1/31/2010

Sara Schieron's Review

SCHIERON: “This gently paced comedy, indistinctly set in Chattanooga, Tennessee, feels like a marriage between Richard Linklater’s early work and an inversion of Mumblecore (trading emotional vagueness and verbal clarity for emotional clarity and totally incomplete sentences). However what first time feature director Jarrod Whaley (an acquaintance of this critic) has done here is distinct; a hyper-specific take on regional cinema, a subset of film that is itself already hyper-specific. The rhythms are often dysplastic, the characters dyspeptic and while the title invokes a well-known quote by Sartre, the existential angle of the film takes such a subtle and semi-literal tack on the matter you hardly know you’re thinking philosophically.”

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Reactions:

"An existential nautilus shell wound as tightly as it is loose."
--Sara Schieron, BOXOFFICE MAGAZINE

"HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE functions as a seeming farewell to a place where the vistas aren't as large as they might be."
--Richard von Busack, METRO SILICON VALLEY

"Deft portrait of morally decaying figures surrounded by that same urban decay in the rundown South."
--Sam Ippolito, PITTSBURGH INDIE MOVIE EXAMINER

"Whaley has launched a counter-movement [...] that now just needs a catchy name to spread like wildfire."
--Brian Darr, HELL ON FRISCO BAY

HIOP On Twitter:
Director's Statement:

What is it about financial poverty that so often impoverishes the inner lives of those who suffer from it? Does the relationship even operate in this fashion, or does emotional poverty precede—even serve as a primary cause of, in some cases—the pecuniary variety? ... [This] is a private story whose movements could only be written by one man holding one camera.

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On Limitation:

Don’t get me wrong; I love Chattanooga. ... I have learned to make large things from small nothings. My resolve has been permanently strengthened. I have been taught to know what I want and to aim only for that[.]

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Director's Bio:

Jarrod Whaley is a Chattanooga, TN filmmaker who has, to this point, worked primarily with digital video. Whaley graduated from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga with a double-major B.A. in English and French. He sits on the Board of Directors of the Shaking Ray Levi Society, a non-profit arts organization which has been bringing non-traditional creative work (such as improvised music, video, film, and performance arts) to Chattanooga, TN and elsewhere for over 20 years. In 2005, Whaley was one of several individuals appointed to the Chattanooga Film Commission by Mayor Ron Littlefield.