reviews
Dir. John Safdie
Rating: 1.5 | 0 User Reviews | Send to Friend
By Lance Duroni
In the unlikely event that you were looking for one more reason to hate hipsters, here’s, like, twenty. Josh Safdie’s incomprehensible, inane and pretentious directorial debut is like an ironic mustache on the face of American cinema, just begging to get ripped off and washed down the drain.
The pseudo-storyline follows a despicable anti-hero: the pockmarked, greasy-haired Eleonore (Eleonore Hendricks) -- a kleptomaniac whose brazen thievery is so ridiculously unsmooth that her victims must either be on sedatives or missing their frontal lobes to allow her to walk off with their stuff. Precious few clues are offered as to Eleanor’s motivations and background. She is probably meant to be an enigma, a mysterious rebel looking for meaning at the bottom of suckers’ purses. In practice, however, Eleanor seems pointless at best and absolutely irritating all the time. Hendricks’ performance is uninspired and dull, as is the acting of the director Josh Safdie himself, who plays a character named (surprise, surprise), Josh.
Eleanore runs into Josh, an old friend, as she is searching for the car to match a key she has pilfered from a purse. Josh, obviously enamored with the hapless klepto, joins her little game. The two find the car and Josh asks for a ride home -- the whole way to Boston from NYC. At no point during this exchange does Josh exhibit any reservations about hopping into a stolen car and riding shotgun for over a hundred miles with someone who has never been behind the wheel in her entire life. Why? Because Josh is just that cool, with his bushy beard, stupid hat with pinned-up earflaps and single-gear bike. Eleanore returns from Boston after a less than meaningful sleepover with Josh and resumes stealing things. At this point I was just hoping against hope that someone would catch her in the act and throttle the grimy little waif until her thrift store get-up was smeared with her own blood. Needless to say, I was sorely disappointed, as you will be if you invest 70 minutes of your life in this lamer-than-hell hipster fantasy that was probably hashed out on cocktail napkins at a really cool bar in New York City that people down in Philly ain’t even heard of yet.
This DVD contains commentary and a couple of short films, but I honestly refused to subject myself to anything else even remotely associated with the makers of this film.
0 User Reviews
Add A Review
