Don't Believe the Hype

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Blistering performances.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

It started off decent. Then it was a whole lot of nothing. It was filmed nicely but the storyline fell flat. It seemed like they were trying way to hard to be "woke".

Okay, so this is an indie film made for Sundance, still, it has it all: good script, good directing, superb acting (especially DeWitt)!Given the simple situation (attractive, bohemian art-lover girl arrives to a family), everyone can easily guess the dynamics. However, her presence points to a general pattern that is present everywhere, in everybody's life... Which is wonderfully depicted in one of the scenes - beware, spoiler is coming!**** SPOILER **** After the party, the 'happy' family walks out the door. Happy??? Complete mess!!! The husband is disappointed... because the young art-lover girl left with his young employee. The wife shared a kiss... with her patient. The daughter is in love with the young employee of her father, who left with the art-lover girl... so she had to make do with her classmate for a kiss :) **** END OF SPOILER ****In its genre, this movie is 10/10! Check it out!

There were so many random, asinine and completely nonsensical plot turns, characters and scenes that I don't know where to begin. I'm not even sure what the story was, if there was a denouement, a resolution or an ending. I'll try to summarize the movie really briefly.So a random girl named Martine comes to LA and the movie opens with some dude she evidently met on the plane kissing her passionately and starting to unzip his pants right in the airport parking deck in the middle of day. From that, I assumed this would be a comedy. Anyways, she ends up at Jim from the Office's house I guess? At first, I thought this was some sort of home for certain people, or an orphanage of some sort. There's a bunch of random aged people living there and the script has you thinking that they aren't related but some little girl gets poems accepted somewhere while Jim from the Office works on a Hollywood project that they never really talk about. So I'm assuming it's some sort of commune for artsy types. Turns out this girl is making a black and white film of ants. Not about ants, just of ants. At one point, voice actors come in to voice the ants. Then they leave and Martine gets sassy. After that, there's never voices with the ants, just synthesizers and random noises.There's a bunch of random, weird scenes. Jim from the Office is capturing sound of various things and he tells Martine to close her eyes and guess sounds. He points the microphone towards traffic, his hand rubbing on a wall, and Martine's breath and nothing really comes from the scene. Also Martine has a crush on Jim from the Office's assistant and says she doesn't want to kiss him, then does, then straddles him, then gets out of the car while the little poem girl is jealous but also is maybe being sexually assaulted by her Italian tutor. Why she's getting tutored Italian, we don't know other than she says she's taking the Italian SAT. Why she's taking the Italian SAT 2, no one knows. These scenes with the Italian tutor rapist aren't connected to any other part of the movie and none of the characters, barring Martine at the very end where she speaks in Spanish to him then tells him to leave, interact with him.Also Martine and Jim from the Office have sex and one point, but Jim is evidently married to a redhead and has the poem girl, but she's not his biological dad. The real biological dad is in the movie for all of one scene where he just disses everyone and is supposed to come across as this cool guy I guess? But evidently, Jim from the Office's wife, thinks he's a loser but also the cool guy boyfriend. She also talks smack about him to his own daughter, and although it's her daughter too, it's still kind of messed up.Also Jim from the Office totally goes after Martine and starts awkwardly dancing with her at a Weed Party with his kids and wife there and he's not exactly hiding it. The poem girl is in 2 scenes with some glasses kid who we never really know who he is. But he asks for the Science section of a newspaper, then goes with poem girl into a private area and kind of reaches up her dress just a little bit, and then they kiss while she's drinking wine.Anyways, the wife is mad but also almost has an affair with one of her patients. She's a psychiatrist, and her patient is a Hollywood screenwriter. But it doesn't really matter what he wrote, I guess. They are also in a separate gazebo at the same party and he kisses her neck a bit, then she puts her arms up like she's on the cross, but then they just stop and she walks off.They also have a young son, but he doesn't do anything except ask to swim with Martine late one night when she's in Jim from the Office's pool. She takes him back to his room and notices his glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling. She says those are cool, but she had birds and bees. Which just makes the scene, with this 6 year old kid, totally creepy.Anyways, it ends with the wife telling Jim to send Martine home. But it turns out Martine was already going home anyways so nothing really happens and Jim makes grilled cheese. The end.

Given the screenplay was co-written by Lena Dunham, creator and breakout star of HBO's "Girls", I was hoping this 2012 indie relationship drama would resonate strongly like Lisa Cholodenko's acclaimed Los Angeles-set films ("Laurel Canyon", "The Kids Are All Right"), especially with such a smart cast of actors. However, something feels amiss in director Ry Russo-Young's coolish approach to a familiar story of adulterous deception and family dysfunction. The pacing feels glacial, and the characters are just not that involving emotionally. Perhaps that was the intention in showing the shallow nature of the lifestyle being portrayed, but it rubs off on the film's inertia leaving it feeling quite flat. The setting is LA's funky-chic Silver Lake neighborhood where sound engineer Peter lives with his psychotherapist wife Julie along with their young son and her teenaged daughter from a previous marriage, Kolt. They epitomize the laid-back, everything's-cool attitudes one associates with affluent Southern Californians.Enter Martine, a New York acquaintance of Julie's college friend who happens to be an attractive 23-year-old experimental filmmaker. She has agreed to work as Peter's assistant in exchange for him helping out on her latest project, an arty video installation revolving around close- ups of ants. How Martine emotionally invades the family is the crux of the story, and to the credit of Russo-Young and Dunham, she never comes across as an unrepentant interloper like more commercially driven exploitative films have done in the past. It's just that the plot pretty much goes the way you would expect it would go from the outset, although the characters carry decidedly ambiguous natures that make some of the story turns feel more complex than they really need to be. For instance, the inevitable tryst between Martine and Peter lacks believable passion because it feels almost matter-of-fact. In hindsight, I feel like it should have been the driving force in pushing each character toward self-examination.The cast is not really at fault here as the acting, for the most part, is sensitive and assured. Olivia Thirlby (the best friend in "Juno") provides the requisite gamine quality needed to make Martine credible as an object of obsession even if her character remains a cipher throughout. The always becalming Rosemarie DeWitt ("Rachel Getting Married") delivers a thoughtful balancing act between earth mother and jealous wife as Julie. John Krasinski has a bit harder time escaping his amiable good-guy image from "The Office" and "Away We Go", but he does provide some surprisingly heated moments as Peter that make you wonder if he could do a greater variety of roles on screen. As the constantly yearning Kolt, India Ennenga appears to be channeling early Claire Danes, but she makes the character's unrequited love palpable. In smaller parts, Justin Kirk as a horned-up Hollywood screenwriter and Julie's attentive patient and Dylan McDermott as her self-possessed ex- husband bring much needed alpha energy to the proceedings. A late meltdown scene with Kolt's smarmy Italian tutor (Emanuele Secci) feels very out of place. Lethargic viewing.