Reviews

Remember when independent films were really independent? 500 Days Of Summer is so dull and Sundance friendly that I felt angry leaving the theater. What really made me nuts was reading after that the creators of the film actually thought they were making some kind of radical romantic comedy.

Nothing in this entire movie is original, intelligent, or subversive. Most of it was stolen from Woody Allen. And a movie that is angry at women and doesn't understand women fits in really well with all the Apatow comedies coming out. So who is kidding who?

Super-stylized, super cold, this movie is great for shallow young people who don't have a clue.

Myself, being over 50, if I want to watch great pop movies I'll go watch "A Hard Day's Night" or "Shoot The Piano Player." Those movies were fun and had substance.

The best kept secret in Hollywood is that Sam Mendes can't direct films. Not at all. He gets the best D.P.'s in the world, but they can't save him from his own lack of any subtlety.

Away We Go is a whole new level of awful for him. It combines the smug obviousness and condescension of American Beauty with the dull self-involved couple scenes of Revolutionary Road.

Usually he wastes talent like Tom Hanks or Paul Newman or Dicaprio. Here he doesn't even have talent to waste. Maya Rudolph and John Krasinski are not movie stars or actors. Krasinski in particular has so little talent, is so wooden, one wonders how much longer his career will go. How long can a guy sit around winking while everyone around him makes fools of themselves? Away We go is just like The Office in that sense.

But what is most offensive about Mendes is how dumb he thinks Americans are. He doesn't understand America at all, but he keeps coming over here as if he think he has anything to say about America. He does not. At all. America is sometimes a dark and stupid place, but there is also something magical about America. And Mendes can't touch it.

I had the pleasure of seeing this movie at the Edinburgh Film Festival. While I do not think it will be very popular, for those who like movies that are a little unusual, this one is for you. The pacing, the music, the lighting is all unusual and terrific. The director Noah Buschel spoke after the film and said he was trying to make a noir where everything happened in very ordinary, everyday ways. A "boring noir" is what he called it. In other words, the movie is so low-key that it becomes almost a different genre than noir.

But the movie is by no means some kind of abstract experiment. It had me crying hard at the end of the movie. The credit goes to Buschel and Michael Shannon. Shannon breaks through to another level in this movie, adding a sweetness that I hadn't seen in him before.

Heartbreaking stuff.