Tassoula Kokkoris' Review
KOKKORIS: “Chattanooga, Tenn. provides a perfect backdrop for the slow pace and discussions of the characters in this film. The mood feels Southern; polite with a natural tendency to get heated. All of the friends and acquaintances talk to and about one another just as we all do in real life. The women also appear to talk a lot more. Fair enough.”
Richard von Busack's Review
VON BUSACK: “There’s an acuteness to this home-brewed movie that contrasts nicely with the sheepishness of Morty. Although he is not mean, this shambling boy-man possesses a wily streak. He shows off a humiliating yet really clever method of dodging a bill that was a new one on me, and I didn’t think I could learn any new ones. One thing I like about the year 2010 is that it’s potentially a heyday for the kind of movies that celebrate what Leslie Fielder called ‘The Bum as American Cultural Hero.’ The mainspring-free life—demonstrated so memorably by Morty—is perfect for an economy that has let so many millions know that their services will no longer be needed.”
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.”
Jason Wiener's Review
WIENER: “I should make it clear—I feel for Morty. I see a lot of my insecurities, fear, self-loathing, and simple poor social behavior in Morty, and I understand him. […] It has occurred to me that this movie has made me want to reveal more about myself than I usually do. I don’t know what to make of that.”
Michael Leary's Review
LEARY: “There is a great coherence here in Whaley’s filmmaking that is able to swap interior and exterior focal points, to let us see Morty from a lot of angles at once and then connect so many shots together that would otherwise feel a bit discordant. Hell is other people, but so is cinema. Because of films like this, I haven’t ever been able to go all the way with Sartre on this point.”
Chuck Tryon's Review
TRYON: “This is a small, intimate story, suggested in part by Whaley’s judicious use of close-ups and extreme close-ups that seek to track down the inner life of these struggling, awkward characters.”
