Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2009)

Sorry, this movie sucks

Excellent adaptation.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Couldn't finish watching this film. It used the contrivance of men being interviewed to create an exposition on male / female relations.I found it choppy (quick cuts between scenes and interviews and even within interviews). It pontificated and had the stilted quality of a stage play. The interviews were uninteresting and stereotypical monologues and the men were mostly caricatures. While it tried to be deep, it was deep in the way an undergraduate is deep (meta criticism within the film itself) - a fist full of knowledge, poorly digested and portentously revealed.The lead actress was a passive doll throughout most of what I saw with whom I neither empathized or cared. I didn't care about any of the characters, and the construct of people talking to the camera outside the interviews was too self conscious.It was a film school, self-conscious mess with no heart and too much head, uninterestingly directed.

This film has, as the director John Krasinski put himself, strong indie influences. The non-chronological time-line, the frequent cuts between scenes, the overlapping of events...I think this is perhaps some of the reason why it receives such conflicting reviews. Every person has a subjective experience of every film and mine was, bluntly, that I was blown away. As I just pointed out, the chronology of events is completely out of whack, and while reviews of the film point it out as a weakness, I think it's a strength. It makes you focus on what's going on and to really pay attention to it, and it's rewarding when you do. There is so much depth in this story, or rather series of stories, that their sparsity and seeming lack of coherence is a statement in itself. Pretentious sounding statement followed by pseudo-profound insight. I know. But I think it's true. There are four distinct episodes in the film that are in my mind the strongest, and are my four favourite - so watch out for them! They are as follows: 1. The episode featuring Christopher Meloni and Denis O'Toole. Meloni tells a story about a girl he met in an airport, and the end of the scene is superbly acted out as far as I'm concerned. 2. Subject #42 and his father. It's an emotional thing to watch, the generation gap between these two men, and yet how fiercely they love each other, though they don't say it. I know it's kitsch and an overused plot line, but I think it's acted out so realistically that it ceases to be cheesy but instead very moving. 3. The storyline concerning Dominic Cooper's character, Daniel, who wrote his paper on how sexual assaults can sometimes be character building - making clear that of course the assault is awful at the time, but afterwards, the person can become stronger and use that experience to build up their strength and sense of self. The scenes which follow are an almost schizophrenic stream of consciousness as we see Daniel in four different places - Sara's office, the function room, the café, steps on the college campus - but having one monologue which remains uninterrupted except for the change of scene. The monologue gets more and more frenzied as the plot begins to unravel and the climax is heart-breaking. Concomitant with all of this is one or two clips of previously seen footage and all the while there is some kind of rock music playing which, when I first watched the film, seemed completely out of sync, but now I think perhaps that was the point. It makes Daniel's monologue even more uncomfortable and heart-wrenching. 4. The monologue that is the ultimate climax of the film, spoken by Ryan, the character played by John Krasinski.You should watch this film and see what I'm talking about. It's well worth it.

This film "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" is adapted from a collection of short stories of the same title by the deceased David Foster Wallace. The short story form remains paramount. Several themes are investigated: what is love? what bonds a couple together? how do private life events affect public research agendas? what b.s. is stereotypically common? You might assemble ideas in a novel way; you might have an epiphany ...but you might not. The story doesn't much care. What's more important is the dramatic arc of the story itself.I didn't notice the running length of the film (although several others have commented on its relative shortness). To me the length was "right" for the story. Figuring out the time sequence of the events might be tricky, and might steal your attention more than it should; keep the synopsis "a graduate student copes with a recent breakup by conducting interviews with various men" in mind at all times.There's lots of variety in the ways the mens' stories are told. Initially I imagined a list of unbroken formal interviews back to back - various "talking heads" sitting on the same chair in front of the same wall. But the reality of the film isn't like that at all. Each of the threads makes use of different devices: flashbacks, flashforwards, flashsideways; intermixing formal interviews with informal contacts; overheard conversations; jumping between internal narration and external events; casual conversations at house parties and academic department parties and bars; imagination played out realistically right in front of your eyes; characters morphing into others; asides with related characters; and so forth. And almost all of the threads are broken into segments that are intermixed with other threads; themes are much more of an organizing principle than time. Even the formal interview segments are broken up by cuts --or faux cuts-- so there's never a dull visual moment.Some of the cut techniques are new to me. In every case the sound is seamlessly continuous - a spoken sentence remains a spoken sentence without any gaps or shifts. But the words are sometimes split between the same character at different times saying the same thing. Or they're split between different characters speaking a very similar --or even the exact same-- thing. Or they might (and this is what I've termed "faux cuts") have a hitch in the image as though a few frames had been spliced out - nothing as big as a change of camera angle, but a visual discontinuity nevertheless. (Are these faux cuts the next "Ken Burns effect"?) To my mind considerable audio and visual editing skills --well beyond what's typical of most new director's efforts-- are demonstrated here; the conventional words are "production values are high".If you listen very closely there are a few internal jokes. For example usually the interviewer pokes the tape recorder and says "do you mind if I turn this on?" But once she says "do you mind if I turn this off?" The words make no sense and aren't consistent with the action, and are easily overlooked.I liked the adaptation of the short story form, and I hope it blazes a path for other future films. To my mind the weak link though is the acting. Much of the material is extremely subtle and challenging, and would overwhelm even many A-list stage actors. But the film's actors are neither veterans nor geniuses. I found a couple of the casting decisions just plain jarring: one of the waiters seemed awfully wooden, and failed to convey some intended humor; and the imagined father figure bathroom attendant looked younger than his son! Apart from these, the acting varies from workmanlike up to quite good ...but nobody "burns up the screen" even when the material cries out for it.The well-known TV persona and skills of the director (which admittedly I'm not at all familiar with:-) don't seem to be any sort of guide to something as completely different as this. Like a typical "art house" film, this is not for everybody. At the small screening room where I saw it, one person noisily fell asleep and another walked out. But while this film asks for an open mind and some investment of mind-share, you'll be richly rewarded.POSTSCRIPT: I've become aware from some others' comments and from an interview with John Krasinski that some of my impressions and even some of my "facts" may be so far off the mark they're just plain back-assward. I seem to have missed some of the comedy, misidentified some of the characters, misjudged some actors' experience levels, and who knows what else. Now I'm doubting myself, wondering if I really saw the same movie or if I paid sufficient attention the first time. Ambiguity and multiple interpretations are part of the point, but not so much as to account for all the distance between my views and some others. I'm now resolved to watch this film a second time. In the meantime please put what I've opined under advisement -- and go see for yourself.POST-POSTSCRIPT after second viewing next day: I couldn't find any evidence of "the hitchhiker" character, either in the film itself or in the credits. My hypothesis is after Lucy Gordon's unfortunate death but before final release, the film was re-cut to remove all the scenes that included her. My guess is there were originally a lot of flashbacks in what's now John Krasinski's monologue. That's where the hitchhiker's story appears to fit best, lots of cuts there too would have made that segment much more stylistically similar to the rest of the film, and the film would have had a more typical length. Also, I've softened my view on the acting – many of the performances are really very good. My bottom line is unchanged though: in the end the extraordinary material overpowers the acting. We're talking King Lear here, but we're not quite talking Laurence Olivier.

I was skeptical about watching this movie at first because I had heard such harsh criticism about it. However, after watching it I would highly recommend it! I'm a huge fan of John Krasinski and I wasn't sure if he could direct or even act in a film like this. Normally he acts as "the funny guy" and I'm glad to see that there is a serious side to him. The only problem I really had with this movie was subject number 15 (Michael Cerveris). I wish the scene with him talking about his father had been at the beginning so we could've been introduced to him before the ending. Other than that I have no complaints. This is a movie that you should share with the people around you! :)