Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

John Krasinski's directoral debut is much like John Krasinski's acting- muted. Krasinki gained fame for his role on The Office where he basically plays the straight man to the wackiness of many of the other characters in the show. Signature to this is where some other character says something crazy and Krasinkski looks at the camera as though to tell the viewing audience that he's aware how crazy it all is.

While this technique works for Krasinski in the Office and in his film Away We Go, Brief Interviews suffers from it. While the movie is not devoid of funny moments, all the characters are straight men, so to speak, and without the existence of wacky characters to counterbalance them, the characters fail to inspire the humor for which the movie clearly strives and ends up dull and non-conclusive.

My Rating:

2 1/2 Arbitrary Shapes

Being There

Being There is a comedy based on a popular (and personal favorite) novel of the same name written by Jerzy Kosinski.

The movie, though it took a few cosmetic changes and slight plot tweaks, was largely loyal to the book, going so far as to lift several lines verbatim. That being said, the movie was less than I expected. My expectations were likely too high because of how much I like the book, but despite Peter Sellers's wonderfully convincing performance, I felt some important themes of the book just didn’t translate onto the screen, while entire new themes were introduced that were nowhere in the book. Additionally, multiple points in the book where the omniscient third person perspective (read: narrator) was describing the protagonist's thoughts (or lack thereof) were transposed into film as long periods of character silence and TV background.

My Rating:


4 Arbitrary Shapes