Passenger Side (2009)

One of my all time favorites.

best movie i've ever seen.

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

"Passenger Side" consists of two brothers (Adam Scott and the writer/director's brother, Joel Bissonnette) spend the entire movie on a roadtrip--driving aimlessly all over the greater Los Angeles area. Much of the time you have no idea why they are doing this nor what the one brother is looking for during this day. All you really do know is that they talk A LOT and meet lots of quirky, almost funny characters.This film by Matt Bissonnette is the perfect hipster movie. It has a soundtrack filled with discordant music that most other folks would dislike. It has TONS of dialog that is extremely smug and self-aware (and no one actually ever speaks this way in real life). And, it has no real purpose...it just drifts aimlessly until the movie ends. None of these things are what others want in a film but hipsters, who generally revel in finding a film no one else understands or cares to understand, will love it because it's just a rather unenjoyable experience. The film has a few moments but never does anything to capitalize on them.

Quite glad I took the time to watch this. The surface premise is quite light - two Canadian brothers with some issues to work out drive around Los Angeles County for a day looking for one of them's ex-girlfriend. As the day progresses first some of the deeper tensions emerge, the driver, elder brother Michael (Adam Scott)is a writer suffering some kind of writer's block on his second book and it's his 37th birthday, while the searcher, Tobey (Joel Bisonette)is a recovering addict who appears to have betrayed family trust in the past. The dialogue between the two leads is realistically the type of deprecatory, disparaging code often used between rival siblings, containing itself below the level of anger because along with the dearth of trust there is an accompanying freedom of communication. It will obviously be a bad day when these two do not understand each other and this is not that day. It becomes clear after a while that there is a mutual help process in action, that they are clearing life paths for one another and re-assessing their relationship and previous perceptions of abandonment.Scott and Bisonette pull off the difficult dialogue effortlessly and and create engaging characters. Scott has the best of it as his driving task begins to open up for him a world around him that he doesn't seem to have been conscious of before - his first book had been based on the relationships among his family members "only made much worse, because that's what people want to read" and there's a sense that the day's experience will be good for him creatively. Bisonette plays the dark horse with the past, streetwise and possibly fearless in a kind of Stanley Cup way, ie not always involving a great deal of obvious intelligence, with enough pathos and uncertainty to convince as the recovering addict who doesn't really believe in programmes as much as (certain) people.The anticlimactic dènoument can be seen far away without much difficulty but is anyway less immediately important than the bonding between the brothers. Unlikely to change the way you look at cinema or satisfy any hunger for action/suspense but scoring quite high on feelgood factor.

Adam Scott seems to end up in a lot of LA-buddy-wannabe-art-films, that feel like a bunch of stoned writers and glad-handing insiders decide to all get together and do that script that Kevin's buddy Steve was shopping around, OMG do you know Raymond oh he'd be perfect, oh yeah i was at the opening for their new house, his girlfriend used to walk my old roommate's dog, she did makeup on that last Carrey flick, right? blah blah. Sometimes you get a great result; sometimes you get drivel like this. Every scene seems to interrupt the flow, and then after a while you realize the gratuitous interruptions that add nothing, they are in fact the body of said flow. They seemed to have been hoping for a robust picaresque, but instead got a pointless chaos where nothing really belongs. I hope that that Pilates'd-out MILF found her breakout role in the unconvincing tranny prostitute, or maybe the well-rested model who was somehow supposed to be believable as a waste case. Adam Scott is his usual charming snoot, but to what end? There is no good reason to watch this movie. On top of all this, the music selection was probably the worst I've ever heard. Not a single track was worth even saving the rough sketch of, let alone burn to actual disc.Somewhere there's a backyard BBQ of earnest young LA acting bucks, and another let's-do- this vehicle is bubbling up. I hope it won't suck like this one.

I attended the World Premiere of "Passenger Side" at the 2009 Los Angeles Film Festival. Written and directed by Matthew Bissonnette, "Passenger Side" stars Joel Bisssonnette and Adam Scott as two brothers reluctantly brought together on a mission to find...well, we're not quite sure. And, yes, Joel is Matthew's brother, so it would be hard to escape the autobiographical implications of Bissonnette's script.Road movies are not that rare. What is novel, however, is one which takes place within the confines of one city. Here the location is Los Angeles."Passenger Side" is indie all the way -- in its look, sound, and quirky sensibilities. Nothing fancy here, just a character-driven narrative that is both poignant and witty, as one would expect from a story centered around two brothers driving around in a car for a day. The strength of a film like this lies in the impact of the sketch comedy represented by each stop along the way, and some vignettes are gut-bustingly hilarious.What makes this film unique, though, is the way in which the filmmakers worked the music into the story. Unlike most movies where songs are added in post-production as they become available, Bissonnette actually crafted scenes around tunes that he already had in mind. It's as if the movie is a series of music videos, with the action set to the songs, not the other way around. I got chills when the pair reached the shores of the Pacific with Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne" playing in the background ("you can hear the boats go by...").