present one.

The American comedy shows those origins as a play, by largely taking place in Joe and Angela’s apartment, apart from an opening sequence that sets the story firmly in San Francisco. Despite that bit of staginess, the comedy is intelligent, darkly funny and often uncomfortable as it fearlessly explores issues of relationships, sex and marriage in an adult way. The discussions are frank and adult but the film isn’t graphic. The original Spanish film was so good, there are also French and Italian remakes as well.

The major highlight of this smart comedy is the showcase it provides for this excellent cast, who relish the sharp dialog and its fearlessness in tackling uncomfortable subjects. The whole story takes place in Joe and Angela’s spacious, comfortable apartment, with the attractive setting contrasting with Joe’s palpable anger and despair about his life and Angela’s misdirected compensation for frustrations. The film runs a bit too long, sometimes lingering with a particular fight before it introduces some table-turning twist.

Still, the actors’ excellent work and intelligent, realistic way the script deals with relationship and life issues, makes this dark, biting comedy worthwhile, especially with its glimmer of something hopeful at the end. Long married couples and those who have experienced divorce or death of a spouse will find things that resonate emotionally here. It is a film that leaves you with something to think about, which seems like a good thing.

THE INVITE opens in theaters on Friday, July 10, 2026.

RATING: 3 out of 4 stars

NEW STRAINS – Review

A scene from pandemic-set lockdown dramedy NEW STRAINS. Courtesy of MEMORY

The low-key indie dramedy NEW STRAINS either succeeds or sucks, depending on what you’re seeking. For starters, do you want to recall the early days of the Covid pandemic through the eyes of a few others? That’s what co-directors, co-writers and co-stars Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan serve up here. They portray, respectively, Kallia and Ram – a young couple staying in her uncle’s New York apartment as a getaway from their recent hassles and frustrations. Unfortunately, rather than explore the city honeymoon-style, the initial quarantine kicks in, sticking them in what becomes an unbearably claustrophobic situation.

She’s more energetic, romantic and sociable than her partner. He plunges into Woody Allen-esque anxiety, with a large dose of Howie Mandel-level germophobia, as this new peril with its unknown parameters shatters their plans… and moods. She’s horny; he’s paranoid. She goes out to breathe to the extent she can. He stays in, obsessing over the news and any unfolding information about the contagion.

As the quibbling and nitpicking escalate, it soon becomes apparent that these two have too little in common for forced prolonged cocooning. Their personalities are so disparate that one may even wonder why they got together in the first place. The film is short at under 80 minutes but will seem much longer to the viewer, as the imposed cloistering grates on the couple. Their different ways of handling this physically and emotionally widen the gap between them. Considerably.

Neither of them remains particularly likable, also adding to the downer factor. She lies about some things due to restlessness and frustrations with him; he gets more clingy. Both creators deserve credit for not making themselves characters who would be anyone’s idea of a role model. Though unrated as I write this, there’s probably enough non-erotic nudity (mostly Kallia’s breasts) for a likely R rating. Very little progress occurs, though there are minimal interactions with others; similar to what we all had to do in the early weeks of the outbreak. About 90% of the running time occurs in the apartment. It’s more likely to make you feel better about how you handled it compared to them than to elicit fond memories of mid-2020.

For a shoestring budget, they do a pretty good job of presenting a slice of life from that time – especially for a pair wearing so many hats despite little feature-length experience. The title serves double duty as the new strain of virus puts new strains on relationships. Whether audiences find it entertaining will vary widely.

NEW STRAINS debuts exclusively on the Memory VOD platform as of July 19.

RATING: 1.5 out of 4 stars

DADDIO – Review

Dakota Johnson as Girlie, Sean Penn as Clark in ‘Daddio’ Image: Phedon Papamichael. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson star in a two-hander that takes place in a New York City cab, as cabbie Penn drives a young passenger (Dakota Johnson) to her mid-town home from the airport. Along the way, they engage in a witty, sharp back-and-forth conversation, where the beautiful young woman holds her own against the talkative, opinionated older cabbie. Their conversation is wide-ranging at first but eventually centers on the relationships between men and women. Almost from the start, she is getting texts from her boyfriend, obnoxious horny, drunken texts, that she seems mostly reluctant to engage with. These two very different people, the older cabbie with old school attitudes and a young successful woman, chat, trade views, share secrets in a kind of competition, and so bare their souls to each other, all during one long night-time ride.

The title is unfortunate, and puzzlingly so. Written and directed by playwright Christy Hall, this finely-acted drama may bring to mind the classic BEFORE SUNRISE and BEFORE SUNSET, a wide-ranging, deeply personal conversation that takes place between strangers, but in this case, it is not two young people gradually falling in love but two very different people sharing secrets and thoughts on love. These strangers not only differ in generations but in background and economically. Instead, this conversation is between strangers who not only differ in age but in background and economically. The older taxi driver played by Sean Penn is quintessential New Yorker cabbie, who grew up in Hell’s Kitchen and has the swagger and confidence one expects. He flirts with his pretty young passenger, complementing her that he knows she’s someone who knows how to handle herself and paying her the New York compliment of telling her he can tell she’s a New Yorker. She does indeed know how to handle herself, keeping aloof but trading in snappy banter, all with the confidence of a woman well aware of the effect her beauty has on men and how to navigate through their flirtations. The young woman (who has no name in this drama, and is listed in the credits as “Girlie”) could choose not to converse with this motor-mouth caveman but confidently matches him line for line, which is kind of fun to watch.

That banter is pointed and witty, and sharpened by an underlying sexual tension, on his part. Penn’s cabbie is good at reading people and asking probing questions, and quickly guesses her texting lover is married. The conversation turns philosophical, but then more personal, and the pair start a kind of competition, of revealing secrets and unexpected personal experiences. The revealed secrets creates an equally unexpected bond grows between them.

Eventually, the talk drifts into the differing expectations of men and women when it comes to romantic relationships, and Penn’s cabbie starts to hold forth on what men want from women, different things from wives and mistresses. As he expounds on patriarchy, viewers might want to remind themselves that that the writer/director of this drama is in fact a woman. That ship will right itself when Johnson’s character weighs in, and the contrast between their viewpoints sharpens the tensions in underlying the conversation. Both characters reveal secrets about their past and their personal lives, in the way one might only do with a stranger one never expects to see again.

The conversation is not profound but the banter between them is entertaining, and a rare fine showcase for both actors. Sean Penn, once a heralded actor, as appeared in lesser roles, and has done his off-screen reputation little good from time to time, in recent years but this role serves as a reminder how good an actor he really is. Likewise, the role gives Dakota Johnson a chance to show

off her considerable acting chops, something not revealed in recent lesser roles.

The acting and the script are both strong, which they have to be for this kind of drama, but writer/director Christy Hall also keeps things visually interesting, not small achievement for a story that all takes place in a cab, apart from brief scenes at the start and end. We see inside the cab and outside it, but rarely the whole thing. Instead the shots are mostly tight, and largely point of view for either character. The focus is more often on Dakota Johnson’s character, and often in extreme close-up, particularly of her eyes. We get shots of her view out the windows, of the cabbie through the glass, close-ups of his hands as his fingers drum on the steering wheel. The varied and tight shots keep the film more engaging visually than one might expect. Rather than forcing the drama to “open up,” the film keeps things close in and focused, which does more to make it less stagy than added exterior shots would have.

Curiously, Dakota Johnson’s character has no name, although she is clearly the major focus of the story, more than Sean Penn’s talkative cabbie). Penn’s character gives his name as Clark, a name he clearly does not feel comfortable with, and says he prefers Vinnie, although we are sure no one calls him that. We get insights on both characters, their inner lives and past experiences, but the overall theme is romantic relationships rather than something broader. It’s universal, sure, but it also makes the whole discussion feel less significant than it could have been.

Overall, DADDIO is an interesting, somewhat sexy, conversation that becomes a pas de deux between two gifted actors playing people who are very different from each other but still find a human bond nonetheless, in the course of a long taxi ride home.

DADDIO opens Friday, June 28, in theaters.

RATING: 2.5 out of 4 stars

Dakota Johnson in DADDIO. Image: Phedon Papamichael. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

ANATOMY OF A FALL – Review

Sandra Huller as Sandra and Samuel Theis as her husband Samuel, in ANATOMY OF A FALL. Courtesy of Neon

ANATOMY OF A FALL begins with a deadly fall but another kind of fall is much of the fascinating, emotionally searing story, starring Sandra Huller, who was so outstanding in TONI ERDMAN. Huller plays Sandra, the German wife of a French man, Samuel (Samuel Theis) who is killed in a deadly fall from an upper level of their remote Alpine chalet home, a fall that quickly becomes suspicious, with circumstances pointing to the wife. The couple have a son who may or may not be a witness to what happened – if there is indeed a crime. Questions and doubts abound in this excellent drama.

ANATOMY OF A FALL won director/writer Justine Triet the Palme d-Or at Cannes, wowing both audiences and critics, and creating considerable awards buzz. Director Justine Triet’s drama is a near perfect combination of police procedural, courtroom drama, and psychological relationship drama with a deep dive into an unraveling marriage and complex family dynamics. The cast is outstanding, the photography striking and storytelling gripping.

The film is French and the story takes place in the French Alps but the film is mostly in English, the language shared by the German wife and French husband, and spoken at home with their son, with some French and a little German with subtitles. But because of the rules for the Oscars, this excellent film is not France’s submission for the International Oscar due to the amount of English spoken versus French.

Regardless, it is an Oscar-worthy film, and an impressive example of how an engrossing, edge-of-your-seat crime thriller film should be made.

In the film’s press notes, the director said that the idea of the film was to depict the downfall of the couple’s relationship, which we discover is teetering even before the fatal fall. References to the potential for a fall, physical or emotional, is everywhere.

From the beginning, with a shot of a ball bouncing down stairs, the photography emphasizes the steepness of the Alpine chalet home, giving us a sense that falling is an ever-present threat. Even the location of the house, perched on a mountain, reinforces this feeling of imminent falling.

The action begins with the German wife Sandra (Huller), an author, being interviewed in their home. Although the interview is why the young woman journalist is there, the author seems to keep delaying the interview’s start, asking questions about the interviewer, refilling her own wine glass and offering a glass to the interviewer, even though it is only mid-day. Eventually, the interview does start but as the interviewer switches on her digital recorder for her interview notes, loud music starts blaring from upstairs.

The author says it is her husband, who is listening to music while working on their attic, yet she makes no move to go and ask him to stop. After struggling for awhile to conduct the interview despite the noise, they finally give up and agree to meet another time, maybe in town. The author only looks slightly irritated, more sorry to lose the company than anything, while the interviewer is clearly frustrated, after having made a long trip.

The subtext that something else going on in this household is palpable, and our anticipation that something will happen as soon as the interviewer leaves is keen. Instead, the loud music continues and the camera’s focus turns to the couple’s son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), who leaves the house with his dog, for a walk in the snowy landscape.

When the boy returns, it is to find his father’s lifeless, blodd-spattered body, face down in the snow, just outside their home. He yells for his mother, who rushes out of the house to find the shocking scene. Emergency services are called, as well as the couple’s long-time friend Vincent.

From then on, there is a flurry of police and ambulances, with the couple’s long-time friend Vincent (Swann Arlaud), a lawyer, arriving for moral support and to act as a buffer between the woman and the investigators. The first question is what happened: was it an accidental fall, a suicide or, perhaps, murder? The evidence seems to point to something suspicious, and those suspicions quickly fall on the wife. What had been an emergency response becomes a crime scene investigation.

ANATOMY OF A FALL unfolds like a police procedural and then a courtroom drama, but the whole while, an interpersonal drama is unfolding, one that reveals the nature of their marriage and the family’s history as layers are peeled back. A key for us, the audience, is the presence of the lawyer friend, who to be on hand during the investigation and to help support his friend, moves into the remote mountain home. There, he both consuls the widow legally and provides emotional support, but allows the audience to have a narration of what is going on, physically and emotionally. The lawyer is an old friend of the couple, and his awareness of their shared history, gives us an entry the couple’s private lives we would not otherwise get. One of the things we learn is that their son is legally blind, which may have an impact on what he can tell about what happened before the fall.

Through flashbacks to the couple together, including confrontations, we learn that things have been unraveling for awhile and why. These insightful scenes and conversations with the old friend, now her lawyer, alternate with the police investigation in the home, their interrogations, and crime scene recreations and later courtroom scenes.

In addition to the talks between the accused wife and her lawyer friend, we get scenes between the boy and a court-appointed advocate for him, who also keeps an eye on any attempt by the accused to influence what her son might say. There are, of course, scenes between mother and son, where she is solicitous and caring but also worried, both about how he will be affected by what has happened and what he may say or do with all that is happening.

ANATOMY OF A FALL is a film that always keeps you guessing. The woman appears dazed by what has happened and proclaims her innocence. In fact, she does not seem guilty to us but there are a lot of secrets about the couple’s relationship and a good amount of acrimony between them is revealed. Doubt creeps in, and we waver back and forth about whether we think she is guilty. We can’t rule out something that might have happened, maybe in the heat of the moment, but maybe more deliberate.

The effect is chilling but the film also makes a deep dive into the characters, revealing their past and their conflicted thoughts and emotions. This excellent film builds up a thriller tension as the investigation and trial unfold in parallel to its tense family drama, with deep insights into a failing marriage and complicated family relationships, all of which grabs and holds tight to our attention.

Sandra Huller is the amazing center of all this, delivering a powerful, multi-layered performance, while on screen nearly throughout. The other actors are excellent as well, particularly young Milo Machando Graner as their son Daniel, who undergoes a transformation as the secrets of his parents’ marriage are revealed. But the biggest acting burden falls to Huller. And she is supremely good, keeping us on our toes, revealing her character’s inner conflicts, her fears and anger, in creating this complex character.

ANATOMY OF A FALL is a title that might evokes another film, the classic ANATOMY OF A MURDER, a 1959 courtroom drama directed by Otto Preminger and starring Jimmy Stewart, but apart from being a courtroom drama (in part) with an accused central character, there is not a lot of overlap. In the case of ANATOMY OF A FALL, we follow the events of the fall from start to finish. Everything is in doubt, all characters may not be what they seem, and even whether a crime has occurred at alls is a mystery. It almost could have been called “anatomy of a marriage” but that does not cover it all either. One thing is certain in this fascinating drama is that there is more and more, as each layer is peeled back, in its riveting examination of relationships and events.

ANATOMY OF A FALL opens Friday, Oct 27, in theaters.

RATING: 4 out of 4 stars

SHORTCOMINGS – Review

Justin Min as Ben, Timothy Simons as Leon and Ally Maki as Miko, in SHORTCOMINGS. Photo credit: Jon Pack. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

We all have shortcomings but in SHORTCOMINGS, all the characters have them in abundance. This funny, smart, modern comedy follows the lives and misadventures of Ben Tanaka (Justin H. Min, who played Ben Hargreaves in the TV series “The Umbrella Academy” and Jimmy Woo in ANTMAN AND THE WASP), his best friend Alice Kim (comedian Sherry Cola) and his girlfriend Miko Hayashi (actress/fashion maven Ally Maki) as the San Francisco Bay area twenty-somethings navigate relationships and just real life. Based on the graphic novel of the same name by Adrian Tomine, SHORTCOMINGS is filled with laugh-out-loud humor and sharp, witty dialog in a real-life tale that also shows the variety of Asian American experience.

Based on a graphic novel of the same name by Adrian Tomine, SHORTCOMINGS is actor-turned director Randall Park’s first feature. Tomine also wrote the screen adaptation of his graphic novel for this hilarious, pointed comedy, which premiered at Sundance.

The story opens at the movies, where a feel-good wish-fulfillment Hollywood ending to an Asian American romance is on screen. The empowering happy ending sends the audience out of the theater in a glow, to the delight of the people putting on this Berkeley Asian film festival. Ben’s live-in girlfriend Miko is the assistant director of the film festival and very pleased with the film’s reaction. But wannabee film director Ben is rolling his eyes at the crowd-pleaser, complaining that there is not a single realistic character in the movie. Miko defensively pushes back, saying the film’s slick Hollywood style and positive representation of Asian Americans actually will open doors for more varied Asian American films, like Ben might make. Still, Ben continues to argue, even carrying over his negative attitude into the next days, creating a rift in their relationship.

In what may be a breakout role, Justin Min does an impressive job making Ben likable despite the character’s tendency to be argumentative, whiny and self-sabotaging while having no insight on his shortcomings in dealing with people. Further, Ben also doesn’t like change even though he is drifting through life. He calls himself a filmmaker, but really he works as the manager of an art-house movie theater, where he shows minimal interest in the theater’s success.

The couple continues to drift apart, arguing over Ben’s secret habit of searching for photos of white women, an obsession he denies. Shortly after, Miko announces she is going to accept an internship in New York. Ben immediately bad-mouths New York but doesn’t try to talk her out of it. Actually, he is worried about losing Miko, but keeps his worries to himself. When Miko leaves, she tells tells him they should take a break in their relationship. Again, Ben says nothing. But he immediately hits on Autumn (Tavi Gevinson), a pretty white woman he just hired at the theater. Then he quickly drops her to go out with another woman, again white, Sasha (Debbie Ryan) even though his friend Alice tries to warn him off her.

Ben certainly seems like a jerk at this point, and a lot of the characters tell him, again and again, that he is the problem – one time even using a reverse of that classic breakup line “it’s not you, it’s me,” letting him know that it is not the culture, it’s not prejudice, it’s him. But clueless Ben resists taking any of that to heart. With Miko in New York, the film follows Ben and Alice and their romantic misadventures. Sparkling, smart and funny dialog is one of the treats in this comedy but so are the relationship exchanges, which are so real world that you could imagine them in any relationship. The characters and situations, while played for comedy, all have a refreshing realism, with messy real-life situations and characters who are likable, complicated, contradictory and flawed all at the same time. The warts and all characters are refreshing rather than irritating because we are given insights on why they do what they do, even when their behavior is not nice and the characters themselves don’t have those insights.

While Ben is bad at revealing his feelings to his girlfriend Miko, he is more forthcoming with his best friend Alice especially while Miko is gone. Alice, a gay graduate student with a history of serial relationships, can be as insensitive as Ben, which might be part of why they get along so well. While Ben wants to hold on to the relationship he has been sabotaging, Alice’s response to relationship troubles is to run away.

Despite his missteps, Justin Min keeps Ben likable enough that we still care about him, while director Randall Park makes clear that Ben is as much the target of bad behavior as he is often the source. They are all behaving badly, and as the story develops, we see lots of shortcomings of other characters, often with Ben bearing the brunt of that, despite the verbal drumbeat of it being all Ben’s fault. In a way, it is, because his lack of insight on himself and his self-sabotage is at the heart of his troubles.

This is a very funny film but director Randall Park also aims to use humor spotlight some things about Asian Americans rarely seen on scene, like the diversity in the Asian American experience. In one particularly good sequence, Alice, afraid to reveal that she is gay to her conservative parents, persuades Ben to pose has her boyfriend to meet her parents, one Korean and the other Chinese. But she doesn’t want him reveal his Japanese heritage to her Korean grandfather, even though Ben points out that his family has been in the U.S. for several generations, because she worries about lingering prejudices from WWII. It sets up a hilarious, farcical exchange but highlights something non-Asians might not think about.

Eventually, Ben and Alice do end up in New York, partly fleeing their own messes back home, but also giving Ben a chance to find out what is going on with Miko, who has been dodging his calls. We meet Leon (Timothy Simons) and Meredith (Sonoya Mizuno), and more craziness, hilarious moments and telling insights ensue, as the film cleverly wraps things up, although not with the predictably neat Hollywood bow.

With humor that catches you off-guard until the end, delightfully smart dialog, and unexpected insights, SHORTCOMINGS has few shortcomings as a clever, insightful, real-world comedy.

SHORTCOMINGS opens Friday, August 4, in theaters.

RATING: 4 out of 5 stars

CineVegas Review: ‘Easier With Practice’

easierwithpractice

For many, the act of finding and then retaining a meaningful relationship is easy. It comes naturally to these people, for some it occurs once and lasts forever and for many more it occurs over and over, with varying levels of success. Then you have that group of deserving individuals who just don’t have that ingrained knack for making the romantic bonds between two human beings work for them. The formula for getting from point A to point B with an intimate relationship eludes these people and they find themselves feeling like outsiders, even though they yearn for the same connection as everyone else on the inside.

‘Easier With Practice’ is a wonderful little film written and directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez, based on a GQ article by Davy Rothbart. Brian Geraghty plays Davy Mitchell, a writer who works as a temp to pay the bills. Davy and his brother Sean (Kel O’Neill) set out on a book tour across the country together in Sean’s old POS station wagon to promote Davy’s book. During their journey from town to town, Sean spends his free time in the bars and picking up chicks while Davy, exhausted from the weeks of traveling and living off of PB&J sandwiches, spends most of his free time in hotel rooms, bored and lonely.

Davy is one of those individuals unable to make that romantic formula work. He struggles with this, seeing this come so easily to his brother, but at the same time frustrated with him for taking that gift for granted. During one of their stops, Davy receives a phone call on the hotel room phone from a mysterious woman. Davy believes this call to be a wrong number at first, but the woman aggressively forces her sexuality upon Davy, who finds himself strangely drawn to her advances. After a relatively “successful” first call, Davy and the woman named Nicole choose to continue their intimate phone relationship throughout the book tour.

The heart of ‘Easier With Practice’ lies within Davy’s longing for the type of relationship that has eluded him his whole life. Davy sees the the signals from interested parties but lacks the ability to move on them. Davy and Nicole maintain a healthy phone sex relationship, but it also develops into a more intimate and personal friendship as well. Davy’s life seems to be turning around for him, until he asks to meet Nicole and she refuses. She prefers this type of arrangement with Davy, and for a while Davy feels the same. With time, however, Davy feels this relationship could never truly be real unless they can physically be together, but is Davy truly ready to match a face and body to the voice he has come to hold so close?

‘Easier With Practice’ embraces that uncomfortable feeling of self-inflicted loneliness. The film perfectly captures Davy’s unrealized passion for a partner he has not yet met, building on his expectations, should the day he and Nicole meet ever occur. Davy attempts to keep his relationship with Nicole a secret, concerned that he feel ashamed of the fact, which only fuels his insistence on meeting her. Once home from his trip, Nicole stops calling and Davy truly realizes how much his virtual time with Nicole has affected him and his life as he shuts himself off from the world, hoping Nicole reconnects with him.

The entire film was shot on the new RED ONE digital technology and it shows. The atmosphere of the film is moody and slightly tarnished, but the camera manages to pick up on and elaborate an incredible amount of detail and the color palette is at once drab and alluring. ‘Easier With Practice’ leads the viewer down a slower, more methodical path of revelation that allows for Davy to reflect on the direction of his life. Slow and boring, however is not an appropriate way to describe the film.

As an audience, we really get to know Davy and we empathize with his heavy heart and longing. One of my favorite visual themes in the film is the use of isolation to convey Davy’s feeling of the same. The film was shot in New Mexico, a state with vast stretches of barren landscape, easy to isolate one’s self while at the same time surrounded by immense natural beauty. It’s a metaphor for Davy’s situation, isolated but still surrounded by so much beauty.

If the visual acuity and attention to the cinematic conveyance of feeling was great, the incorporation of indie music into the film’s landscape was down right brilliant. Kyle Patrick Alvarez is said to be quite the indie music enthusiast and it shows, having meticulously selected and placed an absolutely perfect soundtrack into his film. The songs were carefully chosen and used not just to fill silent space, but to accentuate a scene or emotion and further move the story along in a constructive fashion. The soundtrack to ‘Easier With Practice’ reads like a pop fans worst nightmare, featuring indie musicians and bands unknown to many like Emily Easterly, Source Victoria, Deer Tick and Grizzly Bear, not to mention the other 10 or more bands with licenced music featured on the theatrical playlist.

I have to admit, ‘Easier With Practice’ has a bit of an advantage from the start as it’s the type of indie film that I’m really enthusiastic about. With that said, the film still had to impress me and I can honestly say I am impressed, even more so after researching the making of the film and learning that Alvarez managed to put together such a great film in so little time and seemingly without a hitch. If there’s one movie that will premiere this year and deserve the attention of audiences on a massive scale, ‘Easier With Practice’ is definitely ranked highly amongst the candidates.