I Lost It
Tonight was the last night of the Chicago International Film Festival. I've been to the movies for six of the last seven nights. I don't know why, but sitting on your ass can be oddly exhausting.
Dirt Nap
I can take joy in the fact that seeing this at a festival so long before it's release date, if it gets one, is that it means I get to be one of the first people to call it 'Garden State' for the middle aged set. It's not a fair thing to say, but I guarantee you, it's going to be said, over and over. And it's not D.B. Sweeney's fault. He just wanted to make his movie with his friends, and if your friend is John C. McGinley, and he'll do your movie, then you put him in your movie. In doing that, you've already built in an audience, but the flip side of that is that audience sees that Dr. Cox is in a 'finding yourself' movie, they're going to start comparing it to the other doctor's 'finding yourself' movie.
Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. You can almost see it as a rebuttal to 'Garden State', the cinematic equivalent of our parents telling us, "You think you got problems? You don't have problems. I've had all the same problems you've had for thirty years longer, and I didn't have a blog to cry about it on." Then they go and drink and turn up a Springsteen album to drown out whatever Coldplay album we're crying ourselves to sleep to. Which is a fair point to make, but do people want to see that? I can appreciate that people seeing movies about 20 somethings complaining about their lives can be obnoxious, but at least those movies usually end with a glimmer of hope at the end, but when you're characters are twenty years older, it all takes on a sense of inevitably, which makes the filmmaker work extra hard to get some entertainment out of the story. Which leads to the thinking behind 'Dirt Nap', where our main characters work out their problems by hitting the road and find themselves running into things like alligators and Ed Harris as an one armed carnie.
Other than McGinley's performance and Sweeney and Moira Kelly having a 'Cutting Edge' reunion, there isn't really anything on paper that makes 'Dirt Nap' sound original. And it's not really. A lot of the dialogue reaches to be both normal and entertaining, but fails at both, and some times things just happen so something is happening. You can tell that this is someone's first movie. But the performances are strong enough (Paul Hipp is as good at playing weak and indecisive as McGinley is at being angry and cocky, which says something) and the fact that Sweeney actually cares about his characters and the generation that they represent carries the film through it's rough patches. It's an honest film, which leaves you with a type of satisfaction that you don't usually get from movies. Plus, it has Ed Harris as a one armed carnie. I just wanted to make sure you picked up on that.
Dirt Nap
I can take joy in the fact that seeing this at a festival so long before it's release date, if it gets one, is that it means I get to be one of the first people to call it 'Garden State' for the middle aged set. It's not a fair thing to say, but I guarantee you, it's going to be said, over and over. And it's not D.B. Sweeney's fault. He just wanted to make his movie with his friends, and if your friend is John C. McGinley, and he'll do your movie, then you put him in your movie. In doing that, you've already built in an audience, but the flip side of that is that audience sees that Dr. Cox is in a 'finding yourself' movie, they're going to start comparing it to the other doctor's 'finding yourself' movie.
Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. You can almost see it as a rebuttal to 'Garden State', the cinematic equivalent of our parents telling us, "You think you got problems? You don't have problems. I've had all the same problems you've had for thirty years longer, and I didn't have a blog to cry about it on." Then they go and drink and turn up a Springsteen album to drown out whatever Coldplay album we're crying ourselves to sleep to. Which is a fair point to make, but do people want to see that? I can appreciate that people seeing movies about 20 somethings complaining about their lives can be obnoxious, but at least those movies usually end with a glimmer of hope at the end, but when you're characters are twenty years older, it all takes on a sense of inevitably, which makes the filmmaker work extra hard to get some entertainment out of the story. Which leads to the thinking behind 'Dirt Nap', where our main characters work out their problems by hitting the road and find themselves running into things like alligators and Ed Harris as an one armed carnie.
Other than McGinley's performance and Sweeney and Moira Kelly having a 'Cutting Edge' reunion, there isn't really anything on paper that makes 'Dirt Nap' sound original. And it's not really. A lot of the dialogue reaches to be both normal and entertaining, but fails at both, and some times things just happen so something is happening. You can tell that this is someone's first movie. But the performances are strong enough (Paul Hipp is as good at playing weak and indecisive as McGinley is at being angry and cocky, which says something) and the fact that Sweeney actually cares about his characters and the generation that they represent carries the film through it's rough patches. It's an honest film, which leaves you with a type of satisfaction that you don't usually get from movies. Plus, it has Ed Harris as a one armed carnie. I just wanted to make sure you picked up on that.
posted by Ben at 10:06 PM
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