Lake Tahoe - Fernando Eimbcke - Mexico

A slow and meandering film about a young man trying to find a part for a car he just crashed. Along the way he meets a few eccentric people, and eventually we are given some backstory to flesh out his character. Unfortunately, the character is a blank slate for too long, and the long static shots are uninteresting and lack any mood. It’s a bland film that goes somewhere eventually, but its just not enough to save it.

The Country Teacher - Bohdan Sláma - Czech Republic

A closeted schoolteacher takes a job in an out of the way country village to try to avoid the conflicts of living in the real world. Unforunately, things don’t go quite as planned and his new simple life becomes much more complicated. It’s a well-made film with strong performances. It just has a hard time rising into something exceptional.

Back Soon - Sólveig Anspach - Iceland

Anna, a pot-dealing poet, goes on an errand and ends up on a small adventure while her eccentric clients await her return at her apartment. It’s funny, quirky and slightly surreal. Anna is exceptionally entertaining, and the poetry she writes in the film is amazing. It’s a small film, but one filled with some wonderful moments. Especially the poetry.

Hunger - Steve McQueen - Great Britain

This is an intense prison drama about the Irish hunger strikes. It arrived much-lauded from previous festivals. The film is well made. Slick and powerful. But is it more than just torture-porn? I think so, but not by much. The motivations on a personal level are explained, and the state of the prisons are properly villified, but the film keeps its distance. We are askedto just watch what happened and less to understand it.

Not Quite Hollywood - Marc Hartley - Australia

Ninety minutes of Australian exploitation film history! What could be better? This documentary was made for me. It’s a high-energy romp told through the creators and stars of such classics as Razorback, Turkeyshoot, Patrick, Mad Max, and The BMX Bandits! The talking-heads are entertainging, and the film is full of clips and trailers of forgotten trash. I wish I had a pen and paper with me to write down the titles of films that I want to look up.

The Joy of Singing - Ilan Duran Cohen - France

This is an oddity. A spy thriller that is more drama and comedy than anything else. The widow of a suspected nuclear materials dealer may still have his USB key which contains much needed information. Rival government and non-government agencies will do anything to get it including sending spies to join her opera singing class. What follows is slick entertainment. The characters each have something else going on besides their missions, and their real lives tangle inextricably with their work lives until it leads up to one big climax. It’s a bold, gutsy and artistic film. Very well made and entertaining.

Chef’s Special - Nacho G. Velilla - Spain

This spanish comedy is funny, to be sure, but the drama it tries to force in falls flat. The story concerns a gay chef, his restaurant on the brink of success (or failure), his staff, his love-life, and his newly arrived kids who he hasn’t seen in years. It’s fun and breezy for most of it, but when the drama arrives the film stalls. There is no beleivability to what the characters are feeling  to lend it emotional weight, so when the emotional climax arrived I was left empty. Luckily, most of it was comedy so I did end up enjoying it.

Marcello, Marcello - Denis Rabaglia - Switzerland, Germany

An almost perfect fairy tale. Young Marcello lives in a village in Italy that has a tradition. To get the first date with a girl, the boys line up on her birthday to give gifts to her father. The father chooses the best gift and that boy gets the date. Marcello is in love with the mayor’s daughter, and he has found the perfect gift for him. But to get it, he is sent running around the island performing favors and trades for almost every town member. It’s fun, good-natured, and well-made.  A feel-good movie that doesn’t set out to manipulate, it just wants to tell a nice story.

Rumba - Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, Bruno Romy - Belgium

Strange and very quirky, this film is told with almost no dialog. It is a bunch of comedy set-peices set around a simple story. Dom and Fiona (the directors, writers and producers as well as actors), are school teachers who spend their off-time winning dance competitions. The film is colorful and funny as it follows their day to day lives. When a tragedy occurs, the film gets really bizarre.  It should be sad and dark, but it tries to remain colorful and funny.  It works, too. Some scenes are long or sub-par, but overall the movie was fresh and different throughout.

Revanche - Götz Spielmann - Austria, Germany

I usually like this type of film. It’s slow and deliberate. It has very raw, uninhibited and intense performances. It doesn’t dumb-down anything for the audience. The story concerns a prostitute and an ex-con, and an event that goes wrong that reverbarates through their lives and the lives of others. It’s intense and real. The only issue I had with it was that it felt split too much into two different films. There was the first part before the fateful event that felt like an entire film. The second part had a completely different feel, and felt like its own film as well. Nothing was wrong with either of them, but it was offputting having them together in one movie.

Love, Soccer and Other Catastrophies - Luca Lucini - Italy

A great drama/comedy about a team of amateur soccer-players and their lives on and off the field. The relationships between them and their respective wives and girlfriends are genuine. Each character feels real and goes through real change throughout the field. The trials of the team, and the trials of real life mimic each other. It’s a great structure, and it made a great film.

Kabuli Kid - Barmak Akram - France, Afghanistan

A woman leaves her baby with in a taxi, and the film follows the driver as he tries to find the mother or find someone who can take this baby off his hands.  It’s well directed, but the motivations or everyone involved are unclear and people change their minds too much.  There was a probably a cultural barrier for me, so it was hard to connect to the story. At the end, I felt very unfulfilled.

Moon - Duncan Jones - Great Britain

This sci-fi film lacks the great production design that it needed to rise above the rest. 2001, Alien, Sunshine, Solaris: These all drew you into the film with their production design. This movie felt more like a TV show. Also, the science felt very iffy. I’m no scientist, but things in this film did not sit right with me, unlike the other ones I mentioned. Still, about half-way through I found myself starting to like the film, mostly due to the stand-out performance of Sam Rockwell and some interesting questions the film raises.

I Sell the Dead - Glenn McQuaid - USA

This turned out to be a very fun horror-comedy. Dominic Monaghan and Larry Fessenden play two grave-robbers. They go from selling fresh corpses to a crazy doctor (Angus Scrimm), to collecting more occult specimins like vampires and zombies for the rare but wealthy buyer. Monaghan tells the story to a preist (Ron Perlman), who is there to extract a confession before he is beheaded. This gives the film an episodic structure as he tells bits and peices of his life of crime. It’s not very deep, but its thoroughly enjoyable and full of horror movie-references from the full-breadth of horror cinema.

(500) Days of Summer - Marc Webb - USA

This is a nice little romantic comedy that is anchored by some fresh writing, solid performances, excellent direction, and a great soundtrack. The story and situations might not be anything new, but the film has the courage to not take the easy way out and the talent of all involved elevate it to something more substantial than your average date movie.

John Hamburg, USA, 105 min.

I wanted to love you, I Love You, Man.  Really, I did.  I tried.  I tried so hard to love you, but you gave me no choice.  I think I should see other films.  I’m sorry.  It’s not me, it’s you.

No, please.  Please don’t cry.  It’s nothing you did.  It’s what you didn’t do.  You told me this story about a guy named Peter Klaven (Paul Rudd) who, upon becoming engaged and starting to plan his wedding, realizes that he has spent his whole life focusing on his relationships with women.  This has left him with no male friends to speak of.  He decides to go on a series of “man dates” to rectify the situation.  After a series of slighty humorous mishaps, Peter meets the man-friend of his dreams in Sydney Fife (Jason Segel), a cougar hunting day trader.  Peter develops doubts about his upcoming marriage as his friendship with Sydney grows. His fiancee (played by Rashida Jones….soooooo hot!) becomes jealous of and a bit concerned about his blossoming male relationship.  Friction engulfs both relationships and that’s just about the whole movie.

You were amusing in parts, don’t get me wrong, but your humor only focused on the slightly homoerotic relationship developing between Peter and Sydney.  It was good for a laugh or two, but it inevitably became less funny and predictable.

Otherwise, you really gave no effort.  Paul Rudd did a decent job, but Peter Klaven might have been the weakest lead character I’ve ever seen in a film.  Sydney Fife was a bit more fun to watch, but ultimately neither character was very well-written.  There was no journey of character development, you just showed me a series of events and then ended.

You just seemed so rushed, I Love You, Man. You were the classic case of a studio trying to piggyback the recent success of films like The 40 Year Old Virgin, Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Knocked Up by putting familiar actors together with a relatively humorous script and throwing a movie together.  You just came up short.  You weren’t horrible, you just weren’t anything.  It’s time we said goodbye.  I’m sure there are people out there waiting to see you who will love you for the unspectacular, uninspired and predictible comedy you are.  Find them, I Love You, Man.  Fly Free.