Generation Um... (2013)

Boring

best movie i've ever seen.

Absolutely Brilliant!

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Generation Um... A movie so low on budget that it could be a run-of- the-mill boy-band music video. 1.7 million dollar to be exact. Yet. The underlying message is futility in and of life without bordering on nihilism. It lacks anything related to art, merely it is your typical Polaroid snapshot. The cutting is mediocre at best and the main three protagonist rarely have any Academy Award deserving scene - but it is made up for. When your typical french avant-garde movie overplays its arc, when a Michael Moore movie does not even have something that resembles a story-line. Generation Um.. is exactly as the title describes. A normal day of three people living in New York(?). All characters have depth, yet, once again they just have it, it is not developed for the viewers pleasure nor is it highly presentable. It is the life of those three people intertwined. We all have our dark secrets, not everything is a highly polished space opera nor is it of the importance of a Cuba Crisis solving Kennedy. My personal guess to why this movie has such low ratings is mainly because it does not serve a purpose other to depict reality and it lacks money to buy these guys. It is reality in all its lack of glory, gore, virtue and triumph. It is oddly happiness-inducing and mellow at the same time. It is the perfect Sunday afternoon flick.

This film has one good message. Observing and being observed is arbitrary, the meaning you make is all to do with the 'clarity' with which you discriminate. If you can't discriminate between a pile of cigarette butts and a pile of clean laundry you will probably enjoy this more than I did. The director hurls objects, people, noises,places, events randomly in front of the lens in a random and seemingly indiscriminate jumble. The patterns are meaningless, the characters lack the gumption needed to discriminate between good experience andany experience and after an hour and a half of watching this I felt like giving all three of them a thick ear and some cleaning products and telling them to get cracking on sorting out their minging living space.The actors in this do nihilist chic with the sort of cool that can only be pulled off by a reasonably good looking person who still has all their own teeth and a good head of hair. The women constantly stand on tiptoes in most of their (just hanging in my pants shots)in order to maximise the full potential of their toned legs. Keanu flops about aimlessly looking at squirrels, water and pigeons like a bewildered four year old.Entire galaxies could have exploded in space in the amount of time it takes Reeves to eat a couple of dry looking cakes. The thing is that you can go out in any major city at midnight and find these sort of despondent refugees sitting around whining about life, checking their likes on social media and spanking their rent on coke and shooters. I have sat with these people on terrible nights out waiting for the inevitable suggestion that they call 'the guy'. I have cleaned up the detritus of their rooms as they sit in dirty robes, sobbing about the mess and asking if I have a spare pint of milk. The best thing about this film is that these are not your next door neighbours and you can turn it off and never have to see their scrunched up, miserable self pitying faces ever again.

The film has just that by launching in this question, we are what we wanted to be, we are sorry to walk alongside this endless void, I think it is a film with many questions, above all, about what you do every day, about what drives you to do, as the deliberate moment john steals the camera and decides to film every piece of your life, with frustrating parts, others still, in short something monotonous where all around desperately trying to live the moment, but don't know how.From beginning to end, allows us to wonder if at some point things will change for the 3, as a drama, or as a movie genre as slice of life, then it is clear how it stays cool, where the character tries to john those around questioning moments of your life. Perhaps a dry film way in passing how life really is, sadly.

After watching Generation Um for the 4th or 5th time, I finally figured why I enjoyed this film so much - because it felt relevant.Not that I sniff cocaine or I hang out with two beautiful girls in their apartment; but relevant with their feelings of loneliness, suffering, and existential crisis (also perhaps most important for a mid 20s - being broke).It was crazy how I could be fascinated with a close-up shot of Keanu eating a cupcake, but that was exactly what Mark Mann has done.The camera work was to be praised too, all the vibrant colors of New York, even until all the odd decors in the house. Felt like I was traveling there through Keanu's camera.'Stalking' the characters for a day made me feel like wanting to know them more, their stories and struggles, how did they became who they were then. I felt like sitting in one of their conversations, not necessarily to participate, but merely to watch and be empty of worries, even just for a little while.