Great trailer, mediocre film

Each week I decide a different one of Atlanta's many independent movie theaters is my favorite. This week, Tara Cinemas became my favorite when I ventured there to see Reprise. (My true and permanent favorite is the Plaza Theater on Ponce de Leon: Last summer, they showed Sunset Boulevard. I was nineteen in 2007 when I got to see Sunset Boulevard in a movie theater. Too cool!) Reprise is a Norwegian movie about two young writers who whine a whole hell of a lot about writing. The film's lame synopsis (the real one isn't more exciting than the one I just gave) didn't compel me to drive the miles and buy the ticket; the trailer did:



So should I attempt a review of Reprise? Sure! I really loved the look of the film. "Look": Please excuse my use of ultra-technical language; I'm just a real film scholar and incapable of dumbing it down. I also really liked the feel of the film. The tints, mostly grays and blues, were also really nice, and they seemed to match the mood of the movie. Most "film for beginners"-type books include a gloss on the terms that might've confused you here; they were: look, feel, tints (a.k.a. colors), and mood.

I'm trying to make it abundantly obvious that I have no idea what I'm talking about. Actually, I'm trying to make fun of how abundantly obvious it is that I have no idea what I'm talking about … so you don't have to.

Reprise's trailer did its job and made me want to see the movie, but the partying in the trailer is hardly part of the movie at all. And that really disappointed me, because I had hopes for hardcore sex and drug/alcohol abuse. Most of the movie shows the two young writer characters (who are both published) in pensive and somber states, and it was a real bummer watching their anguish. In real life ... well, there would be no subtitles and I'd have no idea what those Norwegian hunks were so darn sad about, so I wouldn't have had the opportunity to express how annoyed I was by this combination of facts: that they're PUBLISHED writers and that they're WHINING. To quote another subtitled movie also about morose, pensive and pretentious intelligentsia: "Poor me. Poor, poor me." The quote is from Godard's Pierrot Goes Wild. Yes, I quoted Godard, as in Jean-Luc Godard. And, oh wow, look what I just found in the "trivia" section on the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com) for his movie Pierrot Goes Wild: "Godard said of Pierrot Le Fou that 'it is not really a film, it's an attempt at cinema. Life is the subject, with [Cinema]Scope and color as its attributes...In short, life filling the screen as a tap fills bathtub that is simultaneously emptying at the same rate.'" This is why I don’t believe in God: So many people say things that I just don't get.

The only real lesson here is personal, and it's this: Anything that happens to Le Tigre's song "Deceptacon" will look fun and make you sad to miss out on. That's the song playing during the trailer's party scenes, and looking at the fun the characters were apparently having in that party apartment made me decide that I HAD to drive twenty miles into the city to be a part of it. Unreasonable? Such is the power of art. (I do hope that seemed sarcastic; that I had to write "I do hope that seemed sarcastic" is not a good sign.) "Deceptacon", which is probably among my top 20 favorites (which I may, if I feel ambitious someday and learn how to make songs play from links, formulate a list of) contains this here, my absolute favorite lyric: "Everything you think, and everything you feel is alright, alright, alright, alright, alriiiiiiight!"; and also, the word "fucking" (but as an adjective, not a verb - still pretty fucking cool, though).

Manohla Dargis' (of The New York Times) review of Reprise (http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/05/16/movies/16repr.html, because I can't seem to figure out hyperlinks) makes me like the movie a lot more. I guess it really is "an exuberant, exhilaratingly playful testament to being young and hungry - for life and meaning and immorality, and for other young and restless bodies". Why didn't I see that before? Jeeze.