This movie might as well have been made for me

I love Noah Baumbach's films, I have a serious crush on mumblecore icon Greta Gerwig (Hannah Takes the Stairs), and I've been waiting (patiently) for Ben Stiller to do something watchable. Based on the trailer, his character is ambivalent about finding a career and plugging away at it -- i.e., what's widely considered growing up -- and I can certainly relate. Also, he's Jewish. And there's LCD Soundsystem on the soundtrack. Baumbach, Gerwig, Stiller in non-sellout mode, Jewishness, romantic-comedy elements, and indie rock. Yep, this one's got my name all over it.

Not your typical romantic comedy

Despite its unfortunate title and low-budget look, the upcoming film Randomocity has a potentially heartbreaking premise: Boy meets girl, boy falls in love, girl and boy start dating -- and girl gets sexually assaulted by a stranger. Subsequently, boy tries to convince girl that their relationship is still worth pursuing.

Rape is a tremendously difficult thing for film to explore. If a filmmaker depicts it graphically, accusations of exploitation are sure to follow, and sometimes they're quite justified. If, on the other hand, a director portrays rape euphemistically, there's a real risk of trivializing it. And treating the subject with the right amount of perspective and sensitivity -- well, I don't envy the directors and screenwriters who try. Randomocity's trailer suggests an ambitious film that may run into some tonal problems:



Clearly, the movie wants to take rape, and its effects on both the survivor and her relationships, seriously. Yet it isn't grim and humorless; its sense of humor, whether or not it's to your taste, is evident. Will first-time writer-director Tyler Lee Allen (who also plays Ashley) make this combination of comic and tragic elements work? I don't have the highest hopes, but I admire his moxie.

SIFF Report #4: "Humpday" and "500 Days of Summer"

Local director Lynn Shelton's largely improvised comedy Humpday packs an impressive amount of emotional complexity into a premise that smacks of Judd Apatow and/or Kevin Smith. Ben (mumblecore icon Mark Duplass) and Andrew (Blair Witch alumnus Joshua Leonard) are old friends. Ben has a beautiful, sensitive wife, Anna (Alycia Delmore), and a responsible desk job, and he owns his own home in Seattle. Andrew, in contrast, is a traveler and an artist, albeit one who has trouble finishing the ambitious projects he starts. When Andrew breezes into town, surprising Ben and utterly bewildering Anna, the stage is set for Ben to journey away from his tidy domestic life and into Andrew's bohemian milieu.

So far, it's all predictable enough: Anna offers to make dinner for the guys, but Ben joins Andrew at a raucous, pot-fueled party and ends up staying very late, leaving his wife to sit at home beside his rapidly cooling supper. At the party, Ben and Andrew drunkenly hatch an outrageous scheme: They'll enter The Stranger's amateur porn competition with a video of two straight guys -- themselves -- having sex. It sounds good enough in the haze of alcohol and marijuana, but the next morning Anna (who knows nothing of the porn idea) is understandably pissed at Ben, and Ben and Andrew are experiencing a weirdness unlike anything their bromance has weathered before. Eventually, they talk about it. Each man essentially double-dog-dares the other to chicken out, but neither blinks. Ben assures Andrew that Anna is cool enough to okay their plan, and Andrew leaves the conversation thinking it's on. Now all Ben has to do is figure out how to broach the subject with Anna in a way that won't completely infuriate her. Oh, and did I mention Ben and Anna are trying to have a baby?

Shelton combined improvisation and her own strong vision to produce a movie that feels light in all the right places, and more substantive when it counts. She was intent on hitting certain "emotional beats" in each scene, so while the actors didn't generally know how a particular scene would play out, they knew what emotions their characters would go through. This process can be dicey in the hands of certain directors, but Shelton uses it to make her finest film yet, and easily the best new movie I saw at SIFF this year. Duplass and Leonard have tremendous chemistry, making their friendship much more interesting than the average cinematic "bromance." Humpday looks at exactly the kinds of issues I'd hoped I Love You, Man would explore, and it does so with a fraction of the budget and no big names. Though the film's central concept might put off some potential viewers, or conjure thoughts of broad, vulgar farce, Shelton's more interested in the romantic/platonic love triangle she's created than in the results of Ben and Andrew's wild idea.

Just as Duplass and Leonard never hit a false note in their portrayal of male friendship, Delmore and Duplass make one of the most compelling, credible screen couples I've seen in some time. You wouldn't expect it, but one of Humpday's greatest achievements is its depiction of a strong, vibrant marriage. Ben and Anna try to be completely honest with each other, but some things slip through the cracks; when Ben levels with her about his and Andrew's plan, she comes back with a confession of her own. Here Shelton's and Delmore's strengths truly come to light: What Anna has to say isn't as scandalous or dramatic as it could have been, but it still hurts Ben, and Delmore delivers it without malice, but also without regret. I see a lot of movies about relationships, and plenty about marriage, and I don't often witness such honest moments played so well. With unusual boldness, Humpday shows us realistic, well-meaning people who yearn for greater knowledge of each other and themselves -- and then recoil at what they find. The film has a distributor, Magnolia Pictures, and will open in Seattle this summer. I recommend it highly.

I was less enthused about 500 Days of Summer, the new romantic comedy starring Joseph Gordon-Leavitt and Zooey Deschanel (aka my movie-star girlfriend). Much of what's in the trailer unfolds in the film's first few minutes, leading us to wonder whether we're in for a dreadful slog. We aren't, but director Marc Webb's pastiche style misses and hits with about equal frequency, meaning that for every sharp bit there's a stale one in the offing. Gordon-Leavitt is a versatile actor, but he does better with gritty, darkly humorous material (like Mysterious Skin and The Lookout) than with lightweight romcom stuff. Though he brings his signature thoughtfulness to every scene, there's only so far he can go with his character, Tom, a would-be architect stuck in a joyless job at a greeting-card company. (Is the movie packed with easy jokes about greeting cards? Yes, indeed.) Similarly, Deschanel, as the titular love interest, has a fine time singing karaoke and playing the pretty, distant heartbreaker, but we don't get to know her so much as watch her in action.

Clark Gregg's performance as Tom's boss pretty much summarizes what's wrong with the film. Gregg is a capable actor, especially in roles that require dry wit, but Summer's script isn't dry or witty enough to showcase his talent. So he muddles through several underwhelming scenes and calls it a day. Webb shows a few flashes of directorial panache: There's a rousing song-and-dance number in which everyone, including Gordon-Leavitt, appears to be having a hell of a good time, and there are nice comic touches here and there, as when Summer seems not to have overheard something Tom said but proceeds to surprise him. And there's a wonderful black-and-white montage that illustrates Summer's charms in a way that makes fun of an age-old movie phenomenon: the lovely young lady who effortlessly charms the pants off every man she meets. Unfortunately, these fine moments aren't enough to make Summer more than the sum of its parts. On the plus side, the movie has a smashingly good soundtrack, and did I mention that Deschanel sings "Sugar Town"? I think I could watch that scene 100 times.

SIFF Report #1: "The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle" and "Paper Heart"

The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle is a movie about work and, secondarily, about corporate malfeasance. Its oddball corps of janitors, pictured above -- sweet, dimwitted Methyl (Tygh Runyan), puckish O.C. (Vince Vieluf), former data-entry slave Dory (Marshall Allman), goth goddess Ethyl (Tania Raymonde), and their boss, cross-dressing Gulf War vet Weird William (Richard Lefebvre) -- have adventures, affairs, and clashes with each other, and everyone learns a life lesson or two along the way. One thing all the characters learn is not to eat too many cookies.

Indie darling Natasha Lyonne plays Tracy, who works for a company called Corsica whose hot new product is a cookie that heats up in your mouth when it interacts with your saliva (for that home-baked feeling). The substance that brings about this miraculous chemical reaction still needs to be tested on humans, so Tracy begins leaving batches of the individually wrapped cookies out for the night crew, our trusty team of janitors, to nosh on while they work, have sex on conference tables, and so on. Unfortunately, the cookies turn out not only to be addictive but also to cause a reaction in certain people that's a lot more dramatic than their makers intended.

Seattle-based writer-director David Russo plays what could have been horror-movie material for laughs in this fanciful, scrappy, satiric work that recalls the nutty, sharp-toothed humor of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. I'd already seen one of Russo's short films at Bumbershoot; it was an arty stop-motion thing that somehow seemed to move in three dimensions -- across the length of the screen, but also towards and away from the viewer.

Dizzle shows that Russo can concoct a ragtag band of characters and a pretty compelling plot without losing the aesthetic he established in that short. The feature includes several cookie-induced hallucination sequences that could stand alone as exercises in inventive cinematic style, but they also fit nicely into the larger film's loopy vision. (The gorgeous opening credit sequence, which follows a message in a bottle through various seasons and seas, is a perfect example.) Shot in Seattle, Dizzle has a pleasingly anarchic spirit and a lot of energy, and considering that its budget must have been pretty low, it looks great. Much like Kaufman's Being John Malkovich, Russo's film immerses us in a world that looks a lot like our own but has surprising new rules, and by the end I was a little sad to leave it.

Paper Heart, the quirky romantic comedy I'd been anticipating pretty eagerly, is an endearing, low-key semi-mockumentary about a geeky comedian/musician, Charlyne Yi, who doesn't believe in true love. She clearly believes in the kind of love that sustains a friendship, since she has a best friend, and she seems to get along well with her family, so that sort of love makes sense to her, too. It's just the falling-in-love variety she has doubts about. After conferring with a number of comedian friends more famous than she is (Seth Rogen, Adventureland's Martin Starr, and Demetri Martin, among others), she and director Nicholas Jasenovec (played in the film, apparently, by Jake M. Johnson) set out on a cross-country road trip to interview regular folks about love.

What ensues is a series of chats with happy couples, possibly not-so-happy couples, Elvis impersonators, romance novelists, and kids on a playground. Charlyne often asks couples how they met, or how they knew their love was true, and their responses resemble the "interviews" sprinkled throughout When Harry Met Sally..., a canonical work in the romcom genre. Along the way, Charlyne becomes friendly with Michael Cera, star of Juno and Superbad, and Nicholas raises the inevitable question: Is Charlyne finally head over heels?

The film succeeds because of its overarching sweetness, and because of Yi, who has pretty much got to be every nerdy boy's dream girl. She's smart, opinionated, fun, odd, and complicated, and she's also pretty in a very real way. As Louis Menand once wrote in The New Yorker, there are three kinds of love stories: the kind where you, the viewer, fall in love with both lovers; the kind where only one of them wins your heart; and the kind where you don't really care all too much about either of them. Though Michael Cera fans will enjoy his usual stumbling, sensitive-boy mannerisms, Yi is the real find here, and her lightly sardonic toughness and rare moments of vulnerability play beautifully against the intentionally gimmicky premise.

What I especially like about the movie is that it presents a heterosexual man who doesn't have conventional masculine tendencies and a straight woman who's both strong and feminine, and there's no direct commentary about the shift in traditional gender roles. It's very 21st century: Geeks are chic now, and geek love has the transcendent power to mostly avoid fossilized ideas about what a man and a woman should be like in relationship. On a similar note, the romance novelist Charlyne interviews uses the term "H.E.A." to refer to her genre's stock ending. (It stands for "happily ever after.") Without driving the point home too obviously, Heart reveals how naive that old saw is without denying that the right partner can make your life more complete. And that's always nice to see.

Summer of love

The romantic comedy needs an overhaul. Not unlike the horror genre, which many would consider its polar opposite, the romcom has a bad reputation, and unfortunately it's often justified. There are some good horror movies, but many of them are awful, relying as they do on gimmickry, gore, and extremely tired formulas. Similarly, romantic comedies frequently err on the side of color-by-numbers plotting and character development that hold few surprises for the viewer. And since that's precisely the opposite of what love is actually like, it's easy to get cynical. The last cardboard Hollywood romcom I saw, He's Just Not That Into You, combined a lifeless, unintelligent script with meager direction and underwhelming performances from stars who should know better. Movies like this are why people love to hate romantic comedy, dismissing it as a frothy genre stuffed with untruths, the big-screen equivalent of the Harlequin novel.

The Stranger once declared Annie Hall the best romcom ever, and it's hard to disagree. Woody Allen's masterpiece captures the awkwardness and serendipity of dating (in the famous first-kiss sequence, for example), the hope that love inspires, and the way two people can grow apart slowly but surely -- and how hard it can be to let go of the other person, even when you know, in your heart and in your head, that you should. Annie Hall is funny and insightful, yet for all its intelligence it maintains a breezy tone. It's tremendously well structured; every corner of the film, every scene, every moment, is packed with signifiers and color and throwaway jokes and sharp observations. Yet despite its density, it's always a joy to watch, never a slog. It's the kind of movie I can't see too many times, the kind I have to watch until the end if I happen to find that it's on. It doesn't pretend that love is a simple undertaking, but it also captures love's simple pleasures, which are many if you're open to them. For anyone who's been in love and hopes to be again, Annie Hall is a touchstone and a virtual bible of relationship wisdom. With that film as the gold standard, many newer ones understandably -- but still regrettably -- fall short.

Enter 500 Days of Summer, one of the movies I'm most eagerly anticipating at SIFF this year. When I taught an Experimental College class at Oberlin on contemporary (post-Annie Hall) romantic comedies, I sought to include films that didn't conform too much to genre tropes. When Harry Met Sally..., that immortal statement about male-female friendship, was one movie I chose; High Fidelity, about how relationships shape and reveal us, was another. I titled the class "Chasing Love," which I hoped would contain both a whiff of Shakespeare's "What fools these mortals be!" perspective (the Bard, after all, is the source of many romcom tropes) and an intimation of the timeless emotional slapstick to be found in our pursuit of romance.

What Summer promises is a tale of unrequited love. Joseph Gordon-Leavitt falls for Zooey Deschanel (and who wouldn't?), but she doesn't fall quite so hard for him. Hard enough, it seems, to date him for the titular 500 days, but not so hard that she won't cut him loose after that. Gordon-Leavitt is an actor who's played both jaded rebels (Mysterious Skin) and downy innocents (The Lookout), and judging from the trailer he'll be working on the latter end of the spectrum this time around. Deschanel has played jaded to another actor's innocence (Elf and Almost Famous), but this role will require more nuance, and I'm sure she's up to the challenge.

What makes me optimistic about the movie is that it seems intent on doing what one of my favorite books, Blankets, does so beautifully: reminding us that love, real love, is heartbreaking whether or not it lasts, and regardless of whether it's requited. (The movie's lovely tagline offers a clue: "This is not a love story, it's a story about love.") Whether it's easier to be the adored or the adorer is an open question, but to open yourself so wide emotionally is always a trial. Of course, it's a trial that's good for us, but how many times will we submit to it before we turn away forever?

Charlyne Yi, the heroine of Paper Heart (which also stars Michael Cera, and is also at SIFF), thinks she's done with love. The film's mock-documentary approach was hard for me to grasp at first, based only on the trailer; I thought it was a fictionalization of a real relationship between Yi and Cera. In any case, Yi might well stand in for the cynical viewer who's ready to snipe at the first false note in a romcom. Justin Long giving a last-minute speech on Ginnifer Goodwin's doorstep, confessing his true love? Yeah, whatever. Paper Heart seems to be saying that even if we give up on chasing love, there's nothing stopping love from coming after us when we least expect it.

Finally, Adam (at SIFF as well) reveals the personality quirks that populate ordinary romcoms (Sally's habit of ordering everything on the side in When Harry Met Sally..., for example) to be molehills compared to the mountainous task of loving someone with bigger challenges. The film's title character has Asperger's, and the trailer suggests that his condition gets the kind of treatment -- sympathetic, but not sugarcoated -- that 500 Days and Paper Heart try to give romance in general. I've not yet seen any of these films, but I have reason to believe that they could help revitalize one of my favorite genres. Here's hoping.