Isle of Dogs (5/5 Stars)

 Crisis! Setting: The Japanese Archipelago, Megasaki Prefecture. An epidemic of snout fever is raging through the population of dogs with no signs of abatement. Mayor Kobayashi initiates a dramatic solution: Ban all dogs to the nearby trash island. Wholly Moses! Whatever happened to man’s best friend?

So begins in efficient precision the conceit of Writer/Director Wes Anderson and co.’s third masterpiece in a row (following Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel) the Isle of Dogs. I say Wes Anderson and co. because it so obvious from his last three movies that he has assembled an extraordinary crew of artists around him. These movies are quite frankly on another level. A few words of effusive praise can be spent on the look of the movie. It is rendered in spare crisp black and white tones, obviously heavily influenced, nay in direct homage, to the efficient elegance of the best of Japanese art. It is an animated movie, using the same stop-motion technology and style Anderson previously used in Fantastic Mr. Fox. As such, the entirety of each and every frame is designed. And what design! Pick a frame at random and you’ve got a painting.

After the dogs are unfairly marooned, a young boy named Atari pilots his way to the Isle of Dogs to find his beloved dog Spot. Atari his helped in his search by a group of dogs with names such as Chief, Rex, Boss, King, and Duke, voiced by such A-listers and Anderson regulars as Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, and Jeff Goldblum respectively. Why do they help the child? Because they are dogs and dogs love children. Such cute logic is all over this movie. (For example, a not-so-subtle reason for the nefariousness of the Kobayashi clan is the fact that they are associated with cats. The ancient grudge between cats and dogs is continued). The plot is disarmingly simple and the sympathy it commands so persuasive (unless you’re are some kind of cat-lover/dog-hater) that I expect this movie will become the favorite movie of legions of children. For once, grateful parents will have at least one movie their kids are obsessed with that they would not mind watching a hundred times over.

Isle of Dogs is routinely funny in that wry and dry Wes Anderson way. His humor has gotten sharper over the years and his last three movies are a testament to that. There is a particularly good joke concerning a dog, called the Oracle, who the other dogs believe has special powers. Actually she has figured out how to watch T.V. and is letting everyone know what she is sees on the news.

The pathos works as well. One flashback scene shows the first meeting of Atari and Spots, his newly assigned guard-dog. Spot, as if a seasoned professional, describes at length his employment to Atari, the various functions he has and his and commitment to Atari’s well-being. “In other words,” Spots concludes, “I am your dog.” There is a simple profundity to that which just killed me.

I have left to discuss perhaps the more original and inventive detail of Isle of Dogs. The human characters are Japanese and speak Japanese, which the movie chooses to not provide subtitles for. The barks of the dogs, however, have been rendered into English. This provides for a unique experience in which half of the dialogue is not understandable, or is being translated by more-or-less reliable translators. There are enough visual cues so that an English only speaker can definitely understand what is going on, but the decision made by Anderson to not provide a translation of the Japanese is an interesting one. Like Lost in Translation, I expect part of the experience is not understanding the Japanese language. Or it could be that Anderson wanted to make it clear that the Japanese and the dogs indeed speak different languages and do not fully understand each other. In any case, it works.

I always pegged Wes Anderson as more of a “cat guy”. Obviously, I was wrong.  

Godzilla (2/5 Stars)

Godzilla is rated PG-13. Whole cities are wiped out so two enormous bugs can be prevented from having sex.

- A.O. Scott

“Godzilla” is about a big fat lizard that fights two giant sized moths. The cities that are destroyed are Honolulu, Las Vegas, and San Francisco. You see, a long time ago the US Government dropped a big nuclear bomb on this big fat lizard thing in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and such was the arrogance of mankind that we believed that to be the end of the story. But no, two cocoons with two large moths survived and in the present day release havoc upon the world. The two moths are the bad guys in the story. If they like totally have sex with each other they could make lots of babies, presumably more giant moths. Godzilla is the good guy in the story. He lives on the bottom of the sea (that’s why we never found him) and surfaces to kill the moths and save humanity. Why he would want to do this is not explained. Actually nothing is explained. All you should know is that this whole thing is due to the arrogance of mankind. For Pete’s sake people, stop being so arrogant.

Godzilla is really big, like the size of a skyscraper and like when he fights amongst skyscrapers they like get knocked down. Godzilla’s like Crash-Bam-Boom and the skyscraper is all like Kablooie! To the fans of Godzilla this might be enough of a reason to go see the movie. To everybody else I hope it is not enough. For instance, this movie should draw comparisons to last year’s “Pacific Rim,” a superior movie about big monsters who battle each other had several features conspicuously absent here. The first would be a sense of style. Guillermo Del Toro directed “Pacific Rim” and his brilliant artistry saturates the entire movie. Compare the night battle in Hong Kong with its brightly lit modern skyscrapers with the lumbering slugfest in San Francisco with all of its lights conveniently blown out by an electromagnetic pulse. Also the monsters and robots had distinctive personalities in “Pacific Rim,” whereas in “Godzilla” they are essentially the 3D IMAX version of those cardboard/rubber suits from the original 1950s movie. Secondly, “Pacific Rim” had a sense of humor. It cast the gifted comedian Charlie Day from “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” as an excitable scientist. “Godzilla” has no jokes in it at all and is completely bereft of funny people. Given that this is a movie about big things destroying cities, that is a major oversight. Third, and this is just a general thing, but haven’t we got to the point where movies can’t simply get bigger with bigger things destroying even bigger things. I mean ‘Avatar’ had a pretty simplistic plot but it also happened to be a gobsmackingly new visual kind of experience. ‘Godzilla’ won’t ever have that same type of novelty no matter how big the lizard is now or in some future version. This is not the first time I’ve seen skyscrapers knocked down by something big in a movie. There are several of those scenarios every year. That’s all I have to say about this movie.

I would like to a take a moment now and explore the idiocy of movie ratings in what is becoming an annual tradition at this blog (The Absymal State of Movie Ratings, The Avengers, War Horse, Iron Man 2). “Godzilla” is rated PG-13. As is pointed out above, whole cities are wiped out. These cities are populated with people. They are generally in the background running away but sometimes they are right in the middle of the action or in one particularly unsettling shot looking through the windows of their office buildings at the big monsters fighting outside. The astute observer can infer that when Godzilla knocks down a building, we have just witnessed the deaths of several thousand people at the very least. Sometimes it is even more obvious. There is a scene on the golden gate bridge that shows many vehicles with people inside falling into the ocean when the bridge is broken up by a giant bug. In another scene an airport tram is broken up and at least ten people fall to their deaths outside of the hole in the side. Given the overwhelming presence of death in this movie, why is it not Rated R? The reason is because there is no gore. This is especially noticeable when dead people are carted away from collapsed buildings largely intact. Looking at them you would think they all died of heart attacks. As for all the poor souls in the office buildings, to placate the censors, their dead bodies are not shown at all.

Human life is cheap in “Godzilla,” but that does not stop the movie from manipulating the very humanity it so plainly disregards. The result is a few absurd scenes where some lives are arbitrarily assigned more value than others. Take the scene on the Golden Gate Bridge where our hero’s son is on a school bus in the middle of the bridge when Godzilla strikes. The bus driver disregards all the authorities and takes liberties with the traffic rules brazenly passing all the other cars that will soon meet their fate on the bottom of the ocean. Do we not care about anybody else but this one kid in this one bus? When that kid survives, in a way that unnecessarily endangers all the other people on the bridge, are we supposed to feel relief?

Presumably the point of movie ratings is to protect children or whatever from what I wonder. Whatever the reason, the effect of the MPAA ratings is the proliferation of ignorance concerning the nature of violence. Imagine if you took just PG-13 blockbusters as your basis for looking at the world. You would think that you could outrun fireballs, dodge a hail of machine gun bullets behind a car, and never be hit by falling debris from buildings or shrapnel from explosions. Is that a moral way to teach kids about violence, specifically gun violence? To only allow violence that has no physical consequences and shield them from every instance of violence that shows what it can actually do to the human body seems to me to be a rather immoral thing to do. Consider the Rated R movie, “127 Hours.” It concerns the true story about a hiker whose arm gets pinned underneath a large rock. In order to escape and save his life he has to cut off his arm, the process of which the movie shows in full detail. It is gory as should be expected from a realistic version of what happened. But is it immoral? It is an act of violence depicted truthfully perpetrated to save a life. What part of that is immoral? How? The movie would have gotten a PG-13 rating if it had not shown any blood during that scene or at least made it look like the amputation didn’t hurt. But shouldn’t an amputation look like it hurts? Shouldn’t there be blood? 

The truth is that movie ratings are not concerned with morality. They are concerned with the presence of blood on the screen. In any case, that is why ‘127 Hours’ which cares deeply about human life is rated R and Godzilla which treats human life as casually as spilt milk is PG-13. Will somebody please think of the children?!?!?

Okay, that’s enough. I will keep quiet about this for another year. 

Argo (3/5 Stars)

“You’re an associate producer at best,” says Alan Arkin to Ben Affleck during a telling moment. Ben Affleck is playing a CIA exfiltration expert in what is also his latest directorial effort, the historical action thriller "Argo." Affleck is speaking to a Hollywood producer played by Alan Arkin who has agreed to put up a front for a phony movie to help the CIA smuggle several Americans out of Iran during the 1979 revolution. The fake movie is a sci-fi epic titled Argo. Affleck will fly into the Iranian capital, Tehran, under the pretense of scouting locations for the fake movie shoot, find the six Americans who are hiding out in the Canadian embassy, disguise them as part of his film crew, and then fly them out of the country via the Tehran International Airport. This is a true story. At this point in the movie Arkin and Affleck are doing a bit of casting. Which American will be the screenwriter? Which will be the cameraman? Which will be the director? Affleck puts out the idea for himself as the director. Arkin shoots it down. “You’re an associate producer at best,” he says.

Two things are happening here: First and more obvious is the clever self-referential self-deprecating joke Affleck is playing on himself. His character is being told nobody would believe him as a director in the very movie he is directing ha ha. Second and less obvious is a demonstration of an actual critical element of movie casting. Specifically, the utility of casting a movie star. It has been said that casting a well-known star saves fifteen minutes of exposition. For example: when Bruce Willis shows up in a movie the audience subconsciously should expect a no-nonsense action-oriented character because they have seen that actor play that character effectively many times before.  So the movie can skip that one scene where the character establishes his badassness (if it would for some weird reason want to). We already know Bruce Willis is badass.  

Now what do you think of Ben Affleck? If you are like me, you do not automatically think “Director” either and I say this with the knowledge that he has competently directed two movies already. When I think of Ben Affleck, I think of a lightweight actor that tried a bunch of times to be tough in the vein of Alec Baldwin and never really pulled it off. I think of all those years he was fodder for dumb romantic leads in bad movies. I think “Bennifer.” And I think of that time he stood next to Matt Damon clutching an Oscar for “Good Will Hunting” and was pretty sure that was a Roger Avary type of Oscar. This history is what my subconscious delivers when I see Ben Affleck in a movie.

Now this does not mean that I think he is a bad actor. A movie that is well cast will simply recognize and capitalize on audience expectations. You can see this marvelously done in what is perhaps Affleck’s best movie, “Changing Lanes,” in which he plays a naïve pretty boy junior associate at a corrupt law firm. Nor does this mean that Ben Affleck is miscast in this movie! He just needs to be less of a major character and more of a supporting one. Much less of a major character.

There is a gross flaw in “Argo,” and it is a result of an imperfect understanding of what the central and most interesting conflict is in this story. The movie starts with a riveting scene in which the American embassy in Tehran is overtaken by a riot of Iranian protestors. We see how the six Americans from the visa office escaped while everyone else was taken hostage. We see them go into hiding at the Canadian embassy. And then these six people are bizarrely ignored for most of the movie as the story focuses on the CIA coming up with a plan to exfiltrate them by going to Hollywood and teaming up with a Hollywood makeup designer and producer to create a fake movie as a front for the operation. There are scenes in which the CIA and Hollywood argue over the screenplay, negotiate its purchase, and throw a party in which it is read and advertised by the press. I ask you, is this more interesting than what six Americans hiding for fear of losing their lives are going through for three months? I submit that it is not.

The worst effect of all this attention being paid to the plan being developed in the USA is that it is already vetted and explained by the time the Americans in Iran hear about it. All the good objections are stated, all the other plans are explained away, and all the work is done. When it finally gets to the people that matter we are already two thirds of the way through the movie. The six have not been given any depth as characters and when the movie finally focuses on them, only one is given a substantial role, and that is merely as a contrarian voicing all the objections we have heard before. At the end of the movie we have learned almost nothing about the people being rescued.

Imagine what this movie could have been if it were less enamored with CIA spies and Hollywood producers and more with the ordinary people being thrust into an extraordinary situation. It could have stayed with the Americans after they arrive at the embassy, we could have learned a little about their personalities and histories, we could have learned about their daily routine of hiding, we could have seen the scary developments happening in Iran through their eyes. For example there is a scene where Ben Affleck arrives in Tehran and sees from his cab window a dead man being hung from a construction crane. Why couldn’t the six be the ones to witness that? Would not that have a greater effect on them. And then two-thirds of the way through the movie, Ben Affleck, can show up on the doorstep with some cockamamie scheme to smuggle them out of the country in full view of everyone by disguising them as a film crew for a sci-fi epic named “Argo.” What a great way to use Ben Affleck's lack of credibility to enhance the suspense of the storyline. Would you trust Ben Affleck with a plan like that after watching the world disintegrate into chaos before your eyes? No of course not. That would be ludicrous. Therein lies the natural center of suspense and conflict for this movie. 

How does this movie build up tension? Well, by lying about what really happened. This movie will have you believe that the six Americans got away with merely seconds to spare. Seconds. I didn’t say minutes or even hours. I said seconds. When the final plane is taking off (I really don’t think I’m spoiling anything. We all know they successfully escape) a jeep full of angry Iranian soldiers is racing practically parallel to the plane trying to get the pilot's attention. I don’t need to check Wikipedia to know that did not happen. If the story were told correctly, it would not be necessary to enliven it with trumped up bullshit.

I make a big deal out of this because no doubt much of the thrill of watching a "True Story" is in knowing you are watching something that is actually “True.” Well, if it isn't, and I assert that some really important parts aren't, then what? Let's pretend for a moment that we are not watching a "true story" and simply judge this movie on the merits as if it were any other movie. If it we’re fictional, would this be a superior movie? The answer must be no. It is repetitive, misplaces its suspense, does not use its characters wisely, and offers plenty of red herrings where a superior movie would contain actual twists and turns in the plot. Bad events always seem about to happen in “Argo” but never actually come to fruition in any sort of way that would cast doubt on the most predictable of outcomes.

I’m hearing Oscar buzz for this movie. I don’t need to see any more movies this year to be able to say I’ve already seen at least five better ones in every category. “Argo” should not be nominated for anything. If it does get nominated and especially if it wins anything I will take that simply as more proof that Hollywood likes kissing its own ass. Sure they would nominate the movie about how Hollywood saved six Americans in Iran through the Power Of Movies! Just take a look at last year’s best picture, “The Artist,” if you haven’t already forgotten it. To the Academy there are movies about them and there are movies about us. All movies are treated equally I’m sure, but some movies are more equal than others. 

John Carter of Mars (2/5 Stars)

Really expensive nonsense

“Only enormously talented people could have made "Death to Smoochy." Those with lesser gifts would have lacked the nerve to make a film so bad, so miscalculated, so lacking any connection with any possible audience. To make a film this awful, you have to have enormous ambition and confidence, and dream big dreams.”

-       Roger Ebert

The explanation of why "John Carter of Mars" exists is better than the movie itself. It’s director Andrew Stanton is best known as one of the great creative forces behind the golden age of Pixar. He was a cowriter for all three Toy Story movies and directed both “Finding Nemo,” and “Wall-E.” To a movie lover like me he is arguably one of the greatest living directors and I would put “Wall-E” on a list of the 100 best movies ever made. To studios he represents enormous profits, both “Toy Story” and “Finding Nemo” having broken box office records for animated movies. So when Andrew Stanton came to the producers at Disney with an idea for a science fiction/comic book movie with lots of violence and exotic locations, who in their right mind would say no. They granted Stanton full access to the Disney playground. $250 million dollars later in production value and $100 million dollars later in marketing produced the movie that last week grossed only $30 million and is destined to be one of the biggest flops of the year. What went wrong? Well, for one thing, the movie isn’t any good. But how could that happen? (See above). There are two main problems both of which could have been solved by a cigar-chomping asshole producer with only dollars for eyeballs. Those people are good for something.

The first big problem is way too much faithfulness to the source material. This movie is based on more than a century old comic book series. In this book we are introduced to made up weapons, made up languages, made up peoples, made up places, made up cultural customs, made up powers, made up gods and goddesses. Everything is nothing I had ever heard of before. When a character dramatically intones that they have to find the ninth ring of iths from the gates of Barsoon before the tharks release the giant white ape and the thurns shapeshift for the red man blue man widget marraige at Helium, my reaction is like, “Huh? What?” And this sort of thing goes on for much of the movie. They keep throwing in new shit, giving no explanation or time for it to sink in, and then expecting big dramatic payoffs. A very big problem has to do with the story’s technology. People in flying warships are fighting with swords while big green men on the ground have calvary and guns. Then there are these other dudes that have the ability to shapeshift and vaporize anything within a few seconds using a blue widget thingy. I haven’t the slightest idea what that thingy is or why nobody else has it or why it was not used in the battles far more often. This movie could have been a lot shorter if the blue vaporizer thingy had not been used so sparingly. Then there is John Carter himself, a civil war veteran from Earth, transported to Mars via a little thingy, to find that his Earth muscles provide him with superior abilities on Mars’ lower gravity. Basically, he is super strong and can jump really high. But how high can he jump? The movie is very very unclear about that. At points it is just a few meters, but at other times it could very well be a football field. It is this critics opinion that for action sequences to be effective, the laws of physics must be followed, even when it is on Mars, or if they are to be bent they are bent in a clear and predictable manner (See “The Matrix.” Do not see “Matrix Reloaded” or “Matrix Revolutions.”) Otherwise nothing makes sense and the story’s momentum and suspense deflates. The suspension of disbelief gone we are merely witnessing an actor in a weird costume skipping around a room with a green screen.

That actor would be Taylor Kitsch a remarkably bad choice in casting whose responsibility for the failure of the movie is only somewhat alleviated by the even worse choice of Lynn Collins, as the Martian princess. Put these two together and you have some of the most horribly acted scenes I have seen in a long time. And you cannot merely just say that the material was arcane and stilted. Sure they are speaking about weird lore and strange happenings but that still doesn’t forgive the utter lack of excitement or range in the performances. Let’s say a horde of green Martian barbarians was descending upon you for the express purpose of killing you. Perhaps your facial expression and body language should suggest you were doing anything other than posing for the Mars version of GQ magazine. Or consider John Carter’s reaction to learning that he is on Mars for the first time. That Taylor Kitsch reminded me of a young Keanu Reeves, and that is about the worst compliment you can give an actor. One of the producers of this movie should have required that Andrew Stanton cast a well-known action star as the lead in his $250 million dollar epic. This is not simply a cynical attempt at more dollars via a better marketing platform. “John Carter of Mars,” is Stanton’s first live-action movie. He had never worked with actors before. If the director casts unknowns who do not know what they are doing, guess who has the responsibility to teach them what to do: the director. And if the director does not know how to direct actors and the actors do not know how to act, what you get is this silly drivel, made even sillier as it is being performed against a backdrop of a ridiculously expensive, intricate, and extensive amount of costume, makeup, CGI work, set design, and production value. What a colossal fuck-up this was.

I keep thinking back to that other live action foray by an acclaimed Pixar director, Brad Bird’s “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.” Whatever similar problems Bird may have had were alleviated by a familiar and franchised story that took place in present day and was anchored by Tom Cruise, who is, private weirdness aside, quite frankly one of the best actors in the business, and may very well be the best action actor. For future studio reference, the next time a great director wants to spend an extremely large amount of money on something he has never done before with a bunch of inexperienced collaborators, it might be a good idea to sign him up for two movies and make the first one a much less expensive test run.  

Contagion (3/5 Stars)

Setting a record for the number of Oscar Winners killed in throwaway cameos.

The potential of a worldwide epidemic has been a great time-waster/audience scarer in the news for the past couple years. The virus will come from China (SARS, Birdflu) and just might be comparable to the 1917 influenza epidemic that killed about 1% of the world’s population. That was 1917, so the number of dead was only in the millions. Still, what if a virus like that came along again. Hundreds of millions might die.

“Contagion,” tells the story of such a virus in an oddly responsible way. There are no gruesome death scenes, over-dramatic wailing, or contagious zombies roaming the earth. Instead we are treated to plenty of scientists and doctors saying scientific things with patience and composure. These scientists are played by such acting heavyweights like Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslett, and Marion Cotillard. The first victim of the virus is Gwyneth Paltrow. Matt Damon plays her grieving husband. There are several other small parts played by well known actors. Jude Law plays a sensationalist blogger intent on dispensing government conspiracies. John Hawkes plays a janitor in Laurence Fishburne’s office. Jennifer Ehle and Demetri Martin are two other scientists working on the vaccine. Finally there is Bryan Cranston who plays some sort of military officer. Obviously, this is a very impressive cast. There are four Oscar winners, two Oscar nominees, and a two time Emmy winner in it. But none of this really matters except in marketing. You can put all the famous great actors on a screen and it still does not guarantee a great movie. This is especially true if the story is trying to be realistic.  

What’s the point of a Great Actor if the story does not allow for Great Acting? The Oscar winners here are supposed to be playing normal people going about exactly what they would do in this situation. This calls for understated performances, which they all do quite well. But really, it probably would have made more sense if the movie didn’t have any big name stars at all. Celebrity has a way of overshadowing underdeveloped characters. I rarely felt I was observing actual people. More often I was like, well, look that’s Kate Winslett and now she is in Chicago. Furthermore, if the movie wanted to take a realistic take on a subject that involves the entire world and a hyperlink network of characters, then perhaps the movie would have been better if it weren’t a movie. Two hours is not long enough to tell this story the way they want to tell it.  It should have been a 10-hour HBO mini-series.

The fact that the movie has such a huge scope but is only two hours long gives the story a sense of being in fast-forward most of the time. The vaccine apparently takes several months to create and distribute in the movie, but has a screen time of about 15 minutes. The great heroine of the story, Jennifer Ehle, is barely in the movie at all. Character back-story and motivation is hinted at but never developed in a satisfying way. Most of the problems set out are solved off-screen or dissipate in large jumps in time. Weirdly enough, the most dramatic conflict in the storyline is not the virus at all. It deals with the sensationalist blogger played by Jude Law who I think was selling a fake cure online. He gets arrested at the end, or maybe not. I’m not sure what was going on there in that park or even who he was talking to. It all happened so fast.

We’ve all seen catastrophe movies before. Well, remember that scene where the people are running wild in the streets and the looters raid the supermarket. That scene is in this movie too. Now, I’m sure that such a situation can be told in a realistic way that is just as exciting and dramatic as these scenes are in the best of zombie movies. But when a movie does not add anything to the set up the scene will not escape cliche. Time and details are needed for a realistic movies to be exciting. Otherwise they lack credibility. Now they obviously were pressed for time in this case, but whittling away those details makes what is left rather humdrum. Without the credibility the scene actually comes off worse than the same scene would be in a not so serious movie. You take the supermarket scene in a movie like “Zombieland.” Not only do they raid the supermarket, but they also kill zombies. Here they just raid the supermarket. It's boring.  

Having said all this, the movie is well put together considering that it is telling a story about a worldwide catastrophe in such a short running time. The director is none other than Steven Soderbergh, who was the Oscar winning director of one of the best hyperlink movies ever made, Traffic. But, really, you can just sense all the talent in the direction and the cast here going to waste. One wonders why Soderbergh decided to make this movie at all. The man is capable of great things. Why is he wasting his time with mediocre projects? Actually you can say this about Soderbergh’s career in general. Did we really need an Ocean’s 13? Come on Steven, you’re better than this.

Little Miss Sunshine 11/17/06

This is the sweetest fucking movie I have seen this year. It might be the sweetest fucking movie I will see in my entire life. It is just so fucking sweet. and I don't say 'sweet' with any slang connotation. This is truly sweet. It is cheerful, it is cute, it captures all the joy and laughter that somehow peeks through the dreariness of mediocre lives. When one day you wake up and you feel like complete crap and you don't want to get out of bed and go to work but you do because you hate yourself and your so miserable but then you spot a child or just someone you know who is exceedingly cheerful because that's who they are and although you've been trying so hard to have the worst fucking day in your life this little ray of sunshine pierces your heart and melts all the fucking indifference in your system. All your problems turn into solutions and everything that looked so ugly suddenly looks beautiful and you want to stand up and clap and sing and dance and hug oh-so-tightly those you love. That's what this movie feels like. It's the fucking sweetest fucking movie I have ever seen in my entire life. God I love that kid. Everyone else in this movie, although they may be the most depressed people in the world, do too. She's beautiful and I'm not just saying that because of her brains and personality.

I'm not a fortune teller, but if I know anything, it's that the Academy loves giving out the Best Original Screenplay Oscar to this type of movie. Its the director's, Jonathon Dayton and Valerie Faris, and screenwriter's, Michael Arndt, first movie. It's very low budget and it's skillfully made although not expertly made. It's got the amateurish feel to it in that certain scenes may have been staged better or edited differently. It doesn't feel like an art house movie. It's a tiny independent movie, one of those you're glad to have seen because it feels like it could have easily been overlooked. There's a hell of a lot of potential here that makes me eagerly await their next film. One that will hopefully have as much heart, but also the little details that can only come from a good amount of helpful experience. Like I said, this movie isn't technically good enough to get huge awards attention only because so many other films look and feel superior. But it definitely will get a Original Screenplay nomination, and I wouldn't be surprised if it won.