Art House Round Up

Down Terrace is an art house crime drama. A father and son team get released and now they have to deal with reality and try to keep their criminal enterprise going. There are a lot of complications like a suspicious pregnancy and a snitch. This film though just doesn't have a lot of drive. Like many of its characters it seems content to imbibe control substances and stare into the middle distance. I will say I like the character of the father who is one half hippy and one half bad ass.



The first rule of writing is write what you know. Given that, it's no suprise that "struggling writer" is a large genre in both books in film. In "Paper Man" that author is Jeff Daniels. He has problems, boy he has problems. He can't start his new book, his marriage is falling apart, and he's not too mentally sound. He still has an imaginary friend in the shape of Ryan Reynolds who is Captain Excellent. Being left alone in a cottage to write a book Daniels becomes attracted to a young teen played by Emma Stone. As you can guess this is a recipe for disaster, but it is played for the most part rather sweetly. Oddly enough, the Captain Excellent part of the film is the least important and is sort of jarring. It could have done without it.



If you can watch the first three minutes of "Enter the Void" without a blinding headache or seizures, good on you. You might like this film which is mostly an excuse for clever, psychedelic images. A druggie is fatally shot and then floats around tokyo, specially around his girlfriend.