People Don't Live Or Die, People Just Float

Jeff, Who Lives At Home (Duplass and Duplass, 2012)

Mark and Jay Duplass, brothers behind Cyrus, Baghead, and The Puffy Chair, continue to expand the definition of mumblecore with their latest film Jeff, Who Lives At Home. While it would be easy to describe this movie as a tale of a slacker who attempts to find his place in the world, what the Duplass brothers do with this film is so much more expansive because of the way they build upon the concept of a genre they helped popularize. Existing between the realms of drama and comedy their latest creation is more concerned with the humanity than it is with laughs, but it also willingly paints with the broadest of strokes in order to further reach for the universal. But by doing this I couldn't help but wonder if the shift of focus from the nuanced examination of relationships that have defined previous Duplass brothers films would be needlessly sacrificed for a more sprawling affair.

Smash Cuts: The Descendants

It has been a while, friends. I have been watching a ton of films in preparation for awards season, and the hectic life of grad school has once again caught up with me. When you spend the majority of your day writing for pleasure, sometimes you need a break. But breaks are for pleasure too, right? So while I continue to go through films that I won't have the time to give proper reviews of, I figured I would test out some capsule reviews and thoughts about what I am watching. Starting off with the latest from Alexander Payne:

The Descendants (Payne, 2011)

Hawaii isn't just some paradise where we go to forget all of our troubles. It's a place with actual (beautiful) people with real world problems. Sometimes when we are looking down the gun we don't stop to consider that the gun might actually just be looking back at us. We can't run away from our problems, despite how goofy George Clooney may make that particular action seem. We have to actually run to the problems, face them head on. Sometimes it's hard to know whether we should care about our comatose wife who needs the plug pulled, our bratty kids, or that multi-million dollar land deal. See, we're not so different after all.