Go through the massive list of stars that appear in Joe Swanberg’s Digging for Fire and it might be easy to claim that one of the most prolific names in modern indie has “gone mainstream.” But actually watch Digging for Fire (or Happy Christmas or Drinking Buddies), and it’s clear that the mainstream has actually come knocking on Swanberg’s door. This is the same low-key, character-based storytelling Swanberg has been honing for years, only now with a plethora of talent and established names thrown into the mix. And, if anything, Digging for Fire shows Swanberg as a filmmaker in total control, using his ensemble and skills at creating a casual, inviting tone to make a subtle and fascinating exploration of commitment, aging and marriage.

Taking place in Los Angeles, the film opens with married couple Lee (Rosemarie Dewitt) and Tim (Jake Johnson, who co-wrote with Swanberg) taking their son Jude (Swanberg’s own son, stealing every scene he’s in) to house-sit for one of Lee’s wealthy clients. While Lee goes off working as a yoga instructor, Tim—a public school teacher—stays at home during the summer break. Soon after arriving, Tim starts poking around the house and discovers a bone and an old gun buried in a yard behind the house. Tim wants to keep digging, but Lee doesn’t want him messing up her client’s property, and a host of other small disagreements between the two (including Tim’s refusal to put Jude in a private school) leads to Lee taking Jude to spend the weekend with her parents (Sam Elliott and Judith Light).

Tim takes the opportunity to invite some of his old buddies over (Sam Rockwell, Chris Messina, Mike Birbiglia and Kent Osborne, to name a few), and before long he’s convincing all of them to help dig up whatever else might be hiding underneath the property. At this point the film forks off into two narrative strands, one profiling Tim’s weekend with his friends, and the other following Lee trying to have a girl’s night out with her sister (Melanie Lynskey). Both Lee and Tim wind up finding themselves conflicted when they each encounter an opportunity to cheat; Lee meets a British restaurant owner (Orlando Bloom), and Tim makes nice with the young, carefree Max (Brie Larson).

Anyone familiar with Swanberg’s previous work won’t be surprised to learn the film’s central mystery is a nonstarter. It’s more of an excuse for getting characters together to casually chat about the themes Swanberg and Johnson really want to explore. “When did you feel like you got back to yourself?” Lee asks her mom at one point, wondering if marriage and motherhood have removed her ability to live her own life, and Tim admits to Max that he feels like he’s not maturing, he’s just getting older. Their brief exchanges with friends, family and strangers around them reveal that both Lee and Max have hesitations about staying in for the long haul of their marriage, with the hypothetical idea of something “better” existing out there tempting them into seeking individuality over partnership.

What makes Digging for Fire such an enjoyable yet fleeting experience is how Swanberg lets these ideas flow organically into the film through his terrific cast and tight editing. Narrative doesn’t mean much here, as it’s more about how Lee and Tim’s actions reflect their concerns. Dewitt and Johnson anchor the film nicely, and there isn’t a single weak spot in a cast that’s as sprawling as LA itself. Shooting on 35mm with cinematographer Ben Richardson (who also shot Drinking Buddies and, most famously, Beasts of the Southern Wild), the film’s keen eye for composition helps give it a cinematic feel that comes across as a surprise given its dialogue-heavy approach. Swanberg has made films for over a decade now, and at a pretty quick pace too (remember when he directed six films in 2011?), but in some ways Digging for Fire feels like the start of a newer, more refined era for him. It’s exciting to watch Swanberg in complete domination of his craft, but it’ll be more exciting to see what he does next.

They’re heeerrree… and some of us may need to go check our underpants. Check out the new trailer for Sam Raimi’s Poltergeist reboot with Sam Rockwell.

Directed by Gil Kenan, who’s known for Monster House and City of Ember, this doesn’t look like any cheesy two-bit horror remake. Kenan and Raimi appear to give the original classic its due while putting a modern twist (with modern horrors) on this tale of terror. Though we’re happy to see they kept the iconic clown doll scene, even if it is something we’re still working through in therapy since the first film.

Rockwell and Rosemarie DeWitt, along with Mad Men’s Jared Harris, make up the most recognizable of the cast. Though, casting unknowns sometimes makes for a more horrifying thriller when nary a face is recognizable enough to shake our suspension of disbelief. They have managed to cast a young girl, Kennedi Clements, that gives Heather O’Rourke a run for her money in the creepiness category. Quite the feat.

The film is slated for a July release.

For a director like Jason Reitman, who in the past has been so innately in touch with how human connection works (the nuanced Up In the Air and insightful Thank You For Smoking demonstrate his expertise), to make a movie so out of touch, out of date, and overbearing is, frankly, baffling. I don’t understand how his latest effort, Men, Women & Children, came from the same guy that made Juno, a film whose characters felt so grounded and earnest.

Men, Women & Children is an ensemble film about how the internet has reduced all of us to half-awake iPeople and mutated the way we communicate. With an array of cardboard characters and relationships it sends a message: The internet is totally messing with our brains, man! Sadly, everything about the film is sorely behind the times, telling us little about ourselves we don’t already know. If this were the year 2000, Reitman would have had a thought-provoking, prophetic cautionary tale on his hands; In the year 2014, he comes off as naive as his clueless characters do.

The film opens pleasantly enough, with voiceover narration by Emma Thompson accompanying an image of the Voyager I spacecraft, the furthest man-made object from earth, hurtling toward the edge of the solar system. Then the film zooms in on the “pale blue dot” we call home, introducing us to its multiple characters. You know how in almost all zombie movies, it’s an unspoken rule that the characters live in a world where zombie movies don’t exist? Men, Women & Children is similar in that its characters seem to be just discovering the wonders of the internet, despite it being 20-effing-14.

Adam Sandler plays Don, whose marriage to Helen (Roemarie DeWitt) has grown stale, as many do. With the house empty, he grabs his tissues and hunkers down in front of his computer to masturbate. Ahhh…masturbation; the ultimate bandaid for marital-malaise. Or is it? Frustrated by his malware-infected PC, he walks over to his son Chris’ (Travis Tope) room to use his. There, he discovers an online escort agency and sets up a meeting with one of the girls. Helen is no victim in the situation, though–she’s been experimenting with “affair” website Ashley Madison behind his back.

When you strip away the fact that Don and Helen found their affairs online, all that’s left is a story we’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of times before: An unhappy couple cheats on each other. Considering the film’s premise, shouldn’t we be presented some new kind of perspective on this scenario? The infidelity is the focus here, and unique repercussions of the digital element are nowhere to be found. They may as well have used carrier pigeons instead of a mouse and keyboard.

By a mile, the best relationship in the movie is between a teenage ex-football star named Tim (Ansel Elgort) and a reclusive, quiet girl, Brandy (Kaitlyn Dever). Tim left football to hang out with friends he made in his favorite online role-playing game, which consequently lost him all his high school friends. His mom left he and his dad Kent (Dean Norris) to move to California with another man, and ever since Kent’s been trying hard to understand why his son would give up football (the only interest they used to share). Feeling isolated and alone, he’s drawn to Brandy, who’s in a similar rut. Her mom Patricia (Jennifer Garner) goes to borderline psycho lengths to monitor her every move, tracking everything Brandy does online and deleting “dangerous” messages before she can read them. In each other, Tim and Brandy find a respite from a world that doesn’t understand them. A scene in which the outcasts lay together in front of a waterfall at night is the film’s most touching.

The mother-daughter relationship between Brandy and Patricia, like the Don-Helen plot, illuminates nothing new about internet evils. Just because the tightly-wound Patricia uses technology to be overprotective doesn’t change the fact that, for storytelling purposes, she’s simply an overprotective mother and nothing more. Everyone in this film is so one-dimensional, their trajectories so predictable and clichéd. Judy Greer, for example, plays a mom who takes risqué photos of her snooty daughter Hannah (Olivia Crocicchia) and posts them online, a sleazy parenting move that may ruin Hannah’s chances of landing a spot on an American Idol-esque talent competition. The fact that Greer’s character is genuinely surprised that the TV show executives find her daughter’s site questionable is absurd. Again, maybe 15 years ago this story line would make sense, but we’ve come way too far since then.

One thing the film has going for it are some key, good performances, most notably from Sandler. As Don you can see him bearing the weight of his unfulfilled life on his shoulders, often zoning out and staring off at nothing as his wife and son move around him. There’s an honesty to the performance that makes you wish he’d venture into the dramatic arena more often instead of churning out family movie schlock. Elgort and Dever are excellent as well, imbuing their thinly-written parts with real heart.

At least Reitman hasn’t lost his ambition–Men, Women & Children is a huge, intricately woven film that at least attempts to say something profound about the current digital-obsessed landscape. His message may be out of date, but maybe someday, years from now, we’ll look back on this movie fondly, as a time capsule of how foolish we once were to let online nonsense muck everything up so bad.

Men, Women & Children trailer

There’s little to be heard in the trailer for the latest feature film from writer/director Jason Reitman outside of The Plaintain’s hazy cover of the Donna Summer disco classic “I Feel Love.” Men, Women & Children fades between shots of the film’s leading men, women and teenagers attached to their modern tech devices. iPhone chat bubbles, album artwork, and streaming video chats hang above the heads of Adam Sandler, Jennifer Garner, and The Fault in Our Stars‘ Ansel Elgort. Also starring are Kaitlyn Dever, Judy Greer, Rosemarie DeWitt, and frequent Reitman-collaborator J.K. Simmons.

Paramount recently announced the film will land a limited theatrical release on October 3rd, before expanding wider October 17th. The news makes Men, Women & Children yet another potential awards contender opening (at least partially) on October 17th. That weekend, the new Reitman feature will go up against the Brad Pitt war drama Fury (after Sony moved the picture’s release up from November 14th), Birdman and Camp X-Ray (both in limited release), as well as Kill the Messenger (which like MW&C, expands on the 17th). Holdovers like David Fincher‘s Gone Girl, the Robert Downey Jr.-lead The Judge, and Whiplash will still likely be in theaters for what might turn out to be a very enjoyable October at the movies.

Watch Men, Women & Children trailer

Lynn Shelton’s Touchy Feely has, so far, gathered mixed reviews and unfortunately I got to see why. I went into the film very open minded and came away feeling confused and largely disappointed. Nevertheless, there can be a lot said for the powerful depiction of energy and balance within life and relationships, something that Shelton has always done a great job with in her films.

Abby (Rosemarie DeWitt) is a massage therapist whose world is enriched with the need to find balance within all aspects of her life, and her brother Paul (Josh Pais) seems to be the complete opposite, with an uptight personality who comes across as extremely emotionally stunted.

At a dinner held at the house Paul and his daughter Jenny (Ellen Page) share, we are introduced to all the characters that the film focuses on, each with different but strong personalities and each involved within the shift of energy and balance that occurs. Paul is dental practice owner whose business is failing yet it would seem he is in denial. During the dinner Abby advises her brother to see Bronwyn (Allison Janney) who is a Reiki healer and a personal friend of hers.

From the very beginning you get a sense that Touchy Feely is about something bigger than the characters within the film and that energy and balance are two factors that will play a large part in how the story will take shape. Abby develops an aversion to bodily contact and is unable to perform the duties required of her within her profession as well as the ability to share the passion she once had with her partner (Scoot McNairy). This obviously affects her well balanced lifestyle and how she deals with her new found fear is where this film would have focused on – or so you would have assumed.

What I found confusing however, was that the individual paths the characters went down seemed to be very separate from our initial expectations of the films intentions. We presume that from the Touchy Feely poster of Abby and that the entire sequences of events that occur are related to this character’s lifestyle – that Touchy Feely is about her. Yet once the credits role, I felt that it highlighted her brothers personal progression and even his daughter Jenny’s development so much more than any other – that Abby’s final ‘realisation’ was a mere after thought. If this was what the film intended, that the whole storyline and focus would shift along with the balance of energy, then it would seem to make a lot more sense. If this were the case then Touchy Feely would have done well to spend more time on tightening this idea rather than giving Abby somewhat confusing additional storylines, for instance the five-ten minutes she experienced the drug ‘ecstasy’ seemed utterly disconnected from the film.

In A World

What a fantastic, honestly hilarious comedy. Perfect in every sense of the word, In a World defines my idea of funny. This is the directorial debut for Lake Bell, and yet you really would not know it – she brought to the table a vision and with that a solid script; which deservedly won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance, Utah in January.

Carol Solomon (Lake Bell) is a struggling vocal coach, teaching actors how to speak with different accents. This is how we are introduced to Bell’s character, she receives a phone call asking if she could work with Eva Longoria to develop her cockney accent – the auditorium is in fits of laughter as we hear Longoria trying to pronounce “slapper”, just a few seconds into the film. From then on, almost every scene has you involuntarily bursting out laughing as Bell knows exactly what the audience finds funny.

Though lacking in confidence, Carol seems to get lucky in scoring her first big ‘gig’ and attempts to pursue a career in voice acting, something she has always dreamed. Her father, Sam Sotto, the reigning king of movie-trailer-voice-over artists, has never wanted her daughter to follow in his footsteps and becomes insanely jealous of her success.

Dealing with issues of sexism, Bell highlights the hardship women can face in a male dominated industry, however this is not the focal point of In a World and during a Q&A at the end, she described it as being something she wanted to include but never to force onto the audience.

In a World is a wonderfully charming and extremely witty comedic gem directed, written and starred in by Lake Bell – I look forward for its international release.

RATING: 9.5

Touchy Feely

Lynn Shelton’s Touchy Feely has, so far, gathered mixed reviews and unfortunately I got to see why. I went into the film very open minded and came away feeling confused and largely disappointed. Nevertheless, there can be a lot said for the powerful depiction of energy and balance within life and relationships, something that Shelton has always done a great job with in her films.

We presume that from the Touchy Feely poster of Abby and that the entire sequences of events that occur are related to this character’s lifestyle – that Touchy Feely is about her. Yet once the credits role, I felt that it highlighted her brothers personal progression and even his daughter Jenny’s development so much more than any other – that Abby’s final ‘realisation’ was a mere after thought. If this was what the film intended, that the whole storyline and focus would shift along with the balance of energy then it would seem to make a lot more sense.

Stick around Way Too Indie for a full review of Touchy Feely coming soon.

Having liked Lynn Shelton’s previous feature, Humpday, I was anxious to see if she could duplicate her efforts in Your Sister’s Sister. I will tell you right now, she does just that and then some. Shelton’s greatest achievement here is taking simple conventional situations and making them into complex and extraordinary without sacrificing believability. It is something that is commonly tried but rarely achieved, at least to the degree it was here.

Friends gather around having drinks and sharing stories about their friend Tom who passed away a year ago. We never actually meet Tom in the film but from hearing some of the stories it leads you believe he was a nice and likeable guy. That is until his brother Jack (Mark Duplass) gets up and tells the group the side he knows of him, which is a physical and mental manipulative person. Jack has a typical brother assessment but completely inappropriate time and place to express that. Needless to say the crowded room fell awkwardly silent.

Luckily for Jack, he has a close friend who is keeping an eye on him. Her name is Iris (Emily Blunt) and at one point she dated his brother Tom. She tells him that for a year now he has been a mess and that he needs to change his current destructive ways. In order to achieve this she comes up with a plan to send him off to her dad’s remote cabin that is located on peaceful an island.

This cabin has no television or internet, a perfect scenario for Jack not to get distracted and allow him to think about his life just watching the waves in the water that surrounds the cabin. At least that was the plan. But as we all know, life often does not go according to plan, it is especially the case in films.

When he arrives at the cabin he approaches the front door only to see that there is someone already there. Not sure what to do he peers through the window until he makes himself noticed by making a sound. As the woman comes charging out the cabin with an ore in her hand, he notices that it is just Iris’s sister Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt).

The two did not start out on a good note but eventually make amends when they find themselves sharing a bottle of tequila around the table at 3:00 A.M. Hannah divulges that she has just got out of a 7 year relationship with a female partner. Jack explains how he has had a “shitty year” and came to the cabin for solitude. Several shots later a proposition from Jack arises for the two to hookup, even though she is a lesbian. We are not sure if it was the tequila or the intention to let go by try something different, but she accepts.

Almost exactly at the half way point in the film, I began to wonder how Shelton would advance the rest of the story. There is an obvious way the film could go and it does but not for very long. Somehow I knew, or maybe just hoped, that it would not stay on that obvious path for very long. Thankfully, it did not. It continued to hold your attention through it’s entirety.

For me, one of the best qualities a film can possess is for it to come off genuine. Do not get me wrong, I adore the weird crazy out-there films as well. But when a film can accurately replicate that awkward moment when someone prepares food in which you must lie by saying it is wonderful because they were so excited for you to try it, like found in Your Sister’s Sister, it is extraordinary.

I was shocked at how well the dialog was considering it was largely improvised. By definition it is a mumblecore film but for those of you who are turned off by that “genre”, do not worry. While the film still captures raw emotions in the moment with everyday dialog, it never feels like it rambles on for too long. It feels loose but not too loose. I guess you could call it Mumblecore 2.0 but the bottom line is that it worked well.

Remarkably, Shelton shot Your Sister’s Sister in just 12 days. When I first heard that I was expecting for it to be evident in the film. However, after watching the film you would never have guessed it was shot in less than two weeks.

I will admit that if you read just the synopsis of Your Sister’s Sister you will most likely think a typical sitcom is in store. Instead, the film is more of an intelligent romantic comedy featuring terrific characters in a very honest manner. It is an excellent example of how wonderful improvisational dialog can be when you have the right cast members and director. To cap it all off, instead of opting for a safe ending Shelton gives us an ending that fit perfectly with the rest of the film.

My ears perk up every time I hear the name Mark Duplass. It seems like he has really exploded as of late, whether it be directing or acting he is everywhere and I am not complaining. The last film he directed, Jeff Who Lives At Home, was highly reviewed by us.

Director Lynn Shelton used Mark in her last film Humpday (which we loved) so the two benefit from working together previously. In Your Sister’s Sister he plays Jack, a man is sent by a friend to stay at her family’s remote cabin when a unexpected relationship forms. The film also stars Emily Blunt and Rosemarie DeWitt. The trailer certainly gives off the same vibe I got from watching Humpday and that is not a bad thing. Your Sister’s Sister will be theaters June 15th.

UPDATE: Read our movie review of Your Sister’s Sister.

Official trailer for Your Sister’s Sister: