Older Children (2012)

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

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

All I can say is this film really captured my life from when I was kid growing up in Chicago in the early 90's. There is a character in the film, who I swear the god is a 25 year old version of me (I'm nearly 50) and he nailed it spot on.Flawless performance, story, and cinematography by the filmmakers, and even though this film is only an hour plus long, I must say I enjoyed every minute of it.Thanks.Here's what Phillips had to say..."The makers of the Chicago-sprung indie "Older Children" have not bitten off more than they can chew: The film barely runs an hour in length, and in his group portrait of married and single friends — variously rudderless, self-protective and looking for something more — writer-director Duncan Riddell maintains a neat, well-paced familiarity. For local audiences, part of this $10,000 micro-project's payoff comes in seeing Chicago locations (el platforms, the Old Town Ale House) used without fuss, and not as tourist-ready locales, but simply parts of a big city that happens to be Chicago.But I like it. The writing's spare but honest and, at its best, honestly witty. Though he's just learning where to put and how to use the camera, Ridell has an ear for dialog much like that of longtime Chicago playwright Brett Neveu, scheduled to join his frequent theater colleague Riddell at the Siskel Film Center screening discussions this week.Andy (wide-eyed, plaintive Melissa Engle) is coping with mild-to-medium depression, and to save money after losing her museum job, she sublets to Charlie (Levi Holloway), whom she finds interesting. Most of her scenes are conversations with an unseen therapist, in which she talks about her restlessness and her guilt about her mother paying for her shrink bills, among other things.Meantime there are engagement parties and get-together to attend. Walter Briggs plays the getaway artist of the bunch, the one in his North Shore-bred circle who fled to LA, acts for a glamorous-seeming living and has returned to town with his latest girlfriend but finds himself in bed with an ex-girlfriend. She's played by the cast's ringer, Caroline Neff. The best scene in "Older Children" finds Neff's Jill, a sometime writer, pressing her boomerang lover for a laundry list of his recent paramours. This, too, is a familiar dramatic set- up, but Neff shows us a lot behind a tough woman's facade. Mistimed breakups, discussions of Facebook privacy settings and observations from left field ("It's funny how it's harder to get over the people who are wrong for you") keep the film moving. Even if the people on screen don't know where they're going yet."Michael Phillips - Chicago Tribune