Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

source: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

College student Sara Quinn (Julianne Nicholson) conducts a study by interviewing men with stories of disturbing behavior. She also starts observing men in the outside world. She has dates with Ryan (John Krasinski). Nicholson is playing it very passively. The interviews are visually extremely static. There are so many men as subjects that none of them are compelling enough to care about. I suspect that the source material is difficult to adapt. John Krasinski may not be equipped to do so much of the heavy lifting. In the end, he did not find a way to translate this into a watchable movie.

I watched this on cable initially because of my admiration for David Foster Wallace's work. The movie just plain blew me away. If I'd seen it in a theater I'd probably have been crying at the end of it. This is a loosely connected series of monologues by men- young, mature, White, Black- who are bound only by the issues of being men in the confusing world we live in. A graduate student is videotaping these men, working on her thesis project about how men navigate the post-feminist world. The best realized segment is about a man whose father worked six days a week as a men's room attendant. Having a modern consciousness about being a Black man, subject # 42 can't understand how his father degraded himself that way; his father tells us that it is what he could do to keep food on the table and a roof over his family's heads. Worse yet, the man has not seen his father (presumably still alive and in the same job) since 1978. There's so much unresolved loneliness on view here. This is a fine movie that seems to have gotten just about no release, and that hurts. Watch this. Learn. Grow.

The film is a movie adaptation from a play based on a series of short stories based on interviews with people about their intimate beliefs. As such, it is only expected to understand only half of it, enjoy only a part of the opinions of the people in it and maybe even dislike or be bored by it. When a director mixes the scenes and moves them back and forth in time, making obscure connections and playing with the perspective of the viewer, it only gets even more obscure. That doesn't mean it wasn't well done. I appreciated both the ideas presented in the film and the ingenious mode in which the movie was montaged. The actors played well and the soundtrack completed the scenes perfectly. What I do mean is that I am sure I only got about 10% of what the makers of the movie wanted to express, and that is clearly a failure of communication. Maybe other people got other 10 percents and so it was meant to be, or maybe I am not sophisticated enough to get it, yet this is my bottom line: a great story is not so much about the things happening in it, but on how it is told so that both author and reader/watcher understand the same thing and enjoy it together.

I appreciate what this movie was trying to accomplish, but that is the problem. It tried and did not succeed. With the men who were being interviewed being cut off mid-sentence just as they were about to come to the crux of their story, with the plot stopping and starting and intertwining with the interviews, I kept waiting for the climax of this movie, and it didn't arrive. The lead actress was wasted. Most of the time she purposely stood aside like a mannequin and faded into the background. It was obvious this movie was an adaptation from a play, and the play was an adaptation from a book. Something was lost in the translation. I really did not like the ongoing theme that men are pigs who call women derogatory names, and even when men seem to be caring, it is just because they are after "more * than a toilet." I have seen this movie described as a "quirky comedy," and I didn't laugh once. I don't know what it was about. A man getting gang raped? A woman getting raped by a serial killer? A black man who resented his father for working as a men's room attendant? A woman whose boyfriend cheated on her? Who knows? Who cares?

Caveat: I have read nearly everything David Foster Wallace has written, including his treatise on the mathematics of infinity (twice). I've spent the last ten minutes sitting here wondering how to format all the thoughts I have about this movie. As a translation, it was superb. The ultimate book/movie translation, in my very limited memory, is No Country For Old Men. Sure, sure, Messers Miller and Rodriguez did an outstanding job with Sin City (and the only reason I may give more weight to No Country may be that I am older, and it is nearer in my mind), but the Coen brothers made me feel like I did as I read Cormac McCarthy's words. John Krasinski did the same with Brief Interviews, and in some ways I think his challenge was the greater. I just finished watching this less than an hour ago. I will definitely be watching it again, and recommending to others.

Misogynist Film of the Moment: Brief Interviews With Hideous Men 10 Dec sexdrugsmoney.com This movie has a pretty recognizable cast. A lot of NBC actors were involved in the making of this movie. There's like four people from The Office in it. But its not a comedy. Its like an art house, weird, documentary / drama. A few highlights throughout, but not that big of a story plot, because the plot is all about telling stories. In the movie, the main character, Sara Quinn (played by Julianne Nicholson) is a grad student conducting interviews with various men of different backgrounds for a research paper. This also follows a life changing breakup with her boyfriend. She seeks to discover a reason why men doom their relationships with women by doing this case study. The movie is directed by John Krasinski (jury still out on this guy) who takes some pretty good pictures, but didn't edit right, so slow people might get lost early in. Its a crawler of a movie. The dialogue, which consists of a lot of monologue and testimony, is on point and strong. Some of the characters are endearing, but many of the men serve to reinforce stereotypes of misogynist men in the modern era, and nobody portrays that very well (bad casting-shucks NBC!). At times, it seems like feminist propaganda. But the movie is based on a book by David Foster Wallace, and unless that a masculine pen for a femme, it couldn't be feminist. Well it damn sure ain't misogynist. Quinn unlocks the inner thoughts of the 100 or so men in the clinical interviews where they open up about relationships with women while her personal life turns into a mess (but a polite one. no Hagen-daz or bon bons and hate fests with the girls). In doing so she is hoping to understand why her boyfriend has made her feel so bad. Some like subject #17 blame the women for the failures. Some like subject #30 are happily married and in love (but only because his trophy wife stayed a trophy wife through 50). Some, like #42 and #15, are Freudian cut examples of what a man should be. A student shares a horrific story with her, stretching her notions of manhood, like an outlier on a graph, and she begins to gain insight finally. She thinks she understands it. Men are unique. Men are simple. They say they are unfaithful. They say they are sorry. They are all cowards. She thinks that men only see women as things. But when her boyfriend returns to explain the break-up, she learns the truth about the way men love. 2/4 Stars. Worth watching once. But only with your lover as a conversation piece. —— Ryan Mega sexdrugsmoney.com

I honestly can't figure out the low score on the site(as of writing this it has a 5.7). Brief Interviews with Hideous Men was one of the most powerful movies I've seen. Usually John Krasinski is a happy-go-lucky fun loving guy. But here you can really see a darker and much more serious side of him. His end monologue is one of the most intense stories I've ever heard. The story revolves around a researcher studying the different effects of feminism on men by interviewing them. She interviews many different men, and they all have problems. At first, it may trick you into thinking that this will show you a bunch of dumb stories, but it continuously gets darker and darker. You get to hear some truly powerful and gripping stories about different men's lives. They all really hit hard but never feel like they are specifically designed to shock you. The editing is probably the most potent ingredient in the mix. While it can be a bit disorienting at times, it almost always has a powerful effect on the viewer. Also, it doesn't throw everything out for you to see. You have to read between the lines for some of it before it tells you anything, really. The final few scenes pull the whole movie together so well that I really hope Krasinski writes more screenplays soon. This was an extremely intense movie to watch. It's not something you will pop in on a regular basis, or indeed watch more than once or twice, but that's not say that it was anything less than powerful and a great piece of storytelling.

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! :)

This movie was universally panned on just about every site on the internet. Sometimes it works, most often it doesn't. Perhaps it's the films pretentiousness. Or the flippant direction by John Krasinski. I agree with the critics on this one. Although it's not a disaster, it is an incoherent mishmash of interviews, interspersed with various dramatic and comic moments that amounts to a lot of nothing. Not once did I care about any of the characters, except perhaps Julianne Nicholson, who really is about the only ray of sunshine in this film. It's pointless and even though it is only 80 minutes long, it gets tiring after only 20 minutes.