TIFF ’11: Jeff, Who Lives at Home (ds. Mark & Jay Duplass)

I’m no mumblecore slut and found the two previous Duplass Brothers films I’d seen–The Puffy Chair and Cyrus–to be an off-putting cross between Judd Apatow and Henry Jaglom, but Jeff, Who Lives at Home is lovely. Jeff (Jason Segel) is an unemployed, 30-year-old pothead living in the basement of his widowed mom, Sharon (a surprisingly tolerable Susan Sarandon). He’s obsessed with the movie Signs, but the filmmakers seem to accept, rather than ridicule, that it is simply the thing that helped him crystallize his fatalistic belief system, and that if his worldview were less limited by circumstances–namely, depression–he would perhaps have latched onto something more highbrow. When his mother calls him from work demanding that he go buy wood glue to fix a broken shutter, it’s the beginning of an adventure-filled day that brings him into orbit with older brother Pat (Ed Helms), a paint salesman whose fears that his marriage is disintegrating are confirmed when he spots wife Linda (Judy Greer, gorgeously lit) having lunch with another man. In a nice reversal of the reversal of expectations to which sitcoms have conditioned us, she really is contemplating an affair.

In Es-Crowe: On “Elizabethtown”

Because Cameron Crowe considers it a work-in-progress, critics at last night’s TIFF screening of the interminable Elizabethtown were asked, in not so many words, to handle the film with kid gloves. (Apparently the folks at Venice saw a completely different cut.) So to avoid a flap, I won’t be posting a capsule review at the mothersite, but let me just say that the version I saw–which looked polished but by no means finished–makes one long for the subtlety and finesse of Garden State. (And really, how much more warning do you need?) Its epiphanies are so processed and its characters are so inorganically whimsical that the movie verges on self-parody (and it’s possible that a performance of “Free Bird” by the Stillwater-esque Ruckus pushes it over the edge, albeit consciously)–the suicidal hero (Orlando Bloom, channelling Crowe surrogate Tom Cruise (Elizabethtown‘s producer)), for instance, plans to do the deed by rigging up his exercycle with a butcher knife to simulate a stabbing motion!