Two siblings’ underlying resentment for one another is put to the test by a new love interest in My Blind Brother, a rom-com that often feels like it’s cutting with a blunt edge. In a clever bit of character building, the film opens with Robbie (Adam Scott) effortlessly running through the end of a marathon while his brother, an able-sighted Bill (Nick Kroll) sweats the last leg out trailing behind on Robbie’s guide rope. Here both the plot and joke remains purely on the surface; Bill’s life and accomplishments are performed in his blind brother’s shadow. Often, the unsatisfying aspect to Sophie Goodhart’s directorial debut is in its inability to mine its premise further.

The brothers become increasingly petty to one another over Robbie’s new girlfriend Francie (Jenny Slate), a woman in crisis after her ex-boyfriend gets blindsided by a bus. Slate and Kroll have worked together previously and share a dynamic chemistry on-screen as a romantic pair. Her presence elicits a warmer, more verbally unhinged side to his character—the only version of him in My Blind Brother with charisma. She also has moments of unexpected vulgarity spoken with her delightful, squeaky tone. This movie and everyone in it knows that Francie is dating the wrong brother; however, in the frustrating tradition of romantic comedies, the tension is left to linger everyone cowers away from confrontation.

Considering the level of comedic talent involved, one of the most surprising elements to My Blind Brother is its saccharine quality. Robbie is treated as an unrepentant dick throughout the movie, only to be given a tearful confession at the movie’s end. The character’s disability provides a few solid gags but is handled with a level of naturalism. Kroll, Scott and Slate are all charming presences in their roles—as is a totally magnetic and slightly underserved Zoe Kazan as Slate’s roommate—but knowing each of those actors’ penchants for hilarity, My Blind Brother feels lean on humor.

My Blind Brother is mostly amusing and its performances are strong, however, the tone remains unwavering until the film’s ending: lightly comedic, but unrelentingly self-serious. With so little actively happening in the plot the movie grows dull between stretches of more consistent humor. Sophie Goodhart’s My Blind Brother is thinly plotted and familiar, but this mostly pleasant comedy has a winning romance at its center which elevates the film beyond standard fare.

Feeling oddly jealous—and embarrassed about that jealousy—when her sister was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, Sophie Goodhart began developing a story about a tense sibling relationship largely built around resentment. That inspiration led to her 2003 short film My Blind Brother, which at the time seemed like a launching point for her smooth transition into feature filmmaking. “Since then I’ve had three or four films green-lit, ready to go, and then something happened,” Sophie laments from the Tribeca Film Festival. Her new feature-length directorial debut, also titled My Blind Brother, has been a long time coming, but the version Sophie finally got to make comes with a standout cast.

In her interview with Way Too Indie, My Blind Brother writer / director Sophie Goodhart discusses the long path to production for her debut, spending her option money too quickly, and the benefits of working with longtime friends like Nick Kroll, Adam Scott, and Jenny Slate.

I wanted to ask you about the film’s journey into development because this is a story that’s personal to you, but it’s also a movie that was based on a short film that you had directed.
Sophie Goodhart: Yeah, [the idea started with] my sister being diagnosed with M.S. [multiple sclerosis] when I was in my early twenties. I was sort of embarrassed and kind of surprised to find that I was feeling kind of jealous—and really embarrassed by my jealousy—about the fact that I knew that she was always going to be this incredible hero that battled against great misfortune. So that’s where the short came from.

I got incredibly lucky and worked with three great actors—Tony Hale, John Mattey and Marsha Dietlein—in the original. The short kind of got me agents, and got me certain contacts. Immediately I got these films optioned, and I was like, “Look at me, I’m about to really do it!” I had parties where I bought lots of people drinks where I celebrated my success. Unfortunately, I was, like, way, way, way too soon. I realized that was an expensive mistake to make.

Since then I’ve had three or four films greenlit, ready to go, and then something happened. 2008 happened, everyone needed their money and you couldn’t make films. Or one of the actors leaves and I can’t find a replacement or you couldn’t spend a certain budget on the film. I was writing something completely separate from [My Blind Brother], and was just focused on the Jenny Slate character—about a woman who was going out with this guy who gets killed by a bus just after she’s dumped him. She feels terrible, she kind of hates herself and finds herself on a weird path where she would have been a tragic victim and instead she was just a cruel ex-girlfriend. I realized that her story fit really, really well with this other story so I put them together in this feature. I had to wait around for the perfect cast, the perfect three people, who would mean that I could get over a million to shoot the movie.

There’s a way to interpret the logline of this movie as a broad, Mr. Magoo-style comedy, but your movie stays very tethered to reality. Was there an impulse to go broader or do you prefer to keep your writing grounded?
SG: I always write about things I’m feeling, or worrying about, or have experienced in one way or another. You know, I could research the whole world, or a new environment or a new job, but to have that kind of basic character issue that I’m not connected to I think would make it difficult. I think that the fact that it’s based on some of these feelings that I’ve had, meant that it could [depict] a mean-spirited aspect of humanity. Because it wasn’t just an outsider looking in and mocking it. It was something familiar that I felt and believed.

You had mentioned your three lead actors came aboard as a kind of package. How did you get Jenny Slate, Adam Scott, and Nick Kroll all become involved?
SG: It’s one of those things where you never know which people you meet in your life are going to be the ones to make things happen. It turned out that Sharon Jackson at William Morris Endeavor really connected to the movie, and she had confidence in it. She had enough power to make connections to these people. But I didn’t know that when I initiated talking to her. I wasn’t like, “This is the woman that’s gonna package it.”

The three people who kind of made it happen were my initial producer, Tori, who found the short film. That was reassuring and good news for people doing shorts is that [making them] actually can make a huge difference. Somebody can like it, and they can mention you to try and help you get a feature. Then, Sharon; it’s not often in big agent’s interests to put their time into small films—and this kind of a low budget indie film—but she took a fancy to it and sent it to these bigger actors. Finally, Tyler Davidson saw [our cast], read the script and was like, “Fine, I’m happy to give you a bit more money” than he originally would have been inclined to. It just takes so many happy accidents to get off the ground. And it took such a long time. I felt like I was ready for those happy accidents.

Sometimes it can feel fated in a way.
SG: Yeah, I think after 13 years sitting in my kitchen writing I was like, “oh my god.” It was only hardcore delusion and denial that has meant that I made this because any other human would have just thought, “fuck this, it’s not working.”

What was it like for Jenny Slate and Nick Kroll—who have worked together several times before—and to work with them on developing a romantic dynamic, especially one that is played pretty straight throughout?
SG: With Jenny and Nick and Adam, you just get this unbelievable mix of people who are so intelligent and so good at acting. So nimble about playing jokes and playing them so straight or so small, that they can do pretty much anything. When they read this script, they knew that it was this romantic element, and I didn’t want to play it jokingly. I think they totally delivered. I think the fact that they’re friends meant that I didn’t have to do as much work as I might’ve. And there’s such a beautiful ease between them that I could just say, “And kiss now,” and they just were comfortable, grown-up and intelligent. They were good at acting so it was easy.

What other movies and directors did you look to for influence when putting this movie together?
SG: Two directors that I love are James L. Brooks and Elaine May. I also looked to David O. Russell and Silver Linings Playbook. Then, Knife in the Water, even though tonally it’s so weird—I love the kind of graphic quality of [Polanski’s] work. Elaine May! Her original The Heartbreak Kid is just so fucking good. So those are my inspirations, obviously.

In his latest movie, Knight of Cups, Terrence Malick asks us to join him, for the third time in a row, on a journey through the meandering thoughts of people lost in life, confessing their innermost moral quandaries to the cosmos as they stumble and crawl across god’s green earth and bask in heavenly sunlight. This time, the setting is Los Angeles, photographed in all its concrete, Art-Deco grandeur by trusted Malick collaborator (and Oscar darling) Emmanuel Lubezki. We follow and listen in on the thoughts of fading movie star Rick (Christian Bale) and, occasionally, his famous friends, as Malick lays out another unbearably thin narrative that’s as deviously frustrating as a 500-piece puzzle with 450 pieces missing. The eminently respected auteur clearly has a firm grip on the art of filmmaking—at his best, he’s one of the greats—but with his work becoming increasingly nebulous and less inviting to audiences, it’s come to the point where patience for his vagaries grows dangerously thin.

In an almost wordless onscreen performance (we hear his voice, but mostly in the form of narration), Bale drifts down the streets of L.A., occasionally jumping in thought to memories from Las Vegas, Century City and Santa Monica. Rick is in a perpetual state of punch-drunk spiritual crisis, surrounded by gorgeous women who glom onto his status, wealth and handsome looks until his emotional ineptness becomes too much to bear, at which point they make way for the next batch of girls to grab at his pants.

Rick’s fleeting romantic partners are played by a dizzying crowd of famous faces: Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Imogen Poots, Teresa Palmer, Freida Pinto, Isabel Lucas and more can now add a Malick film to their resume. The roles are thin—Blanchett plays his ex-wife, Portman plays a fling—but isn’t every role thin in a Malick movie these days? Antonio Banderas makes an appearance a Hollywood playboy who throws a swanky house party littered with real-life celebrities playing themselves (“Look! It’s Joe Manganiello! Nick Kroll! Danny Strong! Wait…Danny Strong? Huh?”). Banderas takes over narration duties for a bit, spouting twisted, misogynist philosophy. “Women are like flavors,” he says in his sumptuous Spanish accent. “Sometimes you want raspberry, but then you get tired of it and you want strawberry.”

Malick does a good job of laying out the monstrous, indulgent allure of showbiz that pulled Rick in and broke him down into the wandering, pulp of a man he is. He’s become a phony, just like all the other soul-sapped leeches overpopulating the trashy town that bred them (to be clear, Angelenos, I mean Tinseltown, or the idea of it, not L.A.). Similarly swallowed by the city is Rick’s brother (Wes Bently), a non-famous drifter whose short temper is inherited from his and Rick’s late father. The particulars of the family drama (and, in fact, most of the particulars of Ricks life) are left for us to imagine on our own, but the quality of Bale and Bentley’s performances helps to form some semblance of an emotional arc.

Some (this writer included) would consider it a duty of a true movie lover to meet the filmmaker halfway when a film’s concepts or ideas are challenging or obscure. But with Malick’s recent work, it feels like he’s not meeting us halfway. We can only give so much of ourselves over to him before his movies start to feel like tedious chores. What’s so tragic about this is that, on a cinematic level, he’s phenomenal: he and Lubezki’s imagery is sweeping, evocative and immaculately conceived. Some moments—like a ground-level shot of Bale taking a knee on the concrete as an earthquake shakes the buildings and people around him—are so exquisite you could cry. But without a deeper sense of cohesion, these cinematic feats start to feel hollow as they pile on top of each other for two hours straight. As with Malick’s last movie, To The Wonder, Knight of Cups topples over, leaving us to sift through a mess of pretty pictures in a desperate search of some morsel of meaning. Like his characters, maybe it’s time for us to wake the hell up.

For a film loaded with many laughs, it’s strange that Joshy begins on quite the morbid note. Joshy (Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch) arrives home one day to find his fiancé (Alison Brie) lifeless on the floor, dead from an apparent suicide. But the film doesn’t dwell on her death for very long, instead jumping ahead four months when Joshy’s small crew of friends (Nick Kroll, Adam Pally, Alex Ross Perry, and Brett Gelman) elect to celebrate his bachelor party, just as they had intended before the incident occurred. When the boys arrive at their secluded cabin for the party, they discover Joshy saying goodbye to a girl he picked up from the local bar—a rather uncharacteristic move and one that isn’t ever addressed again. Other than this small inexplicable moment, the rest of the film plays out as a hysterical weekend bender of heavy drinking, drug consumption, and partying with hookers. In theory it’s a classic recipe for a “what could possibly go wrong?” scenario, but, oddly enough, the answer in Joshy is nothing.

Credit the amazing cast for making Joshy work as well as it does. Without them, it’s just another hangout movie with a paper-thin plot and very little character development. Granted, simply putting these hilarious actors together in a room would make for entertainment. Each character’s personality puzzle-pieces into the group as a whole. Kroll is the partier. Pally is the sensitive married guy. Perry is the geek. Gelman is the wildcard. And then there’s Middleditch, who’s stuck playing the uninteresting title character—ironically, the least developed of the bunch. There’s also a random appearance by Joe Swanberg (and his real family), who seem only to show up to get a few laughs.

Luckily, there’s enough humor found in sophomore director Jeff Baena’s (Life After Beth) film that it’s easy to forgive some of the off moments. The highlight of Joshy is watching Perry finally getting his wish to play a complicated board game with the group. That’s right, this ensemble even finds a way to make the struggle to play a board game amusing to watch.

Rating:
7/10

Ed Helms has struck comedy gold. He’s done it on the small screen (The Office) and the big (Hangover), and while his name recognition is fairly high, he has yet to cement any sort of leading man status. This has left him to pick up slack in some pretty dreary films (we’re looking mostly at you, We’re The Millers). But now he’s getting a crack at leading his own ensemble in Vacation, a re-boot of the National Lampoon classic.

From the looks of the first trailer, Vacation promises a pretty straight forward plot to make room for the hijinks that are sure to come: Rusty Griswold (Helms) is all grown up and looking to recreate some of the good ol’ family bonding time that his father, Clark (once again reprised by Chevy Chase) managed to create on their long-past road trip to the infamous Walley World.

Vacation is the directorial debut of John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein (the writing duo behind Horrible Bosses and The Incredible Burt Wonderstone), which is reason enough to instill some hesitation. But hopefully the stacked supporting cast behind Helms and Chase will make up for it: Christina Applegate, Leslie Mann, Chris Hemsworth, Charlie Day, Nick Kroll, Keegan-Michael Key and many others are promised to pop up.

So, while we’ve never heard anyone out in the streets calling for more Griswold films, it’s a property with some potentially pre-established fans. And if the first red band trailer is any indication, it doesn’t look to change up the formula too much. We do like Helms, so we’d love to see this surprise us. Vacation hits the road on July 31st.

Vacation Red Band Trailer

Director Ross Katz (Taking Chance) has a bit of fun without leaving the shallow end of the pool in his sophomore full-length feature, Adult Beginners. It’s a generally tame but warmly entertaining familial dramedy steered by three very talented grown-ups: Nick Kroll, Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale. The former two play an estranged brother and sister reconnecting at a pivotal time in their lives; the latter two play a relatively happy married couple whose world is consumed by their young, wily son. The drama that ensues is packed on pretty light. Low-stakes affairs don’t typically go over well at the movies, but this thing, as it turns out, has just enough charm and humor to make it pleasurable, especially on a lazy Sunday afternoon, cuddled up in your favorite onesie, a heaping bowl of cereal at the ready.

A flash of comedic buffoonery opens the movie, the high energy of which is never revisited again. We meet entrepreneur Jake (Kroll) celebrating the launch of his new startup with his tech-bro business partners in his expensive Manhattan apartment, making rich douchebag jokes, making out with his hot girlfriend, and snorting blow. Before the opening credits end, Jake’s business abruptly crashes due to a logistics oversight he made, losing he and all his buddies a ton of cash. Dejected, dumped by said hot girlfriend, and nauseous from riding the train backwards, Jake returns to his hometown of New Rochelle where his sister, Justine (Byrne), is raising a family in their childhood home. Her husband, Danny (Cannavale), persuades her to hire Jake (now broke as a joke) as their son Teddy’s babysitter.

Justine’s faith in Jake is rightfully uneasy. He’s a self-absorbed, pig-headed bellyacher who easily rivals the bouncing 3-year-old as the most high-maintenance person in the house. She needs the help, though: On top of being constantly pressured at work, she’s got another baby in the oven. Danny, while unquestionably in love with Justine, is sexually stonewalled due to her high-demand schedule and brother issues. Naturally, as per indie comedy tradition, he has a moment (or two, or three) of weakness, seeking affection outside the relationship. Just as naturally, Jake starts to get pretty good at being an uncle. He goes from rolling Teddy around in a suitcase (he can’t figure out how to configure the stroller) to eventually preparing the tyke’s favorite snacks and lulling him to sleep with old story-time cassettes.

Throughout, Adult Beginners is schematic and derivative, but the three mains are game enough to keep things interesting surprisingly soulful. In almost everything she’s in, Byrne is the pick of the litter. As a gift to Katz and writers Liz Flahive and Jeff Cox, she breathes life into scenes that on paper are kind of flaccid and uninspired. Cannavale isn’t the most versatile actor, but the fact that he and Byrne have been dating in real life for years obviously makes for an easy dynamic between them. Kroll’s humor is admittedly not up my alley. Sometimes he hits me in the gut and I burp up a laugh, but he throws a lot of big whiffs too, especially when he tries to be a funny asshole (all I see is asshole). He’s actually most useful when he’s being sincere, a pleasant surprise considering his background.

It’s hard to shake the similarities between Katz’s movie and Craig Johnson’s The Skeleton Twins, if you’ve seen it. That indie sibling dramedy, which has Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader filling Byrne and Kroll’s shoes in a broadly similar narrative, has a much larger spectrum of emotion: the laughs are louder, the drama is more heightened and deepened, and the actors showcase more of their talent. Adult Beginners feels too stabilized and mild-mannered to warrant more than a sick-day rental.

It’s about time. Nick Kroll has been a consistently funny presence everywhere he’s popped up over the last few years (Kroll Show, The League, and as The Douche on Parks and Rec), so it’s safe to say we’re pretty excited to watch him lead a film.

Adult Beginners sees Kroll play Jake, a guy who has recently destroyed his career, lost all of his money, and made some enemies. To get away from it all he sneaks away to his sister’s (the woefully underrated Rose Byrne) to hide out and cool down, only to become the nanny of her baby and clash with her husband (Bobby Cannavale).

The dramedy, co-written by Kroll and directed by Ross Katz, looks to set Kroll a little out of his abrasive comfort zone (though not too far) and place some real emotional heft on his shoulders. So, while comedy and drama can be a tough nut for most films to crack, the supporting cast alone is enough to ease some worry; Byrne (Neighbors, This Is Where I Leave You) and Cannavale (the still-wonderful The Station Agent) both tend to bring searing depth to even the most minor roles (see: The Place Beyond The Pines and Blue Jasmine respectively).

Adult Beginners came out of TIFF 2014 on a high note, not to mention the trailer is hilarious. Check it out below.

Adult Beginners trailer