Hello I Must be Going (2012): I really want to see that movie where 500 Days of Summer rides a bike— I don’t know why I’m the only person that sounds like a good idea to, but I really want to see that. But anyways, I wasn’t in the mood, so I saw this instead— Bike Excitement 2012: the Reckoning or whatever it’s called had to wait.
Melanie Lynskey (from Heavenly Creatures and apparently she was on 2 and a Half Men; pretty terrific job holding this movie together) is a woman in her mid-30’s who moves home with her parents, because she’s divorced, falling apart. And then she ends up having sex with a 19 year old, and it goes from there. Going into the movie I was thinking, “Boy, you couldn’t make a movie where their genders were flipped— a movie about a guy in his 30’s having sex with a 19 year old girl, uh uh, no way, monster time, somebody would call the cops, it would be— is that what my hair looks like?” (I walked by my own reflection near the end) But that was seriously, no exaggeration, exactly what one of the trailers advertised. The guy from How I Met Your Mother made that exact movie with one of the Olsen ladies. So… there you go…? Robbing the cradle is the big theme for independent films this year, I guess…
Anyways: this had some things I liked about it— between Bridesmaids and Celeste & Jesse, I find that I’m a much more receptive audience to movies about women falling apart after a divorce then pulling their shit together, than I’d have guessed a couple years ago. That’s turned out to be a pretty sturdy premise for a movie for me. I think the problem was the families in it are all super-rich lawyers or something, so they’re like “Oh no, we’re worried about the economy— if we don’t make more money, we’ll go from being super-rich to merely upper middle class.” Like, those parts felt sort of tone-deaf. I liked it when it was about a lady in her 30’s banging around with the 19 year old, trying to go from sad to un-sad, and when it was about the small moments of that, finding the humor in that, it held my attention— those scenes had a warmth to them. But they really felt anxious about how un-dramatic the material was and their attempts to gin up drama felt pretty forced…
I liked it, but … like, all the mean things people said about Lena Dunham— she is Nino Brown compared to the people who made this one. Most of my audience was a super-old Landmark theater crowd— it was fun listening to them breathe. A lot of interesting noises going on at the Landmark, breathing-wise.
